Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996)

By Sue Sheridan

The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow is based on violent events that took place on Palm Island in the 1930s, when the white Superintendent of that settlement ran berserk, setting fire to buildings and killing his own children in the process, and was eventually shot dead by one of the indigenous inhabitants. Then, as now, the island was a troubled place where indigenous Australians from widely different clans were transported against their will and expected to live together. Then, as recently, a powerful white man’s violent act reverberated throughout the whole island community and beyond. Thea Astley’s take on this incident is to focus most of her novel on various white characters who witnessed it, while framing and punctuating their stories with briefer passages that represent the responses of Manny Cooktown, an Aboriginal man.

Incorporating indigenous perspectives was a significant innovation for Astley after her earlier attempt to probe settler Australia’s inheritance of violence in A Kindness Cup (1994). Manny Cooktown is her fictionalised version of the Aboriginal man who shoots the mad Superintendent in a moment of panic as ‘Uncle Boss’ advances on him with pointed rifle:

Manny remember the word he was supposed to say.
He call, Surrender. He call, Put down your gun.
Then Uncle Boss laugh like mad thing and aim the rifle.... An he scared too an he fire. He fire an Uncle Boss drop down as he run up and see big red blotch on Boss’s belly and the blood spreadin and he cry and say, Sorry Uncle Boss....
 

Here Astley represents Manny’s perspective in the rhythms of Aboriginal English rather than describing his thoughts in standard English from an omniscient authorial point of view. The novel ends, some 20 years later, with another act of violence, when police are brought in to smash the strike led by Normie Cooktown, Manny’s younger brother. Normie’s education at a white school has brought him into the standard English of the main narrative – and has also given him ways to protest against injustice:

The other young men who worked with him on the roads, on the buildings, complained about the pay, the rations, the limits to their freedom, and Normie found a new voice as he encouraged their complaints.... ‘Gotta do somethin,’ he urged around the nightly cooking fires, heady with revolt. ‘We must show ourselves men, eh? We’re worth somethin.’

Finally, though, as he is taken off the island in leg irons, he abandons standard English and sings a song of grief in language. It is not one of his own people’s songs but one that he makes up out of words learned from his friends from other clans, a song specific to the Palm Island experience, with its plaintive refrain: ‘Ngana kari binal’ [‘We do not understand’].

The novel underlines the grim repetitions of colonial oppression but also the endurance and resilience of the Aboriginal characters. Astley makes much of the contrast between the intense beauty of the tropical island (which she names ‘Doebin’) and the cruelty and corruption that it harbours. The white characters, who all leave the island, as they are free to do, nevertheless remain tied to each other. They end up leading lives of quiet desperation in and around the dusty inland town of Taws. Those who appear to have shrugged off that horrific experience (what Leonie Curthoys describes as memories she has ‘resolutely thrust down into some dusty box, resolutely never spoken or thought about’) are nevertheless haunted by failure in their personal lives: ‘Clinger’ Vine, the schoolteacher, endures a loveless marriage to the former hospital matron, while young Leonie Curthoys lives to regret her marriage to the doctor with the fake Irish charm. Others, who sympathise actively with the Aboriginal inhabitants – Leonie’s mother, Normie’s friend Matthew Vine, the two missionary women, and the priest, Father Donnellan – are, effectively, impotent. The novel creates a powerful impression of that far-off violent event which casts a long shadow over the lives of both blacks and whites. Indeed, the ‘multiple effects of rainshadow’ suggests that they inhabit the spiritual equivalent of the dry country that lies in the rainshadow of the Great Dividing Ranges, a spiritual drought caused by the massive event of colonisation.

Although Astley used historical sources on Palm Island and places the workers’ revolt led by Normie in the context of the long-running strike of Aboriginal workers in the Pilbara, she is less interested in shaping historical details into a narrative than exploring the emotional dynamics of colonial racism. Astley’s description of her first book, Girl with a Monkey (1958) as ‘[not] a novel in the strict sense – more a landscape with figures…a study in emotions’ is a good description of all her fiction. Hence her preference for composing a series of loosely connected scenes or stories, and for making her language do the work of poetry.

