ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

1985, ALS Gold Medal (1986)

Beachmasters is a surprising novel: it’s the first time I’ve read an Astley set outside Australia, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her (or any other Australian author) tackle the issue of colonialism in our region.  It’s an appraisal of a failed rebellion in a thinly disguised colonial Vanuatu, and while it has its ‘Astleyan’ challenges, they are not the usual cultural and linguistic allusions.  It’s the best Astley I’ve ever read. Yes.

And yet, at Goodreads there is one brief (three-line) review describing it as Astley not at her best, though it’s Astley, so it’s very good.  There are seven three-star ratings; and less than 20 who’ve marked it ‘to read’.  One of those is someone who follows this blog, so #FingersCrossed I can persuade him to pick up the book…

Some background first, lest you think Astley is having a laugh in her portrayal of the shambolic administrative arrangements for her fictional island of Kristi.  Vanuatu was, for most of the 20th century, governed jointly by historic foes, France and Britain.

Called the British-French Condominium, it was a unique form of government, with separate governmental systems that came together only in a joint court. The condominium’s authority was extended in the Anglo-French Protocol of 1914, although this was not formally ratified until 1922. Melanesians were barred from acquiring the citizenship of either power and were officially stateless; to travel abroad they needed an identity document signed by both the British and French resident commissioners.

Many called the condominium the “Pandemonium” because of the duplication of laws, police forces, prisons, currencies, education and health systems. Overseas visitors could choose between British law, which was considered stricter but with more humane prisons, or French law, which was considered less strict, but with much worse prison conditions. In their book, Vanuatu by Jocelyn Harewood and Michelle Bennett, is this memorable passage referring to the 1920s: “Drunken plantation owners used to gamble… using the `years of labour’ of their Melanesian workers as currency. Islanders used to be lined up against the wall, at the mercy of their employers’ dice. Long after America’s Wild West was tamed, Vila was the scene of the occasional gunfight and public guillotining.”  (Wikipedia, viewed 22/8/20)

The ‘Coconut War’ (which I vaguely remember being reported with mild hilarity by the Australian press) was a brief and mostly non-violent rebellion on the island of Espiritu Santo which although militarily ‘crushed’ resulted in Vanuatu’s independence in 1980.  The revolt was led by a charismatic politician of mixed European, Melanesian and Polynesian descent, called Jimmy Stevens a.k.a. Moses. Wikipedia tells us that at his subsequent trial, which led to his imprisonment for 14 years…

…it was revealed that Stevens and Nagriamel [his political movement] received US$250,000 from the American-based Phoenix Foundation, a libertarian group that previously attempted to establish an independent tax-haven state in Abaco Island, the Bahamas in 1973.

[BTW The Americans got what they wanted.  Wikipedia’s article about the Vanuatu economy tells us it’s now a ‘flag of convenience’ country, and a tax haven, *and* Vanuatu sells citizenship for about $150,000, and its passports allow visa-free travel throughout Europe.  (Who knew??)

Wikipedia also tells us that the trial also established that the French government had secretly supported Stevens in his efforts.

This is wonderful material for a novel, and it’s amazing that only Thea Astley thought of doing it!

However…

The prologue is a bit off-putting.  Browsers in a bookshop may well have put it back on the shelf.  I couldn’t make sense of it until after I’d finished the book.  It’s written in an Italicised creole and it includes sentences like this:

And, too, oh in this litany, pray, your eyes east-west, pray for Hedmasta Woodful, now and at the hour of the changing, and for the Bonsers, mechanics of more than boat engines, for Planter Duchard and family, and above all, for the big man, the yeremanu, Tommy Narota, part Kristi, part Tongan, part Devon, who has taken on his new native name, abandoning that of his sea-faring adventurer daddy, along with his ceremonial dress of Bipi fringed tablecloth and lace antimacassar loin-wrapper.  (p. 1)

What were Penguin’s editors thinking when they allowed Astley to get away with this, on the crucial first page?  Of course, she was formidable…

Fortunately, it’s only one page long, and the rest of the novel is narrated by a comprehensible omniscient third person with a wry sense of humour and a compassionate anti-colonial view of proceedings.  There is a sprinkling of what Astley explains in her Acknowledgements is a South Pacific pidgin which she calls Seaspeak, with dialect words and custom references drawn from a number of areas in the one island group.  (Karen Lamb’s bio tells me that in 1983 Astley had made a research trip to the New Hebrides i.e. Vanuatu but is otherwise not much interested in this novel.)  But the language games of Beachmasters are a good deal easier to interpret than Astley’s usual cultural and linguistic allusions, of which there are few. (Unless I missed them, of course).

