Drylands

by Thea Astley

In her flat above Drylands's newsagency, Janet Deakin is writing a book for the world's last reader. Little has changed in her 50 years, except for the coming of cable TV. Loneliness is almost a religion, and still everyone knows your business. But the town is being outmanoeuvred by drought and begins to empty, pouring itself out like water into sand. Small minds shrink even smaller in the vastness of the land. One man is forced out by council rates and bigotry; another sells his property, risking the lot to build his dream. And all of them are shadowed by violence of some sort—these people whose only victory over the town is in leaving it.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Novels, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Literature

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Thea Astley was one of Australia's most respected and acclaimed novelists. Born in Brisbane in 1925, Astley studied arts at the University of Queensland. She held a position as Fellow in Australian Literature at Macquarie University until 1980, when she retired to write full time. In 1989 she was granted an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Queensland.

She won the Miles Franklin Award four times - in 1962 for The Well Dressed Explorer, in 1965 for The Slow Natives, in 1972 for The Acolyte and in 2000 for Drylands. In 1989 she was award the Patrick White Award. Other awards include 1975 The Age Book of the Year Award for A Kindness Cup, the 1980 James Cook Foundation of Australian Literature Studies Award for Hunting the Wild Pineapple, the 1986 ALS Gold Medal for Beachmasters, the 1988 Steele Rudd Award for It's Raining in Mango, the 1990 NSW Premier's Prize for Reaching Tin River, and the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and the FAW Australian Unity Award for The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow.

Praise for Thea Astley:

'Beyond all the satire, the wit, the occasional cruelty, and the constant compassion, the unfailing attribute of Astley's work is panache' Australian Book Review

Reviews

[Dillwynia Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reads like Astley's last book & on checking it is. This might sound negative, but not so, Astley is still as dry humoured & witty & acerbic as ever.

She thumps her soapbox over the increase in interest of electronic gadgets over reading: no one writes, or reads or is interested in world events in Drylands. The stock in the newsagency is going yellow and the owner is forced to stocking videos. The serious novel is dead! is a frequent mantra. Astley was watching book stores die as she wrote this. I believe she would be pleased to see the resurgence of on line stores and ebooks - although I would love her cutting remarks regarding the YA boom of popularity right now.

Rather than a normal narrative plot, it is almost 6 or 7 connected stories involving the people of Drylands and why they are there. It is only in the last 50 pages or so, that they all flow into a single coda of a narrative. This works well & even the times when an event is repeated, you see that event from another perspective and it only enhances the importance, rather than bores.

Astley's Queensland has always been populated by broken drunks, or someone hiding, or someone being constrained by small town mentality and bigotry. It is all here and more. The great thing is: they are believable and if you have experienced life in smaller communities, very accurate. Astley's microscope of Australian human nature has always been accurate and scathing and sharp as any surgeon's scalpel.

There is also violence, often psychological. There is nothing worse than knowing well your attacker. They know you & your foibles and can manipulate much more than any stranger. The powerlessness of knowing your attempted rapists and knowing you will be treated as the villain must be chilling indeed. Knowing the only way is to move out, at a loss is ugly. Astley handles this portion of the novel masterfully and from the woman's perspective with clarity and lack of sentimentality.

Astley was writing during a period of the country going through tough times - bank foreclosures, lack of free money thus business closures: in short, a town dying. I remember those days & Astley has encapsulated it honestly, truthfully and faithfully. There have been innovative ways of revitalising towns, but they have been remission periods and I see more empty premises again in the past year or so.

My favourite character is Bryceland. He is the wealthy local, a councillor for the local council, & buys up all the land and businesses. He might now own the newsagent and the pub, and vast acreage, but you don't sell very much when the town is empty. Short term gain, long term pain (I believe this the favoured strategy of most Australian governments). His glee is for the mentally retarded that believe in the here and now.

I heard this appropriately driving across the Hay Plains and up through the arid lands of central Australia. If you get the opportunity to acquire the audiobook read by Beverley Dunn, do so. This reader oozes the Queensland accent & inflections perfectly. She made me laugh with her skillful reading - a lot (fortunately I traveled alone otherwise I believe I would have deafened my companion). I suspect she would be unintelligible to my North American friends.

