Plain talk
Tim Winton has been musing on men – empathetically, critically, insightfully – for decades. That his first novel in five years features a damaged young man, and is released just as men’s failings peak in the zeitgeist, is mere serendipity, writes Tim Elli
In 1965, when the author Tim Winton was five, his father, John, a motorcycle cop, was riding through Perth, Australia, when a drunk driver ran a stop sign and collided with him. The impact sent John flying into a brick wall, crushing his chest, shoulder and hip. His ribs were shattered, and his lungs collapsed; when the paramedics got to him, they had to perform an emergency tracheotomy in the street. He’d also suffered massive concussion, and lay comatose for days in the resuscitation room at Royal Perth Hospital.
When he returned home, he was a physical and emotional wreck. He’d gone from being the family’s sole breadwinner to being bedridden, unable to move or shower himself. It was up to his wife, Bev, to manage the house and cope with the kids: Tim and his three younger siblings, Andrew, Michael and Sharyn.
A week or so after John came home, a stranger showed up on the doorstep. His name was Len Thomas. The man said he’d heard about the accident, and that Bev was having a tough time, and that he wanted to help. “It was so weird,” Winton says, when we meet in Fremantle, Perth’s port city. “We had never met this guy before, and here he was, turning up, unannounced and uninvited, offering to give us a hand.”
Almost every day for the next few weeks, Thomas came to the house, where he carried Winton’s father from his bedroom to the bathroom and gently washed him. Tim didn’t know what to make of it: a stranger, in the bathroom, with his father? Now all he could do was sit outside the door, listening to the tap water running, and the two men talking in low, soft voices. As it soon became apparent, Thomas was an evangelical Christian: apart from washing John, he’d been laying hands on him, and anointing him with olive oil.
Thomas’ intercession, what Winton now calls “an act of grace”, changed the family forever. Soon after his father’s recovery, Winton’s parents became devout and lifelong Christians. Every Sunday morning, and in the evening too, the family went to church, where they would hear sermons on degradation and redemption. In Perth’s blithely secular suburbs, the Wintons’ conversion marked them as outsiders and oddbods. “At the same time, the church community was incredibly unifying and nurturing,” Winton tells me. “Your life had meaning and you belonged, and you had this amazing connection with people who weren’t blood relatives but who treated you like family.”
Winton lost his faith in his early 20s. “At one point I reached the limits of the educational and cultural experience of the people around me,” he says. “I just wasn’t getting any answers, no real feedback. And sometimes the feedback was negative because they felt threatened.” It was hard for his parents, who remain religious. “It was a struggle for them to understand. And I didn’t want to disappoint them.”
Yet there was another part of Thomas’ legacy that has never left him. “Len showed me that there is another way of being a man, that you didn’t have to get a double century at the MCG or mow down a machine-gun post and get a Victoria Cross. You could be just decent and gentle and kind. For me, that was incredibly revelatory.”
With 29 books to his name, including four Miles Franklin winners and two Booker Prize nominations, Winton is, as American poet and critic Ron Rash puts it, “one of the world’s great living novelists”. Yet he dresses as if he’s sneaking out the back door on his way to a spot of beach fishing. The day we meet, he’s wearing jandals and boardies, a peak cap with “Challenger Marine” written on it, and plastic wrap-around sunnies bought from the dairy. At 57, there is something about him that is reassuringly grounded, deeply earthed, like a wharf pylon; in the event of a cyclone, he is exactly the sort of thing you’d tether yourself to.
As it’s too late for lunch and too early for beer, Winton gives me an impromptu tour of Fremantle where a sort of contingent nature, the feeling that it’s just hanging on, is typical of Western Australia. As a whole, the majestic, sun-scorched immensity of this place induces a sense of dizzying oblivion.
“It’s a pretty singular place,” he says. “It’s saying to you: like it or lump it.” In Winton’s fiction, this landscape is the ultimate crucible, invariably bringing out the best in women and the worst in men, from the feckless gamblers in his 1991 breakthrough novel,
Cloudstreet, to Fred Scully, the protagonist in his 1995 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, The Riders, whose search for his headstrong wife leads to a kind of psychological disintegration. To be a male lead in Winton’s world is, more often than not, to be nursing some pretty deep wounds.
To be a male lead in Winton’s world is, more often than not, to be nursing some pretty deep wounds.
Jaxie Clackton, the teenage anti-hero of his new novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, is wounded deeper than most. Jaxie lives in a one-pub town north of Perth. His mum is dead, his dad is a violent drunk; Jaxie calls him Captain Wankbag, or the Cap, for short. “He wouldn’t give you the sweat off his balls, the old Captain, but when it come to dishing out a bit of biff when you weren’t looking, well, then he was like f…ing Santa.” Everyone in town knows Jaxie hates the Cap. Then, one afternoon, Jaxie comes home to find his father dead, squashed under his ute in the garage – he’d been repairing the engine when the jack collapsed. Afraid he’ll be blamed for it, Jaxie takes off north, trekking across the vast, bare West Australian wheat belt, hiking at night, napping when he can, en route to the goldfields, and then further north to meet his cousin Lee, the only girl he’s ever really known or loved. On the way, however, he comes across a saltpan, in the middle of which is a shepherd’s hut and a defrocked old priest named Fintan MacGillis.
