BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:
As part of their fortieth anniversary celebrations, the Australian Society of
Authors in 2003 compiled a list of the forty most popular Australian books ever
published. Tim Winton's Cloudstreet (1991) was voted number one; also
appearing on the list were his The Riders (1994) and Dirt Music (2001). Winton
has wide popular appeal but is also highly regarded within the literary
establishment. He has won the most prestigious of Australia's literary awards, the
Miles Franklin Award, three times--for Shallows in 1984, Cloudstreet in 1992, and
Dirt Music in 2002. Both Dirt Music and The Riders were short-listed for the
Booker Prize. His publications for younger readers have also been widely
recognized through awards in both Australia and the United States.
Running through Winton's narratives is the capacity to speak simply about
familiar landscapes that are made new through the lyricism of the writing. In an
echo of Patrick White, Winton stated in an interview for On Being (1987) with
Owen Salter that he was challenged by the desire to "render the commonplace
worthy of attention" through an Australian vernacular that becomes poetic. In
discussion with Elizabeth Ferrier in the same year he stated, "All my books are
about people trying to make sense of things, about the search for meaning. . . .
My work is ultimately about people who are possessed by a vision."
Timothy John Winton was born on 4 August 1960 in the Perth suburb of Mosman
Park, the eldest of four children. His father, John Leslie Arthur Winton, raised in
Margaret River, was a policeman and the son of a policeman. His mother,
Beverly Ruth Mifflin, was born in Geraldton and lived there until the family moved
to Belmont during World War II. Her father worked on the wharf in Geraldton and
for the British Phosphate Commission on the Abrolhos Islands. John Winton and
Beverly Mifflin married in 1959. Michael McGirr in Tim Winton: The Writer and
His Work (1999) quotes Winton's comments on his forebears made to Helen
Garner in 1984:
My father comes from a family with a "long oral tradition," which means they're
gasbags. Failed farmers, failed policemen, failed merchants. The women ran the
family. Iron women. Our grandmother knew all the stories.
We sat and listened to Nanna talk.
My mother's side is more taciturn. Water diviners, jockeys, horse trainers,
gamblers. My mother's the only talker in that lot.
The Nanna-who-talked lived for thirty years in the backyard of her house. Oriel
Lamb in Cloudstreet also moves out of the house into a backyard tent.
Winton grew up largely in the suburbs of Karrinyup and Scarborough, although
family holidays were often spent at the beach, especially at Greenough River,
four hours north of Perth. The mornings were typically spent in the water, and
afternoons on bunks nursing sunburn and reading. It was the beach house library
that belonged to his great uncle that provided Winton an endless supply of books
and stimulated his desire to write. In Land's Edge (1993) Winton writes of this
period:
Morning and afternoon I learned the pattern of my life, of hunting and gathering
and picking over flotsam in the outdoor world--fishing, diving, swimming, surfing,
lighting fires, rowing boats, feeling the landscape rush in from all sides--and of
retiring indoors to wonder and write and read where only the breeze could reach
me, in there where my dreams were. I would never be content with only one
world or the other.
When Winton was twelve the family moved to Albany and lived there for three
years. Memories of life in the town and exploring the beaches of the south coast
have informed much of his writing. The family returned to Perth in 1973; Winton
finished his schooling at Scarborough Senior High School. By the age of ten, he
had announced he was going to become a writer. By the age of eighteen he had
written forty to fifty stories.
Winton attended the West Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin
University), majoring in creative writing. Elizabeth Jolley was one of his tutors,
along with Michael Henderson and Graeme Turner. In January 1982 he married
Denise Elizabeth Fitch, who lived "around the corner" in Karrinyup. In that same
year his first novel, An Open Swimmer , was published. The manuscript was the
winner of the Australian Vogel Award in 1981. The novel opens with two young
men--Jerra and Sean--camping at the beach on the south coast of Western
Australia. In spite of their youthfulness, the past is the focus of their
conversations, and in particular, the role of Sean's abused and damaged mother,
Jewel, in their lives. Jerra's dreams are troubled by guilt-ridden sexual memories
of her death by suicide. Desire in all its forms is represented by the ocean and its
depths; it is the source of dreams--of sexual threat and fulfillment, of finding the
pearl in the fish, of life and death.
In the novel a precursor to Jerra was the hermit who lives alone on the beach in
his bric-a-brac shanty with guilty memories. In Land's Edge, Winton records his
first experiences with these isolates:
All along the coast I met solitary men in squatters' shacks surrounded by raw
bush and sea, and I saw a life for myself out there until I began to sense their
fear. I was eighteen before I saw these quiet, cranky, lonely men as people who
