AMY BROWN and CATHERINE BISLEY double-team Aussie author Tim Winton – whose acclaimed works include The Turning and Dirt Music – during his recent visit to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.


ACCORDING to Richard Ford, meeting writers you admire can be disappointing. In the cave-like bar of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Tim Winton sat in the corner looking jaded, sipping a cup of green tea and entertaining the latest in a stream of interviewers. Observing the scene, the truth of Ford’s comment seemed to be bearing down on us. But, when Winton’s publicist summoned us to his table, we knew there was nothing to worry about. The softly spoken man was firing quietly on all cylinders. In this transcript, we think his down-to-earth eloquence speaks for itself.


AB: I’ve read that you published your first novel when you were twenty-one and have been writing full time ever since. Is this true?

TW: True.

AB: How have you managed this?

TW: Just by bits and pieces. By the seat of my pants. I think I’ve just been enormously lucky. I mean when I was a student and writing my first three books my parents supported me; so they were my first patrons. They were people who’d never finished school themselves, never gone to university. My father was a policeman, my mother had been a switchboard operator until she had us and then she was home with us. So it was quite a foreign idea to them. For me to have got through school, gone to teachers’ college and become an English teacher, for instance, would’ve been the just sweetest thing – secure, I wouldn’t have to work in the sun. My grandfather was a wharfie. Their life was, you know, about having the bosses on your back and if you got sick you were stuffed. So for my parents it was such a stretch for them to be as supportive of me as they were – me going and doing a quite useless arts degree [he laughs]… which doesn’t give you much of a prospect out in the wicked world. And my partner, my girlfriend who then became my wife, has always been enormously supportive. At times I had huge government support – structural things that the government had done through funding the arts, occasional grants, that sort of stuff. And then, well I worked bloody hard, I have to say. I wrote ten books in my twenties, so there’s that, I guess. And then I got readers. Somehow, slowly, book by book, I managed to get a kind of a readership. People obviously were talking to each other; it took a long time to sense that it was growing somehow. I was quite lucky in that, still in my early twenties, my second book [Shallows] was published in the States and the UK and translated, so that meant that I was published three times each time I published. So when each pissy little cheque came in, there were two others – two other pissy little cheques to add up to a still quite pissy amount of money, but it added up slowly, and accidentally over time. I was like some moss, I just hung onto the rock. And moss or lichen or whatever just seems to make its own eco-system, and so I had the patronage of a wider group of readers to whom I’m very grateful. And then suddenly I was lucky that ten years in and twelve books in, I had a book that sort of crossed the river, if you like, from the modest, tweedy little literary world that I was in and it became a bestseller. That was Cloudstreet. Since then, I have this freak world of a person who sees himself as a literary writer but has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And, you know, I can’t explain it. I’m grateful.

CB: Do you participate much in the literary scene, or do you manage to keep yourself separate from it?

TW: I sort of don’t, but I occasionally do – if that’s a not too dopey way of answering it. My original engagement with the literary culture was something I learnt from Elizabeth Jolly, who had been, for a year, one of my teachers at Curtin University where I studied. Basically, it was in the days before book clubs were even talked about. But in rural Western Australia, farmers’ wives in particular were quite isolated. It was a long way to drive anywhere. There were no bookshops in the rural towns. So they had these kind of informal get-togethers, usually during the week, for lunch, and I started getting invited to them. It was a pretty daunting prospect, because usually it meant I had to drive four hours one way on some mud map, to someone’s house – you know, turn at the fallen tree. And I learnt from that; I used to carry a carton of books with me. I’d read a little bit and they would ask me questions. It was like a literary festival, really, except it was self-generated by these people, and held in their own homes. And, bloody hell, they’d buy all the books! It was all off the books, so to speak. You’re not allowed to re-sell all these books that you get cheap. But, that’s one of the reasons I survived. In a way, I understand that people’s passion for books, particularly not being mediated by the academy, often tends to be either from the literature bosses in the media or the literature bosses at the universities, controlling the flow of what people are supposed to think. Now, these were just ordinary people, who liked books, who were thrilled that you were going to come out and talk to them, and, I don’t know, maybe they were just so grateful that someone bothered to show up. There were often fifteen to twenty of them, and the scones were always great and the tea just kept coming. I’d drive home and think, well shit, I made more money today than if I sold three short stories to magazines. I don’t do that so much anymore, sadly. I’ve done all the festivals just about anywhere in the damn world. If I can do it as little as possible now, I do. That’s partly because I’m mean-spirited and a bit tired. The way these things have proliferated, it’s unbelievable! They reproduce like [he clicks his fingers]. Honestly, thirty years ago you could never have imagined. It’s only ten years ago that the ones in England were so crap they were embarrassing. They just didn’t know how to do them. Now, I think they’re great, but the hard thing is feeling like you should go to every one. You could spend your whole year doing nothing but festivals. And it’s a long time to be away from home. I’m not the sort of person who can write when I’m moving around. I can’t even read; I’ve brought a book and I haven’t even opened it since I got on the plane.