The Shepherd’s Hut is vintage Winton, not only in its sense of place – the saltpan, the scrub, the withering heat – but also in its language. The story is told solely through Jaxie’s voice, which is the prose equivalent of a good long slug of room-temperature rum, a mongrel vernacular that is profane, funny and implausibly prideful.
Jaxie knows he’s a “dirty f…up” and a shitkicker: all he dreams of is a “normal” life with Lee, of escaping together and getting a room of their own, “like something off TV”. In the meantime, he’s running like a “chased rabbit”, so afraid and full of hate that he can barely string two words together.
“Jaxie is hyper vigilant,” Winton says. “He’s basically a very damaged person. He’s been beaten; he’s witnessed his mother being beaten.” He has become suspicious of tenderness and empathy; all instinct, no insight. He is a danger to others as well as himself, the embodiment of what Winton calls “toxic masculinity”.
“The thing is that he doesn’t want to be like that,” Winton tells me. “He wants to find peace, he wants to be a better person, to grow up to be a proper man. But he doesn’t know how to, because he’s never had anyone to show him.”
After our little walk through town, we station ourselves in a deserted seaside cafe that has been fitted out to look like a Greek taverna but which actually resembles a hastily retiled 1960s surf club that has been painted blue and filled with wobbly formica tables. Seagulls scour the floor, gorging on a rich bounty of dropped chips. It is so strangely, so inimitably Australian that I feel like applauding.
I also feel a little confused. Somewhere along the line Winton got a reputation as something of a recluse; a bit reticent, reserved – gruff, even. Long on ponytail and short on words. I don’t know if I’ve got the wrong Tim Winton, but the guy I meet in Fremantle quite literally will not shut up.
No sooner has he settled into his chair than he embarks on a long, leisurely, free-ranging riff on his favourite writers (Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Donal Ryan, Anne Enright); the history of Perth (basically it was founded as a real estate scam); parochialism in Australian publishing (with his first few books his editors suggested he put in a glossary, to explain Western Australia’s wildlife to east coast readers); and his picaresque family background, which includes the fact that for 30 years his paternal grandmother, Olive Winton, lived in a tent in the backyard of her suburban Perth home, in an effort to escape her seven children.
Winton was born in the Perth suburb of Karrinyup, where he grew up in social housing, but the family moved from time to time, with each of his father’s postings, including to Albany, a port city in the state’s far south. He returned to Perth to study arts at what is now Curtin University, where he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, which won the Vogel Literary Award in 1981.
Not long after, he moved with his wife, Denise, then a nurse, to a small coastal town a couple of hours’ drive north of Perth. It was here that they raised their three children, Jesse, Harry, and Alice – all of whom are now adults. He keeps the name of the town secret to protect the family’s privacy. “It’s a real issue,” Winton says, a little sheepishly. “When the kids were young we would walk separately in public, in the city, anyway, just so they weren’t bothered or gawked at.”
The coast and the ocean have shaped much of Winton’s fiction, particularly his 2009 Miles Franklin-winning book, Breath, a coming-of-age tale about two boys who grow up under the tutelage of an older surfer, Bill “Sando” Sanderson. (A film adaptation, starring Simon Baker as Sando, is being released in May.)
“The thing about West Australia is that there is nothing between us and Antarctica,” Winton says. “The swell and the trade winds come pouring up, really raw and nasty, and there’s very little to break them down.” Some of his most memorable moments have been spent out on WA’s reefs and rock shelfs and outer bombies, remote breaks which are renowned, in surfing circles, for their numinous beauty and potential for grievous bodily harm.
These days, Winton does most of his surfing closer to home. “I’d be out there five days a week, pretty much whenever I can,” he says. “Really, surfing accounts for almost the entirety of my social life.” It also amounts to a type of incidental ethnography, an opportunity for Winton to observe what he describes as the increasingly “florid behaviours” of the young men sitting with him in the line-up.
It was in the surf, for example, that he first began noticing something “less than lovely” about the local boys: a spiky nihilism; a contempt for gentleness and decency; and, most worryingly, a reflexive misogyny. It was mainly the things they said to one another. About women, and girls. About other races, too, and even about nature. “Some of these guys were the full Dickhead Package,” he says. “They were rednecks. But there was also a script there. It was almost as if they were rehearsing what they thought a real man should be like.”
That “script”, the abiding notion of men as invulnerable, flinty, emotionally distant, is as destructive as it is resilient, a kind of prison where the best parts of boys – the sensitive parts, the nurturing parts – go to die. “It’s so impoverishing,” Winton says, wincing. “It stops men from growing. They become emotional infants, little man-boys who despise women and lean on them in equal measure.”