had sought refuge and become stranded. . . . They were stuck in time, always in
their moment of betrayal or humiliation or outrage. They had stayed too long in
their shacks or at some place in their memories, and everyone had forgotten
them. Their own forgetting had left them with nothing to go on with. . . . Most of
them never seemed to even have names anymore. They gave me my first stories
and my first novel. . . .
An Open Swimmer encompasses the numinous--a constant source of meaning in
Winton's fiction--grounded in the natural world where trees speak, fish symbolize
the self, and oceans contain secrets that must be confronted; otherwise the
would-be hermit Jerra will be as lost as the figures Winton met on those
windswept south coast beaches. Winton retains this setting for his next novel,
Shallows, which analyzes the impact on a small community in the town of
Angelus, a thinly disguised Albany, of an attempt to close down a key business,
whaling. The community is ignorant of its own dark history and thus condemned
to repeat it. One of the protagonists, Cleve Cookson, commences the task of
discovering the past, and he, at least at the end of the novel, along with his wife,
Queenie, looks forward with some optimism to a future that is not blighted by the
past. From Queenie's grandfather, Daniel Coupar, Cleve has received copies of
a journal that provides an account of the lives of whalers in the 1830s. Denial,
abuse, and the misuse of power were the key issues then, as they are now, for
the townspeople. At the center of corruption--moral and physical--is Des Pustling,
a real estate agent. The corrupt behavior of his father in the 1930s is a precursor
to that of the real-life entrepreneurs in Western Australia in the 1980s. At one
level the message of the novel is a simple one: face up to the past (especially the
dispossession of Aboriginal people), live moral lives, and respect the
environment. In Winton's powerful, poetic prose, no sense of banality is found in
such simple statements.
Winton's first collection of stories, Scission , was published in 1985. "A Blow, a
Kiss" includes an account of a father and son coming across an accident where a
motorbike rider is lying on the road in a pool of blood. The son, Albie, is left alone
in the dark with the badly injured man while his father goes for help. The story
establishes a sharp contrast in the relationships between two fathers and two
sons. One is marked by kindness and love; the other, by drunkenness and
conflict. "My Father's Axe," first published in Australian Playboy in 1983, is also
about a father and son. In an interview for Antipodes (1991), Winton said about
this work:
A story called "My Father's Axe" found me a route between realism and the kind
of 1970s fabulism that was about at the time. I didn't want to write either. What
passed for realism denied me a whole wedge of material--the numinous.
Surrealism faked it in order to escape restraint. . . . The term magic realism really
upsets me. It assumes trickery. The weird things that happen in my books aren't
devices. For my money, this is the kind of world where pigs speak in tongues and
angels come and go. And I'm not speaking metaphor here. The world is a weird
place.
The evocation of an alternative world, mysterious and nonrational, is evident in
"Wilderness" (from Scission), in which the teacher who lives a socially isolated
life with his mother becomes so disturbed that he believes his students' heads
have separated from their bodies. A voice comes from the ground and says to
him: "'Go into the wilderness and wait,' . . . the logic of it made him nauseous with
excitement and apprehension. He had no doubts as to whom had spoken." He
follows this advice and, at the end of the story, achieves transcendence through
death. "Lantern Stalk," introduces the character Egg, who appears later in the
second and third Lockie Leonard books. While out on a schoolboy exercise, as a
would-be soldier, he comes across a Christian group celebrating the arrival of a
newborn child. For Egg, the experience is transforming. He becomes "more than
himself." This focus on the "other" in Winton's work does not, however, preclude
the representation of strong realist elements. The title story, "Scission," concerns
the violent revenge of a possessive and jealous husband who shoots his wife, a
successful model. In "The Oppressed," Quoi, a Vietnamese boat person,
confronts the lack of understanding of his well-intentioned Australian friends.
That Eye, the Sky (1986) develops several themes and issues evident in the
earlier work, particularly the collection of short fiction. It begins with an accident.
In a 1999 interview with McGirr, Winton stated,
My parents were a young couple with two very small children and one on the way
when my father was basically cut down in a road accident. I remember the day
Dad came back from hospital completely unrecognisable. I just couldn't admit
that he was my father. He had a tracheotomy with sticking plaster across the
wound in his neck . . . a man showed up out of the blue one day at the house
after my father was released from hospital. He used to come and bathe my father
and talk to him and help my mother out. It was probably their very earliest stages
of being confronted with any notions of faith. . . . My father had a completely