This is a fitting final work to the wonderful opus of the currently neglected Thea Astley. Yes, I am a fan.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet Deakin had lived in Drylands for as long as she could remember. She and Ted had been happy – Ted had passed away some time back, and Janet was lonely; she lived alone above the newsagency where she worked. Janet tried to interest the townsfolk in books instead of the usual magazines and local paper, but she was fighting a losing battle. After hours were spent writing her own book – it was for the world’s last reader….

But the people of Drylands were struggling – the drought was driving people out. The increase in council rates, the lack of jobs in the area, the young people with nothing to do, getting into trouble and causing trouble to all and anyone they could inflict themselves onto. The sadness of people, the dreams they once shared and had begun to live – all came to a crushing halt one way or another.

As Janet watched the town die, and tried to put it down on paper, her loneliness built; she could see others leaving – could understand them cutting their losses and getting away. But could she do it herself? Would Ted tell her to just get out? She was sure she could hear him telling her to “just go, love, just go…”

I thoroughly enjoyed this delightful novel which won the Miles Franklin Award in 2000. Australian author Thea Astley won the Miles Franklin Award four times – 1962 The Well-dressed Explorer, 1965 The Slow Natives, 1972 The Acolyte and 2000 Drylands. She won many other awards as well over the course of her career and passed away in August 2004.

This novel covers topics of bigotry and racism, bitterness and hatred, bullying and small mindedness. But it also shows compassion, courage and that great Aussie determination. A wonderful novel of literary fiction which I highly recommend.

[Thoraiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This book is beautiful and devastating! It will haunt anyone who has ever lived in a country town. And I'm not even deducting any stars for the writer character. It is that good. (And literary novels are so short, aren't they? Reckon I could snack on half a dozen more of these before I get to the end of "Under the Dome"). But there's an unusual number of themes crammed into this short work - community, equality, love, envy, loss.

Anyway. Had trouble getting into Thea's work before? If you should pick up "Drylands" with trepidation and find yourself stuck at about page 4, reading such sentences as:

"Or a spot of Calvino clutter - no matter how meticulously brilliant - as if some gabmouth has found a defenceless alienist and vacant couch and is determined, the nerd, to fill the poor bastard in on every nuance of landscape, movement, his reactions thereto, oh God, those endless reactions and possibilities of reactions, and of possibilities of possibilities like some never-ending sorites."

...and thinking Y U NO MAKE SENSE...

Do not despair!

Not for naught has Thea Astley won 4 Miles Franklin Awards! (Yes, that's right! As many as Tim Winton! But I bet you've read all of Tim Winton's books, haven't you?? Just like I had! And they are good, aren't they? Well so is this, you just have to persist!)

For as soon you get past the bit about the writer (we writers are so wanky, aren't we??) you shall feast on much more delectable sentences:

"A dogsbody hacker who was idiotic enough to mention suspicion and unbalanceable ledgers to a senior partner; a hacker who explained how he had tracked pay-offs to police and customs officers and off-shore deposits of corrupt splendour, following a rambler vine of poisonous greenery through leafy acres of North Shore Sydney to vanishing points in Hong Kong."

Or:

"The Lizard was roaring when she returned late that afternoon, the bar racketing with desperate grogships formed after the third glass, sustained by a matiness of tired old catchwords but waiting for the peril of the imagined insult, the disagreements after the sixth or seventh."

Or even:

"It was as Lanie Cunneen was fixing her nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-eighth school lunch that she suddenly downed tools and scribbled on the kitchen notepad I can't do this any more. I can't bear it and went out to her small car and drove off, still in her dressing-gown and slippers."

To find out how Astley tortures all these poor country folk, go, purchase/borrow, read! Win the AWW Reading Challenge!

Thea and I bid you good night :D

[Tundra · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 This is a long despairing ache and it speaks volumes about racism, misogyny, climate change and poverty. The power of the written word...

