Cirrus@Austlit

'Thea Astley - the great Queensland novelist, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78 - famously expounded the notion that Queensland is quite unlike anywhere else. Even when familiar cultural elements are present, she argued, they are combined so incongruously here as to produce an utterly distinctive environment:

It's all in the antitheses. The contrasts. The contradictions. Queensland means living in townships called Dingo and Banana and Gunpowder. Means country pubs with nvelve-foot ceilings and sagging floors, pub which, ,while bending gently and sadly sideways, still keep up the starched white table-cloths, the heavy duty silver, the typed menu. Means folk singers like Thel and Rick whom I once followed through to Clermont on that lecture-tour while they cleaned up culturally ahead of me; but it also meant listening to the now extinct State Queensland String Quartet playing the Nigger Quartet in my fourth-class room among the sticks of chalk, the tattered textbooks~ means pushing our way through some rainforest drive laced with wait-a-while to hear the Lark Ascending, or more suitably, the Symphonie Fantastique crashing through the last of the banana thickets.

Many of Astley's novels and short stories explore the ways in which Queensland enters and shapes her characters' bodies and minds. Astley's biting humour, her vivid evocations of excess in the tropics, and her elusive search for spiritual . authenticity in a stolen land are - at least in part - products of the quirky, infuriating, but also deeply creative environment in which she grew up.' (Editorial)