"'I am Jessica Olive,' he heard her say absent-mindedly over breakfast. 'I am Cornelius and Nadine and George.'"

Jen and Ezra heading out. Sisters Beach, January 2021.

It's Raining in Mango by Thea Astley

Thea Astley is an interesting case study of gender and publishing in Australia. The winner of four Miles Franklin Awards (tied with Tim Winton as the most frequent recipient), most of her books remain out of print. It Is fair to say that she’s not as widely read as a great talent and unique voice in the Australian literary landscape deserves.

Which leads me to It's Raining in Mango, which spans multiple generations of the Laffy family in Far North Queensland. The book covers from the 1860s through to the 1980s. In it, they carry the family (and local) stories with them, and they identify as something more than themselves.

These stories intersect with the history of Australia itself, from the brutal invasion and settlement, the scramble of the gold rush through the misery of the Depression to the Stolen Generation, two World Wars and the hippies, freaks and dropouts of the 1970s.

Despite being published before the jingoistic Bicentennial celebrations of 1988, this is no celebration of the Australian character, nor is it some heroic family epic. The family is flawed, but decent, and thus echoes of failure and violence occur and reoccur throughout – tales of failed marriages and farms, the lawlessness on the mining fields, of poverty, of the betrayal of returned soldiers after World War I and the damaged veterans of World War II. The cruelty practised to the natives, the women, the children, the church, the police, the mobs and the state. Indeed, the novel opens and closes with the bulldozers of developers who tear down the rainforest to make way for ‘progress’.

It is an angry book, albeit a tired sort of anger. Incidents of dispossession and dispersal of the original inhabitants ripple through the book, with those stories written out of official histories forcing their way back in. It is an unapologetically feminist book, with women at the centre rather than at the periphery of the family stories.

The novel's other key strength is how Astley writes about the weather, and this is a hot and sticky book. Tropical heat rises from the page, with years measured not by anniversaries or holidays, but by the ‘build-up’ through the dry months and the breaking of the Wet, and with it cyclones and floods. The weather is, in many respects, the central character of the book.

Recommended it to all and sundry!

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