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful, angry book, written in 1999 and Astley's last. It is fiercely critical of Australian anti-intellectualism; cynical about justice for victims of white-collar crime; scornful about attempts to import ‘culture’ in the form of writing groups and a branch library to the backblocks of Queensland; and contemptuous about small-town life and society.
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/200...

[Yuri Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A book for the world’s last reader.”
Outback Queensland, a drought ruined grazing community and its dying town – a place that is a mere “hesitation in the road”. The men are drunken louts who bully and beat their wives. The decline in educational and ethical standards Astley lamented late last century, continues. The obsession with sport has only worsened. Astley is satirising, but everything she says happened like that (and not just in Queensland) a generation ago and, too often, still does.
The novel is a collection of stories about various town characters; stories playing out to logical (if not, perhaps, always quite realized) developments, coming up against those hard what-ifs that haunt people’s lives. Even when things don’t quite eventuate, you can see the way the wind is blowing. Drylands was not the sort of place in which normal people wished to stay – and they didn’t.
As usual, Astley’s language is spot on, entertaining.

[Carina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted, provoking and insightful. A book with overlapping short profiles, that pulled me in so much I wanted novel length chapters on each character. Still pondering many aspects.

[Jayden McComiskie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was magnificent. Hitting Thea Astley hard. Keep them coming

[Ásdís Gunnarsdóttir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Var mjög tilbúin að hata þessa bók til að byrja með, fannst hún snobbuð og self-absorbed, en fór svo eiginlega að elska hana þegar á leið. Fáum að kynnast ótrúlega djúpum og áhugaverðum persónum í gegnum erfiða og oft ósanngjarna tíma, og sjáum svo hvernig leiðir þeirra tvinnast saman. Frásagnastíllinn sem mér fannst til að byrja með snobbaður þótti mér svo á heildina litið mjög skemmtilegir og áhugaverður. Allt í allt skemmtileg og áhugaverð gagnrýni á valdasambönd, fátækt, kynjahlutverk og stöðu frumbyggja í Ástralíu.

[Anne Fenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easy book to get into, and it's possibly one of the most depressing novels I've read. However, it's mini-short stories about people's lives are fascinating. Set in 1970s outback Queensland dying town, Janet narrates what she imagines about how local characters may be living. Thea Astley writes in a brief, succinct style. Her work packs a punch. There's often violence and a terrible 1960's exploration of how limited women's lives were.

[Dominic]

In purchasing this book I got chatting to the saleswoman (who was very good at her job and others could learn from her) about Richard Flanagan for some reason. I made a comment that of the three books I had read of his, he seems to be telling the same story. In my reflection on ITS RAINING IN MANGO, the last book by Astely that I had read, I commented that it did remind me of a Flanagan story. All this pre-amble is for context of my initial thoughts while reading.

At the early stages, I thought that this may be another story of Australia's history being told through as small town. There are elements of that but it would be an oversimplification and unfair. It would also make me sound simple (heaven forbid). As I read on I realised that Astely doesn't like to hold the hand of her audience.

While the small, fictional town of the Drylands COULD be seen as a representation of the country I don't think that that is its literary purpose. At its core it is a dying setting for characters to wrestle with. This is an anthology of the human desire to escape, but at the same time how our nature also desires home and to stay. That is an "overview" of the thread that seems to connect the stories of this book. Each one tells its own tale in this context.

When reading Astley, one should let go of the idea of finding concrete, solid footing.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished: 17.12.2019
Genre: novel
Rating: A++++
#AWW2019
Conclusion:
Winner Miles Franklin Award 2000
For all those book lovers on your Xmas shopping list
....this is truly a delight from the Australian outback
as told from the woman's point of view!
Thea Astley's
... last masterpiece "Drylands"

My Thoughts

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the end of the first chapter I was ready to give up. I didn’t understand Astley’s ramblings or exactly what this book was about. By the end of the second chapter I was hooked! Each chapter has a different story about a different character. At the end of the book it all comes together. Astley’s description of a small town slowly dying is spot on. We’ve all seen it happen. One by one the businesses close down as the locals move away and most people travel to larger towns to do their business. Each character in this book is a fair representation of the kind of people who live in those dying towns. If you have grown up in or near one of these towns like I did you come to recognise each character is similar to someone you know!

