The Acolyte

The Acolyte
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: St. Lucia : University of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1980
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Thea Astley won the coveted Miles Franklin Award for the third time with this powerful, bitterly funny novel, her favourite among her own works. Many lives orbit around the radiant genius of Jack Holberg - including wife, lover, child and acolyte - all slowly destroyed by their devotion to the blind musician.

Drylands

Drylands
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: Text Publishing
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 192562661X

This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian

Thea Astley

Thea Astley
Author: Karen Lamb
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0702255017

This is the first biography of one of Australia's most beloved novelists, Thea Astley (1925–2004). Over a 50-year writing career, Astley published more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including The Acolyte, Drylands, and The Slow Natives, and was the first person to win multiple Miles Franklin Awards. With many of her works published internationally, Astley was a trailblazer for women writers. In her personal life, she was renowned for her dry wit, eccentricity, and compassion. Karen Lamb has drawn on an unparalleled range of interviews and correspondence to create a detailed picture of Thea the woman, as well as Astley the writer. She has sought to understand Astley's private world and how that shaped the distinctive body of work that is Thea Astley's literary legacy.

Chocolate and Sustainable Cocoa Farming

Chocolate and Sustainable Cocoa Farming
Author: Peter McMahon
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2023-04-11
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 144380472X

This second edition includes an updated bibliography.Astley's signature is a highly allusive, layered and self-conscious prose style, non-linear and open-ended (Gillian Whitlock, JASAL: Journal of Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 6, 2007, p. 154.)The essays offer insights into issues of language, art, gender and religion ... as well as Astley's evolving body of writing and the historical and literary context of her work (Lyn Jacobs, Australian Literary Studies v.23, n.3, 2008, p.358).

Vanishing Points

Vanishing Points
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 234
Release: 1992
Genre: Australia
ISBN: 9780855614782

Comprised of two interlinked novellas - 'The Genteel Poverty Bus Company' and 'Inventing the weather'.

Reaching Tin River

Reaching Tin River
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: Text Publishing
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1925603555

• This May, Text will concurrently publish four Text Classics by the prolific and highly awarded Thea Astley • As with previous suites of Text Classics by Randolph Stow, Christina Stead, Amy Witting and Robin Klein, the concurrent publication of these four Astley novels demonstrates Text’s belief in the importance of this author • Astley is among the most significant Australian woman writers of the twentieth century—typified by her ironic style and her social consciousness, particularly of the injustices faced by indigenous Australians • At the time of her death in 2004, she held the record for the most Miles Franklin Literary Award wins by one author, a record she now jointly holds with Tim Winton • Collectively these four works of fiction are an opportunity for readers to rediscover parts of Astley’s catalogue that have been unjustly out-of-print, guided by two established and two emerging contemporary Australian woman authors • Reaching Tin River won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction when first published in 1990 • A woman becomes obsessed with the story of a long-dead colonial pioneer, and her research becomes a way of coming to terms with her own past • This Text Classics edition will be introduced by Sydney Morning Herald 2017 Young Novelist of the Year and author of Our Magic Hour and Pulse Points, Jennifer Down

By the Book

By the Book
Author:
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2007-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0702240478

Queensland? place of barren land and wild politics with subtropical weather, beaches, and natural wonders's the subject of this rich literary history. Chronicling a wide range of literature, from the first days of European settlement to the present day, this collection touches upon thematic topics such as travel stories, writing for children, and indigenous writings. The role of institutions such as schools, public libraries, the press, and publishers, as well as how they have contributed to the shaping of Queensland? literary development, is also included.

Subverting the Empire

Subverting the Empire
Author: Paul Genoni
Publisher: National Library Australia
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2004
Genre: Australian fiction
ISBN:

This paper examines the way in which contemporary Australian novelists use various tropes derived from exploration in order to embellish themes of personal search in their fiction. By doing so they have borrowed from the language and myths created by what was essentially an exercise in imperialism, and applied them to the quest by individuals in the settler society to find a permanent spiritual home in the new country. The exploration imagery proves to be apposite, in that just as the empire's hopes were dashed when exploration of the inland was repelled by the barren heart of the continent, so too has the metaphysical exploration of the same spaces foundered on uncompromising and withholding landscapes.

Beachmasters

Beachmasters
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN: 9781922730442

A story of rebellion and loyalty on a small Pacific Island where one man becomes caught in a struggle for independence from colonial rule.Written in 1985, and awarded the ALS Gold Medal the following year, Beachmasters remains relevant in our globalised, post-colonial society, offering pertinent observations about politics, nationalism and race.Thea Astley AO (1925-2004) was a multi-award-winning novelist and short story writer. She won the Miles Franklin Literary Award four times, for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962) and The Acolyte (1972), both also part of the Untapped Collection, as well as The Slow Natives (1965), and Drylands (1999). Her personal awards included the Patrick White Award in 1989 and, in 2002, a New South Wales Premier's Special Award for a lifetime's achievement in literature.

The Well Dressed Explorer

The Well Dressed Explorer
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN: 9781922749437

Pompous, vain and a self-professed charmer, George Brewster moves from one unfulfilling journalism job to the next, one empty relationship to another, his faithful wife and daughter ever the afterthought. The Well Dressed Explorer is the story of a man of his time, but as a story of toxic workplaces and an Australia where comfort and self-interest breed men like George, it might well feel familiar to a new generation of readers.Described as a 'formidable and enduring novel' by the American magazine Publishers Weekly on its original publication in 1962, The Well Dressed Explorer won the Miles Franklin Literary Award at same year. Thea Astley AO (1925-2004) went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award three more times, for the novels The Slow Natives (1965), The Acolyte (1972) which is also part of the Untapped Collection, and Drylands (1999). Other awards for her work include The Age Book of the Year, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award's Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Fiction Book. She also received multiple personal awards including, in 1989, Patrick White Award and in 2002, a New South Wales Premier's Special Award for a lifetime's achievement in literature.