He pauses. Nods. “Wow,” I say. “So how did we get here?”
“I dunno,” says Winton. He wriggles in his chair, stares out the window. It’s a murky area, this gender and culture stuff, and I get the feeling he’s thinking
his way through it as we sit here. “Maybe it was the 60s, you know? The whole Aquarius thing, everyone being encouraged to ‘follow their own bliss’. They were given this dud message that they were somehow absolved of responsibility.”
All the “self-actualising” was good news for women, since they had for so long been denied any “self”. But the benefits for men were less clear. Sure, all those tired old models, the traditional pathways to manhood, were swept away, but they weren’t replaced with anything, or at least nothing especially solid or coherent. “It’s a little bit like what has happened with the modern economy,” he adds. “Like neo-liberalism. It has reduced us all to players in the market. What is ‘the market’ anyway? Like, what the hell?
“These days nothing is expected of you, and nothing is given to you. But your journey to maturity is wrapped up in a sense of deeper culture, of spirituality even. Without that, all that’s left is sex, money and alcohol.”
And so here we are, untethered by narcissism, fractured by the market, all floating in space, yearning for connection. A bit of a downer, I say, to which Winton laughs, almost apologetically. I say it reminds me of a scene in The Shepherd’s Hut, where Jaxie is at a Christmas get-together with Lee. All the aunts and uncles are there, plus, of course, Wankbag, reeking of rum and scratching his beard. They’re playing happy families. No mention of the abuse, the beatings. Jaxie can’t stand it, and runs out of the room, into the bush.
Lee comes out to find him doubled over, crying. She says nothing, just touches his face. “And next thing she’s kneeling in the dry weeds,” Jaxie says. “Her hair’s shining. Them strange eyes are looking up into me like she understands everything. And it wasn’t like any time before because it was so sad and calm and kind and it was like we really were in a room of our own. When I was done she squatted back on her haunches and wiped her mouth with a victory grin and that’s when I knew I would love her forever.”
Winton recalls crafting the scene. “When I was writing that, I was going, ‘Am I going to leave that in?’ People will see that in terms of the gender politics, and they won’t be kind about it. But the way I felt Jaxie feeling about it, was that there was almost no sex in that scene. It’s almost just about kindness.”
Despite the jandals, the T-shirt, the way he has of looking as if he slept last night on the beach, Winton is a very serious man. The world is an intense, complex place, full of problems. His way of addressing these problems is by writing books. He deals in metaphors and large-scale narrative arcs, oblique fictional vistas, at once opaque and diamond-sharp.
For a journalist, this can be frustrating. Winton is taking roundabouts, admiring the scenery; I want to get on the motorway. At one point, I suggest that he wrote The Shepherd’s Hut as a reaction to #MeToo, as if he were examining the problem of misogyny through the eyes of a little misogynist-inthe-making called Jaxie Clackton. Somewhat disappointingly, Winton says he doesn’t write in reaction to “cultural moments”.
It’s just not how he thinks. And besides, “writing novels is too slow for that”. (The Shepherd’s Hut is his first novel in five years.) By the time you’ve got one out, the culture has invariably moved on to another moment altogether.
Neither is he a social commentator or a pundit: “That is way out of my pay grade.” He says he “doesn’t have particular answers” and “that it’s just his observations”. His best suggestion is that “men must take responsibility” for showing a better way for boys to grow up. One of the saddest things about those young guys he sees mouthing off in the surf, he says, is the reaction of older guys in the water, which is pretty much no reaction. They just sit there, not wanting to get involved.
A few years back, Winton spent time travelling with the Ngarinyin people of Kimberley, Western Australia’s sparsely settled northern region. Despite their “many challenges and sorrows”, he says, “they maintain secret and sacred pathways that are highly complex and sophisticated. For the boys who have been through the Law, there was a sense of certainty and solidity you don’t see in their suburban Australian counterparts.” He is not suggesting mainstream Australians adopt some “bogus imitation” of Indigenous rituals. “But the stuff we put value on and the stuff we dismiss out of hand, they say a lot about us, don’t you think?
It’s late afternoon now. The owner of the cafe has started playing Def Leppard, really loud, perhaps in an effort to make us leave. I ask Winton what he’s got planned for the night, and he says he’s going to visit his dad and mum, both of whom are well and truly still kicking. I ask what kind of man his dad was when Tim was a child. Was he gentle? Was he jaded? Was he hardened up by his years of being a cop? Winton thinks for a while. “To meet him you wouldn’t have thought he was a particularly sensitive guy or anything. But then one day, when I was about 14, I remember coming out to the back shed, and there he was, with a hanky stuffed in his mouth, bawling his eyes out.”
It turned out his dad was leaving to work in another station, in another town, on a relief job for six weeks. “He loved us so much and he didn’t want to be away from us,” Winton says. “I could see then how vulnerable his love for us made him. Of course I hugged him. We had a silent moment. He got his game-face back on. And we went back into the house without a word.”
The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton, $45) is out on Monday.