Thea Astley's It's Raining in Mango explores the relationship between people and their homes within a fictional frame. The aging Connie Laffey struggles to keep her family together after generations of mental unwellness, violence, and poor decisions. She posits that family is the most important, and, at least on the surface, everyone else agrees. In her brother, Will's interpretation of family, however, he returns to the land which his grandfather first settled. This is his "Wasteland," a place formerly inhabited and now full of ghosts and enduring spirits. Despite her best efforts to persuade him otherwise, Connie loses Will to the Outback, the same way her Grandpa Cornelius left and, in a twist, the same way her rebellious absent teenager son, Reever, deserts her in order to fight environmental destruction.
As she recognizes the approaching end of her life, Connie reminisces upon her family, the strong force which kept her and her brother together. From her impenetrable grandmother, Jessica Olive, to her troubled and generous cousin, Harry, who raised both her and her brother, Connie has had a plethora of role models from which to choose. In this gene pool, however, there is also an abundance of mental unwellness, four out of six men in the family having chosen either suicide or run away from the family. In Connie's recollection of the stories, however, they left for their own purposes, not because the family pressured them into anything.
The significance of Australia in Astley's narrative is unmistakable. She is writing to describe how people have responded to the adverse environment of Australia, throughout the years, by presenting a representative family. Among a settled aboriginal people, the white society has developed a particularly nasty, abrasive bent. Racism is prevalent. In fact Cornelius Laffey leaves his family after being fired for speaking out against racially motivated violence in his newspaper articles. Nevertheless the family lives in Australia now and are committed to improving this land and its relationships. This sort of settled decision places enormous pressure on the inhabitants who already experience tremendous hardship as a result of the climate and abundance of dangerous animals. In the end, several of the men in the Laffey family bend under the crushing pressure of inhabiting the frontier.
