Thea Astley is an Australian novelist. This is her biography that I had to do for English Literature as a speech in relation to It's Raining In Mango, in Year 12, 1998. I keep it on my site as when I was trying to research this speech, I couldn't find anything on the Internet. I hope this helps other people trying to research Thea Astley and her life. Because I haven't read anything about her since 1998, I probably can't help you with any questions you have, sorry.

Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925, and educated at All Hallows Convent before studying arts at the University of Queensland, graduating Teacher's Training College and becoming a teacher. She spent the first 5 years of her career teaching in small country towns, which partly explains why country towns are the main settings of many of her novels. After she married, she moved to Sydney where she became part of the New South Wales Education Department, teaching at high schools prior to becoming a senior tutor at Macquarie University. Now she has retired from teaching and writes full time. She has won many awards for her writing.

Her writing is influenced by her Catholic upbringing, living in Northern Queensland and mostly by her teaching experience in small towns. Her father was a journalist, and his influence on her writing is also strong. She is also close friends with Patrick White, and was quoted as saying, "almost everyone I've read has influenced me. Patrick White, Cheever, Hemingway, Nabokov, Carver."

Her life teaching in small towns contributes to her use of small town settings and slang. She also uses it for other reasons, as she said 'It's easier to see conflict taking place within a small group of people. It's easier to understand the reasons for conflict if the group is accessible" and "in a small town where the population is a few hundred and everybody knows everybody (I'm taking the easy way out for the writer) people can be assembled like characters on a stage". Hence, the setting of It's Raining In Mango in small towns. This is despite her personal dislike of small towns, as she says that she felt isolated when she was teaching there, due to the lack of culture such as books, poetry and music, that she was discovering at that time.

Queensland is important to her, as that's where she was brought up. She describes it as "Queensland isn't the place where the tall yarn begins; it's the place where the tall yarn happens, where it is lived out by people who are the dramatis personae of the tall yarns".

Astley draws heavily on observed people, as she believes that she can't write about people that she knows, as she can't let her mind wander free. An example of the people she observes is a man she used to see in Cairns, who wore a tartan skirt, green tank top trimmed with yellow, sandshoes and a cheap plastic eye patch. She says, "I thought of him when I was writing about Reever...Skirts are cooler in the tropics".

Dialogue is difficult for her - "I find it the hardest part of writing to have characters talking and not sounding totally trivial. That's why I have such admiration for playwrights".

Her main novels all focus on oddball, misfit characters, as she also sees herself as a misfit in society.

She feels sympathy for the Aboriginals. She says "after all, the British poisoned, shot or gave disease to most of the aboriginal population in this country". This sympathy is conveyed through her novels, such as the Mumbler family in It's Raining in Mango.

All these factors regarding Thea Astley's life have an impact on how It's Raining in Mango is written, its characters, the issues it presents, its setting and its portrayal of Aboriginals.