unexpected recovery.
These autobiographical elements form the basis of the novel. Ort Flack is twelve
years old and the naive narrator of the complex world around him. What he does
know about, at an intuitive level, is the potential for transformation in the
everyday--in nature and commonplace domestic objects. The sky, blue for most
days of the year where Ort lives in Western Australia (the foothills outside of
Perth), is the dominant symbol of the novel. For Ort it is like some big blue eye
that looks down on him and the world that he knows. Ort needs all the strength
and consolation he can get from this source to cope with the traumas in his life-his father in a coma after a car accident and cared for at home; his grandmother,
who shows signs of advanced dementia; his troubled sister Tegwyn; and perhaps
most challenging of all, the deceptive preacher, Henry Warburton, who arrives to
"save" the Flacks. In the end, Ort's faith in the world and the power of redemptive
acts prevails. On Easter Sunday his father, anointed by Ort with safflower oil, is
reborn.
That Eye, the Sky is an optimistic novel, especially the passages concerning Ort.
However, Henry Warburton, who is older than the Flack parents, is a dark force,
and his sexual relationship with the sixteen-year-old Tegwyn, who seems the
most perceptive about his hypocrisies, is problematic. Ort's character supports
several of Winton's views about children. In an interview for Sojourners (1992),
he stated,
Children are all we are until we have the wonder squeezed out of us by the
educational system. However ludicrous it seems, we spend years learning a
rationalist view of reality in an attempt to arm ourselves against the transcendent.
It's great to be working with agencies who have not lost their wonder. . . . So, my
characters are typically apprehending but not understanding. . . .
In that respect, I think children have the capacity to not worry so much about the
answers to life, but are more content to figure out what the questions are.
The title story in Minimum of Two (1987) is a disturbing account of a vengeful
husband who has never recovered from his wife's rape by the head of her
department some years earlier. In other stories in the collection, Winton returns
to characters of his earlier novels. Jerra is now married to Rachel and is the
father of a three-year-old. In two of the stories he confronts death (of Sean) and
dying (of his father). Queenie and Cleve also reappear with their daughter Dot,
seven years after the events that conclude Shallows. In "Laps" the reader learns
that whaling has now ceased in Angelus (the Albany station closed at the end of
1978), but Daniel Coupar's old farm now belongs to Pustling. Other unsettling
changes are present. Queenie swims at City Beach, not Scarborough, because
"the little men with big money were tearing up the beach front to build hotels for
the Americans." Recalling this period, Winton stated in an essay published in the
Fremantle Herald in 2002:
For those of us from Scarborough, however, it felt that the 80s cost us our
neighbourhood. When Australia II won the America's Cup we were as pleased as
anybody until we realized what Alan Bond had in mind for our beach and our
suburb. Part of his scheme involved a twenty storey hotel complex on
Scarborough Beach from which the wealthy could observe the historic doings at
sea. We thought he was dreaming. We'd grown up believing that local council
regulations forbade high-rise development. And on paper they did. Nevertheless,
Observation City was approved and built in short order. We watched, slack-jawed
as it went up around us.
Although many of the stories in the collection are about characters embattled
politically and personally, the final story--out of chronological sequence--is "Blood
and Water," celebrating the difficult birth of Jerra and Rachel's son, Samuel.
In 1987 Winton won a traveling scholarship, the Marten Bequest, which took him
and his family (his son Jesse had been born in 1984) out of Australia for the first
time. They traveled to various cities in Europe and lived in France, Ireland, and
Greece for periods of approximately six months. In Ireland the Wintons lived in
the gate lodge of a ruined castle in County Offaly, a setting later recalled in The
Riders. On return to Perth at the end of 1988, the family bought a shack in the
coastal township of Lancelin. It became the setting for several of Winton's works
in the following years, including Dirt Music.
In the Winter Dark (1988), written in Perth and Paris, examines what happens in
individual lives when the past is denied or repressed. Four people living in an
isolated valley called The Sink come together when they are frightened by the
presence of a large cat-like animal that is ravaging their stock and pets.
Gradually, the stories they are hiding from come to the surface. The narrator,
Maurice Stubbs, is an old man who is granted insight into the dreams of all the
characters caught up in the horror of what to do about a silent and savage killer
on the loose. Each of them feels some responsibility for what is happening: their
pasts have caught up with them in the form of a wild beast. However, at the literal
level, the explanation is simple. The dedication of the novel reads, in part, "for the
Nannup Tiger whoever you are." Throughout the 1970s and 1980s many
