Author Tim Winton feels duty to defend the earth
▶ Malcolm Forbes speaks to award-winning Australian writer Tim Winton about the dark characters that drive his novels and how he feels ‘duty bound’ to defend the Earth
Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet is a scintillating saga about two families thrown together and finding common ground in “a big, old, rundown eyesore” of a house. Published in 1991 when the author was 31, it has the distinction of being his breakthrough novel and his most famous. For many, it also has the honour of being the great Australian novel. It isn’t an accolade Winton takes seriously.
“I still can’t understand why that book worked,” he tells me. “It’s a big, baggy novel. It doesn’t have many conventional characters and it isn’t conventionally punctuated. I certainly didn’t set out to write the great Australian novel. I was just enjoying myself and seeing if I could get away with it.”
Winton has continued to get away with it, and deservedly so. His varied output – novels, plays, short stories, children’s books – has earned him popular appeal and literary acclaim. He has won Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award four times and has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize. In 1991, he was made a National Living Treasure. He knew at the age of ten that he wanted to be a writer. However, he could have been steered into doing something else.
“I came from a family of tradespeople. You honoured labour and the artefact. I had to somehow match the sensibility of the artist with that of the artisan. I’m unapologetic about being an artist, but I’m also in touch with my working class origins.” Winton’s novels unfold in prose that is both smooth-planed lyrical and rough-edged visceral. All but one play out in the wilds of his native Western Australia. “The books always start with place for me,” he says, “and then the people bubble up.” Many of those people are underdogs and black sheep who have been dealt hard knocks.