The novel is framed around the politics of well-past-its-use-by-date colonialism and its climax is the rebellion, but it’s the character of Gavi who holds the book together.  He discovers as a teenager that he has a mixed-race background similar to the charismatic (but naïve) Tommy Narota, and to his embarrassment Gavi learns that his classmates don’t believe in his mother’s French identity, even if she, perhaps, believes it herself.  Astley portrays the racism of this petty society in all her trademark ferocity, not least within Gavi himself.  Confused by his father’s obfuscations, he becomes an acolyte of Tommy Narota and gets mixed up in the cynicism of Bonser’s covert role in facilitating the rebellion.  This novel is a warning about radicalisation long before anybody knew what it might come to mean.

Gavi’s teacher Père Leyroud tries to counsel him.  In an allusion to the differences in French and British law, he canes Gavi with six strikes, not five as it would have been had he punished the boy in English, and Gavi has never forgotten that the ironic taps on his hand were spelling out the word v-é-r-i-t-é: truth.  It is to the priest that he goes to unravel the truth of his racial heritage, but he doesn’t want to hear Leyroud’s truth that it makes no difference. No ultimate difference.  Gavi already knows differently from the scorn of his classmates.

Other characters represent certain types.  The colonial Brits and the pretensions of their wives are obvious targets:

Whenever Assistant Resident Commissioner Trembath saw a black face, he instantly launched into pidgin, believing it to be one of those enduring symbols of colonial power.  one spoke to them.  Oh indeed one spoke but in a bastardised version of one’s precious tongue, placing them, old chap, in the position of using baby-talk back.  Frightfully funny, really.  Of course they couldn’t cope with anything more than baby-talk.  Only the simplest thoughts going on.  (p.110)

Trembath always speaks to his driver Joseph in Seaspeak, and Joseph speaks back to him in perfect English.

But Astley is too honest a novelist merely to caricature these types.  Mrs Trembath is a fool, but the indignity of her undoing is compassionately rendered.  Astley has less patience with Colonel Mercet who despises Trembath’s efforts with French and almost choked whenever he had to listen.  His perfidy is made clear:

As for Colonel Mercet, non-communication with his British half suited him perfectly.  For four years, now, he had plotted an ill-laid course of Gallic takeover, encouraging a group of shonky developers from the States with roots originally sprouted in a fundamentalist religion.  Born again, they declared, wisely, for profit.  The Salamander Corporation, with the Colonel’s connivance, planned to carve up great tracts of Kristi and turn it into a mini-Florida.  (p.111)

Headmasta Woodful rises to the occasion.  When his morning starts with distant shouts and missing staff, he suspects it’s another ‘fright-jump’, another of these moments of sudden political passion that decorated his years on the islands like painted beads.  (p.65) He’s never fitted in despite his best efforts with students and expats, and for him, in all the hot stinking sweating years he had been striding from house to classroom in his mad belief in service through a wife’s death and a daughter’s absence in a Sydney boarding-school, there is only the platonic friendship of Madam Guichet, island jetsam abandoned by a lugger master, her grey hair ashake form too much morning bottle. He refuses to join the exodus of Brits on the beach as they wait for promised rescue and turns the school into a refuge for frightened Islanders. And it is Headmasta Woodful who, at first not realising exactly what Gavi has done tries to comfort him for the evil his folly has unleashed:

Under cover of back-seat chatter he said to Gavi, without turning his head, as if he were convincing himself as well, ‘This day, Gav, this year, next year and the one after that and even beyond that, they’ll all string out like old Lorimer’s.  No harder, no softer than they are for any of us.  Remember that.  You’ll live through them, as he did.

‘You don’t understand,’ the boy said.  ‘I helped to take them from him.’ His voice was so low Woodful had to incline his head to hear.

‘Took what?’

‘His years.’

That stopped him.  He couldn’t reply to that, to such self-slaughter.  He drove in silence for nearly a mile.  Finally, ‘I don’t know what happened today,’ he said, ‘any more than you’ve told me.  Perhaps you did, indirectly. ‘ He heard the boy gasp with the pain of accusation. ‘Soothers won’t help.  Soft things.  If you did, if that is what you believe, then admit it and accept it.  That’s the only thing and the hardest.  Accepting.’ He fumbled around in his mind.  Nothing seemed right.  ‘You’ll have learned not to make excuses. That’s one of the best things you can ever discover.’

He could hear Gavi crying, not loudly, but insistently as if the tears would never stop.

‘The main thing,’ Woodful went on, turning the car off the coast road and heading for the school, ‘is to be sorry.  Beyond that what can you do?  Oh it will hurt for a long time but time does other things besides pass.  Sorrow is one thing, Gav.  Regret’s another.  And regret is useless.’ (p.147)

This is a gentle, generous side of Astley the author, with words of wisdom that sound as if they are straight from the heart, and hard won.

Update Feb 2022: This title is now available through the Untapped Australian Literary Heritage Project.  It can be borrowed electronically through libraries and can be purchased in digital form from eBook sellers.  For details visit the Untapped website. 

Author: Thea Astley
Title: Beachmasters.
Cover art: Bill Farr
Publisher: Penguin Australia, 1985
ISBN: 0140079122, pbk., 185 pages
Source: OpShop find, $1.00