sightings of a large cat that was killing stock in the southwest of Western
Australia were reported. The novel offers various explanations for its presence:
an escaped tiger from a traveling circus; a panther mascot that grew too big for
its American ship; and a return of the Tasmanian Tiger. Winton, however, is more
concerned with the hearts and minds of his characters, which might have brought
this beast into existence because of their refusal to acknowledge past deeds and
guilty consciences. In the end, the small community that forms to fight a sense of
isolation and fear once again disintegrates. Darkness prevails; this vision is
counter to the conclusion of That Eye, the Sky.
The picture book Jesse (1988), illustrated by Maureen Prichard, is a
characteristically Australian story about a boy lost in the bush. Jesse lives on a
farm near a forest and goes for an early morning walk into the forest. He is happy
with all he sees, until the sun starts to go down. A cow with a "voice like
Grandma" tells him he is lost, and he had better climb on her back for a ride
home. When he gets home, he is asleep. Winton, on the inside cover, states,
When my first son was very small, he used to like to pretend he lived on a farm,
so I began to tell him this story. Soon it became a story of him becoming lost, and
I told it to him so often that it became a book in our heads. In a way, we wrote it
together and now we read it to Jesse's younger brother, Harry. Maybe the three
of us will write one some day.
In 1990 Winton published the first of the Lockie Leonard books, Lockie Leonard,
Human Torpedo. It is a first-person narrative in which Lockie provides an account
of arriving at a new school in the country on the south coast. He is a city kid who
takes some time getting accepted. When the best-looking girl in his class, Vicki
Streeton, becomes his girlfriend and when his surfing prowess is acknowledged,
he achieves a short-lived hero status with his peer group.
Winton discussed the origins of the novel on the Pan Macmillan website
(http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/pandemenium):
. . . Lockie is autobiographical in a sense. My dad was a cop. I was the oldest kid
in my family. My mum was (is) like Mrs Leonard. We moved from Perth to the
country town of Albany when I was twelve-and-a-half. Albany is Angelus, more or
less. . . . Between twelve and fourteen I got the shock of my life. Moving from the
life I'd always known to something completely new was a trauma. I think I
reassembled myself under pressure. My baby brother nearly died of meningitis
and I learned about the strength of family. I was hideously lonely for the first time
in my life and learned the true value of making and keeping friends.
The second novel in the series, Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster (1993), again
includes characters from earlier works. Queenie and Cleve Cookson return, with
Dot, who is now nearly twelve--and a better surfer than Lockie. The title refers to
a project undertaken by Lockie and friends to try to clean up the harbor, which is
being polluted by industries partly owned by the mayor, Des Pustling, who first
appeared in Shallows. Lockie falls in love with Dot, but the romance is shortlived. Dot and her parents go back to Perth, and Lockie is bereft, particularly
because he also loses another new friend, Egg, the highly intelligent bogan
(white, working-class person), whose father is an unconventional Baptist minister
and whose mother is an "artist" who welds vigorously in the back shed. At the
end of the novel Lockie is left with his surfboard and the swell, which is "long and
clean" as it roars into the bay.
Lockie Leonard, Legend (1997) is the third, and probably the last book for Winton
in the series. It is a strongly written account of how Lockie and his family deal
with the trauma of Mrs. Leonard being hospitalized for depression. Chaos reigns
in the Leonard household until the arrival of a mysterious "guardian angel," who
leaves much-needed dishes of hot food on their doorstep. The angel turns out to
be Vickie Streeton. The reader learns that she has had a hard time since she and
Lockie broke up. Vickie is a more restrained character than previously, but a
romantic spark still exists between her and Lockie.
In That Eye, the Sky, Ort Flack was reborn from a coma when he was very
young; in that time he had access to two worlds: a mysterious inner space and
the world he inhabited as a physical being. As an adolescent, he maintains a
duality in which the material and spiritual collide, and occasionally mesh. Winton
extends this figure in remarkable ways with Fish Lamb in Cloudstreet . As a child,
Fish nearly drowned, and not all of him came back to the "real" world. His name
underlines the dual elements in which he operates: water and earth. In his
moments of transcendence, Fish is God-like in his knowledge, but at other times
he responds to the physical world with an immediacy that suggests he is
inseparable from it. In a final epiphany, however, he goes back to the water and
a life of the spirit, which he has been seeking all along: ". . . I burst into the moon,
sun and stars of who I really am. Being Fish Lamb. Perfectly. Always.
Everyplace. Me." In common with Winton's other works, the transcendent in