In the first half of The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, stories of island life and Superintendent Brodie’s rampage are marked by violent images as well as violent acts. The climate itself is menacing: ‘the appalling blanketing heat, the jellied air of monsoons that never hatched’. Brodie’s pregnant wife collapses during Mass, ‘dropping forward from her chair during the nunc dimittis with the blood running down her legs to the floor, the terrible red of it, her face drained as the body drains’. Weeks after her death, Brodie drinks himself into oblivion: ‘He dozed but woke to mosquitoes and the dark. Dreams had bitten and he’d scratched at the flesh of memory’. Memory and emotion are embodied, and his embodied rage pushes him over the edge into insanity, propels him into destructive action. From the ‘armoury’ he collects gelignite and fuses, and two rifles ‘kept in case of riot’:

There never was a riot. It lay only in this cleft skull that even now shattered again with rockets of pain.
The dark and the boundaries of nothing. If he could weep, the humanity he was trying to suppress would overcome the rage. He lusted after the rage, after purging.

Astley’s language takes readers deep inside extreme states of violent emotion – Brodie’s rage, Mrs Curthoys’ fear and shame, journalist Gerald Morrow’s desperation to escape.  In the later parts of the novel, expressions of the ‘multiple effects of rainshadow’ in the various characters’ despair – to the point of suicide, on the part of a young priest – also require our empathy. The despair is powerful, but does not completely dominate. The final vision of Normie and his men singing suggests a degree of resilience that will continue. While the missionaries enact their Christian belief that to help ‘even one can make a difference’ and instil hope, angry resistance of the kind that drives Matthew and Normie is a stronger counterpart to despair.

Among the white characters, Leonie’s caustically humorous expressions of resistance to her fate as a woman suggest a loose parallel with the black men’s resistance to racism. Her late-found feminism may seem to be at odds with the novel’s main attack on racism, but Astley’s point is, I think, that resistance is a sign of vitality. One of the missionary women, trying to answer Leonie’s youthful outrage at the treatment of the islanders, tells her it’s hard to explain hatred, but ‘you never forgive the people you have treated badly’. This insight is just as true of the barely suppressed hatred of women emanating from men as it is of the outright hatred expressed in whites’ brutal treatment of Aboriginal people. Leonie’s great moment is when she confronts the all-male Church committee to establish ‘a home for fallen girls’, meeting, at her husband’s invitation, in their living room:

‘Why fallen?’ I demand abruptly. ‘Why must men regard pregnancy as a fall, for God’s sake!...Aren’t men fallen, too, for Chrissake, or is there a special dispensation for male sins of the flesh?  How about,’ I add, ‘a home for risen men? That’s the nub of the matter, isn’t it?’
But they are not disturbed, that’s the rub. They are disgusted.

It is surely significant that of the eight white characters, only Leonie and her mother tell their stories in the first person, each having her own perspective on injustice. All the others are spoken for, albeit with empathy, by the narrator. Mrs Curthoys muses, when she begins her journal of life on the island: ‘Writing creates maps. Of a sort. Are maps about people, or places?’ Astley’s story-maps are about people in particular places, about the struggle for domination in the spaces of postcolonial Australia. But she goes on to pose the hardest of questions – what can writing actually do? ‘Clinger’ Vine suggests to Normie that it might help if he writes down his experiences, ‘what pleased, what hurt’, because in time the pain of reality would fade and ‘become absorbed in fiction’. But Normie is sceptical about the value of fiction to resolve feelings in this way. His final comment, ‘This fiction, it don’t go away’, strikes a resounding blow against such a sentimental view of writing. Astley’s ambitions for her novel are, rather, to rub our noses in the stories of oppression and their excruciating emotions.

Further reading:
Leigh Dale, ‘Colonial history and post-colonial fiction: The writing of Thea Astley’ (1999), in Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds, Susan Sheridan and Paul Genoni eds, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, pp.142-152.