Thea Astley - Career

Career

Astley's novels won four Miles Franklin Awards and in 1989 the author won the Patrick White Award for services to Australian literature and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Queensland. Much of her writing, which draws heavily from her early childhood, is set in Queensland, which she has described as "the place where the tall yarn happens, where it is lived out by people who are the dramatis personae of the tall yarns."

Astley nearly became a journalist, following her father's footsteps, but was refused a position by the Brisbane Telegraph for being too old when she applied after having finished her university degree. She sold her first poem under the name "Phillip Cressy" because men were paid ₤5, while women were only paid ₤3.

Her first book, Girl with a monkey was published in 1958. The author noted that "I wrote quite a bit of it before Ed was born and entered it in the Herald and got an honourable mention. So I thought. 'Oh well, I'll bung it into A&R's, which was the only published I knew'". After the publication of her third book, The Well-dressed Explorer, the Herald's reviewer, Sidney J. Baker, wrote "With this book, Miss Astley earns a place among the leaders of modern Australian fiction". He associated her with writers such as Patrick White and Hal Porter who wrote "poetic prose ... an important but by no means popular dimension to Australian fiction". Her early style, in particular, used "obscure polysyllables, formal syntax and lush imagery divided critics and daunted many readers".

In 1997, Thea Astley wrote in a column for Australian House & Garden magazine that "For me the chief advantage of writing is that it can be done anywhere. I recall writing almost the whole of a short story in Hunting the Wild Pineapple on a plane coming down from Cooktown. I've taken copious notes at a luncheon table in Santo, in small pub rooms in Charleville and Roma when I was on the Writers' Train. I've written in a convent bedroom on Palm Island, on the wharf at Magnetic ".

Two weeks before her death, Astley appeared at the Byron Bay Writers' Festival and gave "a brilliantly comic reading of 'Why I Wrote a Story Called the Diesel Epiphany', a short story about one of her many journeys by bus with all its annoyances".