AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Australia's acclaimed national treasure delivers two slyly linked novellas - The Genteel Poverty Bus Company and Inventing the Weather - in which "progress" vies unsuccessfully with more feral aspects of an untamed land. When would-be hermit Macintosh Hope, formerly of the Genteel Poverty Bus Company, settles down on a tiny Pacific isle off Australia's coast, he thinks he's found the perfect retreat from the workaday world. And he has - until neighboring Hummock Island is claimed by developer Clifford Truscott as a tourists' paradise. Thus sparks a confrontation pitting the thuggery of progress against the skills and wit of a lone man who proves uncannily adept at remaining the proverbial thorn in the magnate's side. Inventing the Weather finds the same developer's wife fed up and leaving her fatcat husband and their smug, precocious children. Julie Truscott's journey to independence takes her as far as a small mission run by nuns at Bukki Bay. But old ties aren't severed easily, and Clifford soon sets off tremors in the mission community, once he casts a profit-making eye on its enviable spot on the coast. With an unerring sense for language and a shrewd eye for human character and detail, Thea Astley sounds the territory and spirit of her native Gold Coast with the authority of a seasoned denizen of the terrain. ' (Publication summary)
Contents
-
The Genteel Poverty Bus Company,
single work
short story
For Macintosh Hope, marriage, the 'fustiness of the Romantic poets' in academia, and society no longer hold any attraction. However, solitude and isolation on an uninhabited island in north Queensland do. All seems perfect there for Mac, until the treachery of a greedy developer becomes apparent.
-
Inventing the Weather,
single work
short story
With her marriage to a rapacious property developer failing and her three materialistic children becoming more and more distant, a disillusioned Julie Truscott walks away from her mundane life into a vastly different experience.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Also braille and sound recording; ebook
Works about this Work
-
Dementia, Ageism and the Limits of Critique in Thea Astley’s Satire
2022
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , December vol. 22 no. 2 2022; -
Will the Real Subject Please Stand Up? Autobiographical Voices in Biography
2021
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 18 no. 1 2021; (p. 25-30) Essays in Life Writing 2021; (p. 24-29)'Biographers exist in a tight partnership with their chosen subject and there is often during the research and writing an equivalent reflective personal journey for the biographer. This is generally obscured, buried among an overwhelming magnitude of sources while the biographer is simultaneously developing the all-important ‘relationship’ required to sustain the narrative journey ahead. Questions and selections beset the biographer, usually about access to, or veracity of, sources but perhaps there are more personal questions that could be put to the biographer. The many works on the craft of biography or collections about the life-writing journey tell only some of this tale. It is not often enough, however, that we acknowledge how biography can be unusually ‘double-voiced’ in communicating a strong sense of the teller in the tale: the biographer’s own life experience usually does lead them to the biography, but also influences the shaping of the work. These are still ‘tales of craft’ in one sense, but autobiographical reflections in another. Perhaps this very personal insight can only be attempted in the ‘afterlife’ of biography; the quiet moments and years that follow such consuming works. In this article, I reflect on this unusually emotional form of life writing.' (Publication abstract)
-
Questioning Belonging in Thea Astley's Vanishing Points
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Bernard Hickey, a Roving Cultural Ambassador : Essays in His Memory. 2009; (p. 265-272) -
Thea Astley Makes Something Out of Nothing
2007
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 21 no. 1 2007; (p. 35-40) Paul Genoni discusses the concept of 'nothingness' in Thea Astley's writing. He concludes: 'It is in the disharmony betwen mankind and Australian space that Astley finds the impetus for many of her narratives ... And this triumph of landscape, born of the nothingness of Australian space, is the end point of many of Astley's narratives ... For Astley, it is only death that wins release from the tyranny of space and the awful pall of nothingness.' -
Thea Astley's Failed Eden
2006
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Thea Astley's Fictional Worlds 2006; (p. 153-163)
-
Alive to the Ironies
1992
single work
review
— Appears in: Editions , November no. 14 1992; (p. 23)
— Review of Tanglewood 1992 single work novel ; Vanishing Points 1992 selected work short story -
Astley on the Move
1992
single work
review
— Appears in: Overland , Summer no. 129 1992; (p. 80-82)
— Review of Vanishing Points 1992 selected work short story -
Astley's Stylish Journey to Hell
1992
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 10-11 October 1992; (p. rev 6)
— Review of Vanishing Points 1992 selected work short story -
Blunt Attack
1992
single work
review
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 17 November vol. 114 no. 5846 1992; (p. 91)
— Review of Vanishing Points 1992 selected work short story -
Damning Development and Seeking Salvation...
1992
single work
review
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 6 no. 2 1992; (p. 150)
— Review of Vanishing Points 1992 selected work short story -
Thea Astley : Exploring the Centre
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Subverting the Empire : Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction 2004; (p. 97-144) -
Thea Astley's Failed Eden
2006
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Thea Astley's Fictional Worlds 2006; (p. 153-163) -
Untitled
Rosemary Sorensen
(interviewer),
1992
single work
interview
— Appears in: 24 Hours , November 1992; (p. 29-31) Thea Astley in conversation with Rosemary Sorensen. -
Thea Astley Makes Something Out of Nothing
2007
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 21 no. 1 2007; (p. 35-40) Paul Genoni discusses the concept of 'nothingness' in Thea Astley's writing. He concludes: 'It is in the disharmony betwen mankind and Australian space that Astley finds the impetus for many of her narratives ... And this triumph of landscape, born of the nothingness of Australian space, is the end point of many of Astley's narratives ... For Astley, it is only death that wins release from the tyranny of space and the awful pall of nothingness.' -
Questioning Belonging in Thea Astley's Vanishing Points
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Bernard Hickey, a Roving Cultural Ambassador : Essays in His Memory. 2009; (p. 265-272)
Awards
- 1993 shortlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award