Hostname: page-component-669899f699-tzmfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-24T10:43:30.882Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Touching the edges of cyclones’: Thea Astley and the winds of revelation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2018

Chrystopher J. Spicer
Chrystopher J. Spicer*
Affiliation:
[email protected]
Get access

Abstract

Thea Astley once commented that, ‘everybody is living on a cyclonic edge’, and that many of her characters were ‘always touching on the edges of cyclones’. In Queensland literature, cyclones often appear as tropes of apocalypse: new worlds of person and place are revealed out of the destruction of the old. In Astley's novel A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968), the tempestuous forces of personal cyclones, as well as those of the cyclone destroying the island around them, overtake a group of stranded cruise passengers, and consequently place and person assume unique meanings as the characters try to survive. Although one of her least-known works, A Boat Load of Home Folk is a profound novel of human experience in which Astley uses the elemental cyclone as a trope of apocalypse that is both an instrument of destruction and a catalyst of revelation.

Type
General articles
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , June 2018 , pp. 137 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Astley, Thea 1958. Girl with a monkey. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Astley, Thea 1960. A descant for gossips. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Astley, Thea 1965. The slow natives. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Astley, Thea 1968. A boat load of home folk. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Astley, Thea 1970. ‘The idiot question’. Southerly, 30 (1): 3–8.Google Scholar
Astley, Thea 1976. ‘Being a Queenslander: A form of literary and geographical conceit’. Southerly, 36 (3), 252–64.Google Scholar
Astley, Thea 1985. The acolyte. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Astley, Thea 1989. It's raining in Mango: Pictures from the family album. Ringwood: Penguin.Google Scholar
Astley, Thea 1996. The multiple effects of rainshadow. Ringwood: Penguin.Google Scholar
Baillie, Allan 1997. Wreck! Ringwood: Puffin.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund 1992. A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Phillips, Adam, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph 1902. Typhoon. New York: Putnam.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel 1704. The storm. London: John Nutt.Google Scholar
Genoni, Paul 2007. ‘Thea Astley makes something out of nothing’. Antipodes, 21 (1): 35–40.Google Scholar
Halcro, Hugh 1896. ‘Little Sigma: A cyclone story’ North Queensland Register Christmas Number, 23 December, 10–11.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Susan 2009. Earth's breath. Melbourne: Spinifex.Google Scholar
Hughes, Richard 1929. A high wind in Jamaica. London: Chatto & Windus.Google Scholar
Hurston, Zora Neale 1937. Their eyes were watching God. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Ketterer, David 1974. New worlds for old: The apocalyptic imagination, science fiction and American literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Lamb, Karen 2015. Thea Astley: Inventing her own weather. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.Google Scholar
Matthews, Brian 2008. ‘Life in the eye of the hurricane: The novels of Thea Astley’. In Sheridan, Susan and Genoni, Paul (eds), Thea Astley's fictional worlds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 42–63.Google Scholar
McCauley, Diana 2012. Huracan. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, Vance 1932. ‘The big wind’. The Sydney Mail, 2 November, 12–13.Google Scholar
Palmer, Vance 1936. ‘Cyclone’. The Bulletin, 4 March, 30–31.Google Scholar
Palmer, Vance 1947. Cyclone. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Porteous, R. S. 1949. ‘Quite a blow’. The Bulletin, 19 October.Google Scholar
Spicer, Chrystopher J. 2016. The cyclone which is at the heart of things: The cyclone as trope of place and apocalypse in Queensland literature. eTropic, 15 (2): 58–68.Google Scholar
Stewart, George R. 1941. Storm. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books.Google Scholar
Townsend, Ian 2008. The devil's eye. Sydney: HarperCollinsGoogle Scholar
Traherne, Meredith 1982. ‘Cry of the wild wind’. The Australian Woman's Weekly, 16 June, 57–62.Google Scholar
White, Patrick 1977. The eye of the storm. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin.Google Scholar
Willbanks, Ray 2008. ‘Thea Astley: Interview’. In Sheridan, Susan and Genoni, Paul (eds), Thea Astley's fictional worlds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 21–35.Google Scholar
Wright, Alexis 2006. Carpentaria. Sydney: Giramondo.Google Scholar