[Ben Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written but very depressing depiction of life in a small Australian town. More a collection of interlinked stories than a novel as such. Astley does a good job getting into the heads of a diverse group of characters.

[Megan P · Rating 2 out of 5]

the substance and cleverness of the work is undermined by astley's consistently obnoxious voice

2.5 stars, may change

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

toff 👕

[Georgia Mackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A late review, but this book did little to wow me. It was a fine exploration of the challenges of living in the Australian outback in a changing world.

[Lauren Griffiths · Rating 2 out of 5]

ts was tooooo depressing for me

[Chrissy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant!

[Joshua Line]

Dreadful. Extremely cliched, boring and the writing is very ugly. Australian literature sux.

[Roxann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of vignettes detailing the lives of the residents in a dying town (Drylands) in Outback, Australia. All of them want to stay, want to find hope, community, and a home there, but they are forced out one by one in varying circumstances and ways - almost all of them violent in some respect. Meticulous, dense prose written by a quintessential Australian writer - once you get the hang of it, it's hard to put the book down. This book won the Miles Franklin Award in 1999, Australia's leading literary prize. Astley won 4 Franklin Awards during her career, more than any other writer.

I'm trying to work my way through Anna-Liisa's collection of Australian literature while she is away. :) Since her books were amassed during her course work for a degree in English and Australian Lit, raiding her bookshelf is a great way to get a sampling of the best of the best.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never read Thea Astley before and I have to say I was quite overtaken by this novel.
I was swept into the world and her writing is such that you are just sucked into this lovely rhythm of words. The story resonates because so many people have been touched by small country towns that struggle to survive. Once the central part of the community the gradual demise due to drought, crime, foreclosures so creeps up and the town becomes a husk.
There are several character threads that weave their way through the story and none make for a happy ending. There is bitterness and anger in this book and each character is so real.
I am still coming to grips with what I have read and the book does linger with you.
A great book and should be an Australian all-time classic

[Megan Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book and was very sad when it finished, I wasn’t ready to leave the world of Drylands. Thea Astley creates a compelling, if somewhat depressing at times, view of the outback and how people cope with hard times. Parts of it reminded me of Wake in Fright, a world foreign to me yet also familiar.

[Kris McCracken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thea Astley's last novel Drylands is a queer old thing. Presented as a series of loosely connected fragments, it begins with a decidedly clichéd post-modern flourish more Calvino than Miles Franklin. To my horror, I thought for a moment that I was getting a meta-exploration on the nature of writing and literature. Early on, it appears that we are to follow the process a writer going through a painful attempt to birth an idea.

For whatever reason, Astley gives up on this conceit - although she half-heartedly returns to it every now and again - and instead we drift into the series of vignettes that eventually build the book. It is an awkward and stuttering start, but perhaps this was the author's aim. After all, novels are born out of such stutters and stumbles.

From such a beginning is born a cast of exhausted and alienated characters sleepwalking through a failed and resentful town in the grip of drought and entropy. They flail against the tide before each seemingly submitting to inevitable failure and defeat. You will struggle to find a bleaker metaphor for rural Australia than this.

The usual Astley themes are here: the nature of words and meaning; the impoverishment of the spirit; misogyny; racism; violence; and the denial of our history and true national character. There are flashes of brilliance here, but this is a tired book by a tired author. I largely enjoy her work, but both the narrative framing device and underdeveloped characters who appear and disappear seem unconvincing and insubstantial.

I have no problem with a novel that ends on a bitter tone, but it saddens me that this is the note one of the greatest Australian novelists ended her career with.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an angry political book this is.

Anger is certainly an energiser and an emotion I am finding very helpful at the moment in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. This book was just what I needed to be reading in our current situation. Written by someone who sees through all the hype about how superior Australians are, about how we always look after our mates, as if all other cultures and countries could somehow learn something from us. There are many Australias and this book describes one of them incomparably. It reminds us that although we as a people do have many qualities, we also have cultural characteristics to be heartily proscribed.


