Couldn’t get into it.

I’d love to know who designed the cover of the 1996 Viking hardback first edition of The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow. That image of shadowy Indigenous figures in the landscape is a perfect allusion to the content of Thea Astley’s penultimate novel whereas the Penguin paperback which followed in 1997 gives the wrong impression altogether. A rainshadow is a dry area on the leeward side of mountains which block the passage of rain. Farming in Australian areas of rainshadow is a heartbreaking business when only neighbours on the other side of the mountain receive drought-breaking rains. Areas in rainshadow are desiccated deserts, withered, dried out, incapable of nourishing life and growth.

Like the characters in this novel.

The story fictionalises a real event on Palm Island:

In the little hours of a January morning in 1930, on an island off the Queensland coast, a man goes berserk with a rifle and a box of gelignite. Is he evil? Or crazy? His violence is in fact a mirror for the brutality of Australian life – and is a dim reflection at that, in a country where atrocities by whites against blacks are so ingrained few question them.

The effects of the rampage ripple out from the island to link the fates of those who witnessed it, across the north and down through the decades. It is a time when silence in the face of tyranny is at its loudest. When allegiance to English niceties is confounded by the landscape and by the weather. And change is a slow wind that brings little real difference.

Thea Astley at her crusading best, brings this event to life through multiple perspectives over a chronology of ensuing decades. The book begins with Manny Cooktown, the only Indigenous narrator, whose bitter first person voice is interleaved among the others. Manny is the one who puts an end to the madness after being armed by administrators skulking in safety. As always there is a search for a scapegoat, and Manny is put on trial on the mainland, away from his wife and children.

There are two women whose narrative is also first person — intimate, confiding and scornful: very Astley. Mrs Curthoys is a widow who makes a living as a landlady on the island, hosting the various administrators of what is essentially a penal colony for innocent Indigenous men, women and children. She has two daughters, for whom she has social ambitions: Leonie narrates part of the story in years long after the incident. The other voices are all examples of the ineffectual, morally complicit Whites, and they are distanced from the reader by third person narration: Gerald Morrow, the failed author and incompetent foreman who is depicted on the 1997 Penguin cover in his craven escape from the island during the violence; Mr Vine, yet another of Astley’s misfit schoolteachers isolated by his intellect, and defeated by his attempts to teach a classical education to the boorish sons of the wannabe gentry. Like others in the Astley pantheon, he marries imprudently out of loneliness. (Marriage is, in this novel, an institution which meets no one’s needs.) Father Donellan is a well-meaning but useless priest, defeated in his attempts to ameliorate conditions for the Indigenous people herded onto the island and treated abominably by the supervisors who succeeded Captain Brodie, who, for all his manifold flaws, at least was fond of the poor devils even as he treated them like children with very little potential.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/08/26/the-multiple-effects-of-rainshadow-by-thea-a... ( )

Read this novel in conjunction with the story it's based on about the "incident" on Palm Island.
Renata Prior- Straight From The Yudaman's Mouth. pub by James Cook University. Only 45pp and Renata's father Peter (Manny Cooktown in Astley's novel) gives his a/c of what happened-better than the novel I reckon.ISBN 0864434863 ( )

Evocative and devastating story about the "unmoored behaviour of humans" in northern Australia in the early 20th century. Reviewed at: whisperinggums.wordpress.com: http://whisperinggums.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/thea-astley-the-multiple-effects-... ( )

A very interesting and well written read, if rather bleak.

It starts off in 1930 on a small island in the far north of Queensland, an island which is being used as a dumping ground for aboriginals who aren't wanted elsewhere, half-caste or pregnant or just plain old in the way. Then each chapter is about the story of one of the people on the island (the woman running the boarding house where the whites live, the superintendent, the teacher. etc).

Instead of being like Roshomon (the same story told differently by different people) each person tells their own story, either leading up to them reaching the island, or staying on the island, or their life after the island.

Thea Astley has a great writing style, rather poetic. It's not that easy to read, but it's very clever.

However, the overall story was a bit too bleak for my tastes. ( )