Cloudstreet is grounded in a powerfully realized social world. Winton comments
in the Fremantle Herald essay:
During the WA Inc. years [the 1980s] I was writing a novel that had its roots in
family mythology. Listening to my parents and grandparents talk about their lives,
I noticed that the settings of most of their stories no longer existed. . . . I could
find few of the places sacred to family memory.
Perth's provincial insecurity is probably part of Australia's old self-doubt, the
cultural cringe. What deep anxiety requires a city to wreck itself anew every
twenty years, what fear of time and memory? . . . Ours is a provisional culture
obsessed with the short term.
The Pickles travel south to Perth from Geraldton. The Lambs move north from
Margaret River. They meet and share a house in Cloudstreet. Winton depicts the
entwinement from the 1940s to the 1960s of personal histories, quotidian lives,
and dreams with a particular ramshackle building. Part of the strangeness of the
house is its barely contained violent past. Many years earlier an Aboriginal girl
had died in the library by swallowing ant poison. There, too, the respectable
white owner of the house was found dead. It was the middle of summer, and her
body was not discovered for some time. This history has seeped into the walls of
the house, and it is not until the birth of a child to Rose Pickles and Quick Lamb
that the embattled shadows of the white woman and the black girl disappear,
freeing the house of their presence and allowing a more positive future. Winton
won the 1991 Deo Gloria Award for this novel.
Winton often works on his children's books at the same time as the adult novels.
In 1991 The Bugalugs Bum Thief was published. The inhabitants of Bugalugs, a
fishing village on the coast, much like Lancelin, wake up one morning to find that
their bottoms have all gone missing. They are all a bit embarrassed to talk about
what has happened, except for Skeeta; he takes up the challenge of finding the
thief, who turns out to be Blue Murphy, a fisherman who was after a good supply
of bait. Apart from commenting on the foibles of human beings who want better
bottoms than they had (when it comes to reclaiming them), and providing his
characters with revealing names such as Constable Coma, the story is intended
as an entertaining romp--although some critics believe Winton is mildly obsessed
with bottoms.
Land's Edge is an autobiographical celebration of life by the sea. Written from the
perspective of a thirty-three-year-old, it recalls holidays at Greenough River and
school days at Albany on the south coast. They are remembered as days of
endless summer. Winton asks,
Have I idealized these memories and chased their myth all my adult life? Did the
suburban boy simply imagine himself a coastal life?
No, I have lived both these lives and have the wonky slides to prove it. It's just
that I lived the coastal life harder, with more passion. . . . At the beach I wasn't
just passive, letting life happen to me; I didn't care about being smart or popular, I
didn't long to be better looking. The sea swallowed up all my primary school
anxieties. Something suddenly consumed my whole attention. I surged toward
shore through the laughing crowd, bodysurfing, careful not to lose the togs.
Winton and his family moved to a more urban lifestyle in Fremantle in 1993, but it
is in the sparse coastal environment of Lancelin that Winton is most at home.
Winton's close identification with the natural world has led to an increasingly
public role on environmental issues. In 1994 he became vice president of a lobby
group, The Marine Conservation Society. In 2002, in a campaign to save
Ningaloo Reef, he addressed a rally in Freemantle in which he described his own
sense of that special place:
What is there now is a rugged and beautiful wilderness. People come from all
over the world to see it. After all, how many places can you go to where you can
swim with a whaleshark, a placid animal the size of a bus covered in brilliant dots
like an Aboriginal painting. The same day you can be circled by manta rays that
roll and swerve like enormous underwater birds. If you're lucky you'll see a
dugong, the shy and vulnerable creature of the seagrass meadows. There'll be
turtles, of course . . . It's an incredible place. [Rally speech, "Tim Winton on The
Day"]
In The Riders Winton shifts away from an Australian setting and well beyond a
single house in the suburbs. The action is played out in a cottage in Ireland and
various cities in Europe. It is a hybrid work--a thriller indebted to the picaresque
tradition, a novel with a strong moral purpose, and the familiar intermingling of
the real and surreal. Scully with his wife, Jennifer, and their daughter, Billie, have
left their house in Fremantle, Western Australia, to begin a new life in Ireland.
Jennifer is on a journey of self-discovery as an artist of one kind or another. She
is present in the story only through the memories of Scully and Billie. She has left
them--and Scully is determined to track her down wherever she may be. And so
the desperate, and often drunken, pursuit begins. Robert Brain in TLS: The
Times Literary Supplement (7 February 1995) comments on the underlying
seriousness of the work and its limitations:
Throughout, there is a high moral tone, based on the old-fashioned values of
