Fact harder than fiction

Author Tim Winton’s new book digs deep into the origins of his writing, writes Adam Dudding.

Look back over your life from the vantage point of middleage, says Tim Winton, and you start to see shapes you couldn’t see before.

You see your behaviour as a sibling, as a son, as a father. You see the patterns of work. Winton’s been writing now for three-and-a-half decades – ‘‘so there are a lot of footprints there’’.

You see the external forces that shaped you: class, religion, the natural world, a surprisingly large number of serious car accidents. And then you write some of it down.

Winton, 56, is one of Australia’s bestknown, most-awarded authors. He’s written 11 novels and many short stories, as well as plays, children’s books, and a decent number of nonfiction articles.

He is an industrious writing machine, and this year’s industrial output is The Boy Behind the Curtain, a collection of 22 essays and fragments of memoir in which he has a go at identifying those shapes. Some chapters are new; others were previously published but belonged in the collection because they ‘‘rested up against’’ the others.

He writes about the strange summer when, aged 13, he would take an unloaded .22 rifle and draw a bead on passers-by from behind the terylene curtain in his parents’ bedroom. He writes about growing up with a policeman for a father, about social class, films, shark attacks, cars, art, and surfing, and his accidental career as an environmental activist.

One piece, Lighting Out is a vivid, hallucinogenic account of the day he realises, seven years into writing what will eventually be the hit novel Dirt Music, that he’s done it all wrong, before rewriting the entire thing from scratch over two deranged months.

Compared to this, compared to his prodigious writing feats (10 books published in his 20s alone), was it a doddle knocking out a dozen or so non-fiction pieces of a few thousand words each?

Not at all, says Winton, down the phone from Perth, Western Australia, the state where he’s always lived and where most of his work is set.

Sticking to facts, and talking about himself, was tougher than writing fiction.

‘‘I’m used to telling a story, and that’s hard enough, but non-fiction is a bit harder, eh.’’ As a novelist, your responsibilities are solely aesthetic, ‘‘not moral and emotional in the way they are when you’re writing about people you know and love’’.

You can see him tussling with that responsibility in the essay Twice on Sundays, a complex, fascinating account of his upbringing within a community of suburban evangelical fundamentalists: a narrow faith that, as he eventually realised, contained remarkable breadth.

‘‘It’s perfectly normal for people to come out of an enclave or sect like that – it doesn’t matter whether your family were evangelical fundamentalists like mine or an old family of Trots – you kick against it, and wonder how you survived it. But there are things that came out of that that were enormous gifts.’’

There was the sense of community and village life, at a time ‘‘when village life was being expunged from Australian culture’’. But two things in particular would become central to his writing life. His community’s nearobsessive study of the meaning of The Bible and its implications meant ‘‘we were exposed to high ideas’’.

This was the 1960s, a time ‘‘when Australians were aggressively suspicious of introspection, and policing and self-policing of people’s language around emotion and expression. You had to use a very safe and arid palette, just in terms of the lexicon. People were anxious about letting the side down and saying something silly in front of their peers, looking too keen, sounding too poncy – all that stuff.’’

By contrast, in Winton’s church ‘‘we had this whole business of examining ourselves, our hearts, reaching for something something beyond us – a language of transcendence, or reaching. Conscious living, in a nutshell.

Nowadays, Winton is agnostic about an afterlife, and figures if there is indeed an ‘‘energy at work which is beyond us’’ it’s probably not a bearded guy in the clouds. If any faith has persisted, it would be in the tradition of St Francis of Assisi, or the Celtic mystics who saw the world itself as God’s body, as ‘‘an expression of the divine. And it seems a pretty complex and eloquent and dynamic expression to me.’’

High language and high ideas have served him as a writer and they’re never far away, even in a phone interview to plug a new book. Winton’s answers are long, eloquent, impassioned. He is almost unstoppable once on a rant, but as in his books, you get swept along, like when he describes why at 10 he’d already decided to be a writer.

‘‘I wanted to be in on the magic I got from being taken out of myself as a reader. When a book is working you get relieved of the burden of yourself briefly. You get that delicious feeling that a book can’t be fat or deep or wide enough – I’m into it so bad.

As a teen he made ‘‘the stubborn and foolish decision that I was going to be a writer and not compromise, not get a job’’. Being raised working-class helped.

‘‘Everyone’s doing practical things and you can see the fruits of their labour. They can build a chair; they can put a dunny in and fix your taps. And if you did this much work, by the end of the day you’d have earned this much money.

‘‘If you’re working in the arts, you’re stuck with the ‘effing ineffable’. But I bring to it my tradesman-like mindset, and apply that to the ineffable.

‘‘It took me a long time to own the idea that I had embarked on a life of industry, manufacturing works of useless beauty, and thinking, I’m fine with that. That’s good enough for me.’’