I don't think I was quite as angry as Thea Astley in 1990, certainly not as productively angry anyway. But every story, every word in fact, rings true in this stunning yet disconcerting book. She brings to light and focus the culture of excessive drinking, of racism, of male aggression, of corruption (both political and mercantile), of addiction to sport, of the unnecessary noise of our day to day lives, of the power wealth and position brings. If anything these issues are greater problems now than in her time, with the addition of drugs into the mix, something that is just beginning in this book. But the anger in the community just wasn't there back then, not enough to tackle the issues anyway.


I love her turn of phrase: 'curly bowling at tax-men', 'the powerlessness of poverty and colour', 'our land is rort by sea', 'master race assurance', 'the more illiterates the easier for governments to supply slave labour to the wealthy' and I could fill a page with more.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thea Astley was a brilliant Australian novelist who won the Miles Franklin award four times. The novel is set in the fictional town of Drylands in Queensland and is comprised of multiple stories, some over different timelines, all connected by life in the town. I grew up in a rural area and so much of this novel struck a deep chord within me; I loved it, I was confronted by it and disturbed by it, but at no time did I feel that it was unrealistic.

Astley has captured the many nuances of life in a parochial small town in a harsh rural setting. There is an accurate depiction of how life on the land can be extraordinarily hard for farmers and the toll that that takes on them physically and psychologically and on their families, yet they persist because of a deep connection to the land. She does not shy away from portraying the racism, misogyny, domestic violence and corruption within this environment.

A central theme that runs throughout many of the stories is the role of women and the lack of power of many in an environment where too often their role is limited to the confines of the kitchen and the bedroom.

Astley’s anger at anti-intellectualism is clear and in Drylands the reader sees the notion that we are a society being “dumbed down” by our constant need for visual stimulation, while a love of reading wanes, played out. It results in the decline of values and behaviour - the crime rate within Drylands rises.

You may think that this now sounds depressingly gritty and not want to bother reading it, but it is a wonderful, superbly written book.

Five Stars

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm currently ticking off a bucket list item by spending some time in the Top End and Red Centre of Australia. In looking for a book or two to read that are set in outback Oz I cam upon Drylands. And I loved it. I loved it even though it is dark, dystopia and quite probably doesn't reflect accurately real life outback small community rural Australia.

Published in 1999 one wonders what Thea Astley would make of the digital revolution now! Parts of this book are a rant against the folly of youth, but we all do that as we grow older.

I struggle with writers who write about writing, but Thea Astley does it so well, so elegantly and with such erudition that it would be churlish to dissent.

Human redemption will not be found in reading and classical music alone, much though both are very dear to my heart. There are men who are not either violent or weak and many of these are to be found in rural Australia.

Meanwhile..

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was beautifully written - an absolute joy to read. Thea Astley’s writing is rhythmic, laden with metaphors and the vocabulary is so well chosen. Certainly not an easy read, but given time and attention, deeply absorbing.

I was worried during the first couple of chapters, as I thought it might contain a catalogue of Thea’s pet hates of low brow tastes and provincialism. And while she does write about these things in a biting way, it is by no means pitiless. She describes her characters with empathy and humour, recognising them as caught in undesirable, dead-end situations.

I enjoyed the novel more and more, and towards the end had that melancholy feeling that it would be over soon. It generates a strange and wonderful momentum of sadness as it approaches the final chapter. My first Astley novel and it surprised me - I’ll be back for more of her work.

[David Risstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent read. An Australian girl's Wake in Fright that surfs on different perspectives and stories of small town Australia to take us through what might be the gruelling analysis that Australians may be less interested in reading and thinking that the smallish minority think we are. Like many who find it hard to believe libraries are more popular than many other Australian past times, I hang onto a prejudice book readers find hard to soak away.
I imagined Thea Astley as a university student visitor to Helen Garner's Carlton townhouse as Puberty Blues looks through dissimilar landscape accompanying similar views in Thea Astley's portrayal of outback brown.
Thanks Thea. Well worth a read. Perhaps while hitch hiking to somewhere smaller.