patriarchy, Christianity, procreative sex, the nuclear family. . . . These hardheaded fundamentalist values force everything into rigid categories: of good and
evil, cold and heat, work and leisure, manual labour and creative art, the bush
and the city, Australia and Europe, even sand and loam. One of the effects of this
kind of thinking is that if Scully, the man, is big-hearted, Jennifer the woman is
small-hearted, if he is good, she is bad. . . .
Billie is a stable point in the narrative and does not fit into these easy binary
positions. Although at times traumatized and physically vulnerable, she is
resilient and wise beyond her seven years. She has not yet been damaged by
the social and political processes that accompany the passage to adulthood.
In 1997 Winton published Blueback , a story of Abel Jackson who lives with his
mother on the coast. They live off the sea and the land as their family has done
for generations. Apart from his mother, the most important figure in Abel's life is
an enormous Eastern Blue Groper that he names Blueback. Whenever possible,
he and his mother dive on the spot where Blueback lives and hand-feed it
abalone and crab. Abel, now a marine biologist, returns as a married man to
Longboat Bay. His daughter is born there, and she, too, is introduced to the
ocean and old Blueback. This story is about belonging, about knowledge, and
above all, about the importance of relating to, and caring for, the environment.
The Deep (1998), a picture book illustrated by Karen Louise, is also about the
ocean. Alice lives with her family in a house near the beach. Her two brothers,
Jesse and Harry, are not frightened of the deep water where the color changes,
but she is. One day, she is lured into the water by some playful dolphins. She
keeps following them until she realizes she is in "the deep." After a moment of
panic, she discovers that she has overcome her fears and can happily join the
others in their play. The characters in this story are named after the Wintons'
children (Harry and Alice were born in 1981 and 1989 respectively).
Dirt Music further develops the female character who challenges stereotyped
roles. Georgie Jutland shares some of the "whore" characteristics of Winton's
earlier female characters who are on the wrong side of the good-bad binary, but
she is also a caring figure, a nurse by profession and a "stepmother" to Jim
Buckland's two boys. Her background is the privileged middle class of Western
Australia, with a house by the river and a father who is a judge. (Jutland Parade
is a well-known riverside address). This family history of wealth, private schools,
and social position has been, until this novel, consistently represented in
negative terms in Winton's writing. The rest of the Jutlands, with their privileged
neuroses, do not add up to much, but the rebellious Georgie is credited with
escaping the worst of the influences of elitism. She is intelligent, complex, and
seeking something beyond material success in her life. Her partner, Jim
Buckridge, is a White Point crayfisherman who, stereotypically, in his closeness
to nature and the ocean, would be in the canon of Winton's heroes. A Buckridge
family history of violence and misused power and wealth, however, dates back to
Jim's childhood. He believes he must make reparation for the past. To do this he
must confront the loner, the musician, the traditional enemy of the Buckridges,
Luther Fox. Lu and Georgie have commenced an affair before Fox leaves for the
territory of northwest Australia, an archipelago of islands north of Broome. The
narrative of Fox's journey north is part epic, part road novel. The damaged and
dying characters he meets and the music they play are integral to the
development of the new self that Luther Fox is seeking. The story ends when a
seaplane carrying Georgie and Jim (who are searching for Luther) crashes into
the ocean, and Georgie is rescued by a scarcely recognizable "wild man," who is
Fox. The novel works throughout on a melodramatic edge with a gradual
awakening of characters, all flawed, to a world of the spirit firmly rooted within a
powerfully realized landscape of dirt, music, and ocean.
In 2004 The Turning, a collection of Winton's new short fiction, was published.
White Point, Angelus, and the suburbs of Perth are the settings for the stories.
They feature the return of several characters from earlier narratives and the
introduction of a new family in more than one of the stories. In many ways the
collection reads more like a novel, as the layered, complex lives of frequently
embattled and alienated characters are revealed.
Tim Winton is widely regarded as one of Australia's finest novelists. He has a
worldwide readership, and his books have been translated into many languages.
He has been recognized by both national and international awards for his
publications for both adults and children. In 2003 he won the inaugural medal of
the Australian Society of Authors and in the same year was awarded a
Centenary Medal for services to Australian society and literature.
Papers:
Manuscripts, proofs, first editions, and correspondence by Tim Winton from 1980
to 1996 are held by the National Library of Australia in Canberra (MS 8583).
FURTHER READINGS:
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Interviews:

Elizabeth Ferrier, "Tim Winton: Affirming the Values of Human Life and
Effort," Fremantle Arts Review, 2, no. 9 (1987): 3-4.

Owen Salter, "Suspicions of Hope in a Chaotic World," On Being (June
1987): 7-10.

Beth Watzke, "Where Pigs Speak In Tongues and Angels Come and Go:
A Conversation with Tim Winton," Antipodes, 5, no. 2 (1991): 96-98.

David Batstone, "Reflections from a Teller of Tales: An Interview with Tim
Winton," Sojourners, 21, no. 8, (1992): 18-21.

H. A. Willis, "According to Winton," Eureka Street, 4, no. 7 (1994): 20-25.

Andrew Taylor, "An Interview with Tim Winton," Australian Literary
Studies, 17, no. 4 (1996): 373-377.

Elizabeth Guy, "A Conversation with Tim Winton," Southerly, 56, no. 4
(1996-1997): 127-133.

Eleanor Wachtel, "Eleanor Wachtel with Tim Winton," Malahat Review,
121 (Winter 1997): 63-81.

Janet Aumann, "Interview with Tim Winton," Viewpoint: On Books for
Young Adults, 5, no. 3 (1997): 9-12.

Richard Rossiter, 'The Writer and the Community: An Interview with Tim
Winton," Westerly, 49 (2004): 29-38.
References:

Barbara Arizti Martin, "The Crisis of Masculinity in Tim Winton's The
Riders," Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 24, no. 2 (2002): 29-45.

Veronica Brady, "Looking into the Light: Tim Winton's Interleaved
Continuing Place," BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature
Studies, 5 (1994): 9-17.

Anthony Hassall, "Over There: The Dream/Nightmare of Europe in Tim
Winton's The Riders and George Johnston's Clean Straw for Nothing,"
Overland, 161 (Summer 2000): 26-30.

Genevieve Laigle, "You Can't be Immature for Ever: The Painful Process
of Growing Up in Tim Winton's That Eye, The Sky," Commonwealth
Essays and Studies, 19, no. 2 (1997): 22-32.

Michael McGirr, "Go Home Said the Fish: A Study of Tim Winton's
Cloudstreet," Meanjin, 56, no. 1 (1997): 56-66.

McGirr, Tim Winton: The Writer and His Work (Melbourne: Macmillan,
1999).

Hilary McPhee, ed., Tim Winton: A Celebration (National Library of
Australia, 1999).

Richard Rossiter, "Speaking to Adults, Speaking to Children: Tim Winton's
Cloudstreet and Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo," Southerly, 53, no. 3
(1993): 92-99.

Rossiter and Lyn Jacobs, eds., Reading Tim Winton (Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1993).

Jennifer Rutherford, "The Colonising Victim: Tim Winton's Irish Conceit," in
Flight from Certainty: The Dilemma of Identity and Exile, Rodolpi
Perspectives on Modern Literature, no. 23, edited by Anne Luyat and
Francine Tolron (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2001), pp. 153-163.

Murray Stewart, "Tim Winton's 'New Tribalism': Cloudstreet and
Community," Kunapipi, 25, no. 1 (2003): 83-91.

Andrew Taylor, "What Can Be Read, and What Can Only Be Seen in Tim
Winton's Fiction," Australian Literary Studies, 17, no. 4 (1996): 323-331.

John Turner, "Tim Winton's Shallows and the end of Whaling in Australia,"
Westerly, 38, no. 1 (1993): 79-85.