AB: When you mentioned that your dad was a policeman and your mum worked on the switchboard – that comes through in Cloudstreet.

TW: Well, the switchboard certainly does. And, oh yeah, his old man’s a copper. Wait, no, he’s a copper.

AB: Do you have any qualms about using your family’s stories? Have they clammed up and stopped telling you their tales or do people sometimes enjoy recognising themselves?

TW: Um, I think that Cloudstreet’s the only time that I’ve ever come close to treading on any family toes. And there was once, way before Cloudstreet, when I fictionalised a real life event that wasn’t a family event and that made a very dangerous person very angry. And I was very naïve and didn’t understand. So, I have learnt, I have learnt from that. When you get threats from maximum security, you know not to make the same mistake twice. But before Cloudstreet was published I think I must’ve been interviewed by somebody earlier and I probably over-explained what my new book was about – again something I’ll never do again. There was a little family petition that went round because my father’s siblings were embarrassed by the prospect of me publishing a book which spoke about a woman who lived in a tent. I mean, obviously it was massively fictionalised, but I’d already said in the paper that my grandmother had lived in a tent in the backyard of a big house in the inner-city of Perth for thirty years. And that’s just a fact. But they were very embarrassed, whereas I wasn’t – maybe because I was removed, my social circumstances, I hadn’t lived through a depression and nine world wars and all that like they had. But they were really nervous and mortified at the prospect of their mother being held up to ridicule. And after the book came out some of them actually even read it and didn’t mind. The rest of them did what most people would do and went off in a huff and didn’t read the book. But they had an opinion about it anyway. By in large, over time, they’ve slowly come round.

CB: In your writing you’re quite candid about yourself as well. I was reading an interview with ABC in which you talk about being at the window, holding a gun. And then in the story you read today, ‘Immunity’…

TW: Yeah, I didn’t know whether to mention, before I started reading, that the girl who sees the boy at the window with the broom or the hockey stick, that it’s really a gun. And, yeah, in a sense I’ve ‘fessed up to the autobiographical element in it. I was a boy who, for awhile, stood at the window with a firearm.

AB: Lining up Fords.

TW: Well, yeah, absolutely.

CB: Are you still a Holden man?

[laughter]

TW: Holdens are probably harder to hit than a Falcon. [more laughing] But, yeah, I guess I probably forgot that for a few years of my life and I lost some of that memory, or perhaps the vividness or the gravity of that memory – what it means to have been an adolescent male, in a culture where guns are quite hard to get. We don’t have a gun culture like in the States, as you know. We probably don’t have as many guns as the Kiwis, even. You’ve got more mad gun murders than we do; what Patrick White used to call “a very New Zealandy murder.” [laughs] But to look back and think, hell, if my life had gone differently or – or maybe that’s just something people do; people think things but they don’t always do them. I mean, what was I thinking anyway?

CB: That’s interesting, because Tobias Wolfe describes doing the exact same thing in This Boy’s Life.

TW: Did he? I’ve read the book but I don’t remember the scene.

CB: He gets the gun out and points it at people on the street through the blinds. Maybe this is a writer thing?

TW: Or a sad boy thing [laughter]. I don’t really know. Maybe what stopped me from doing anything stupid was that, essentially, whatever unhappiness I was in I didn’t believe would claim me, or didn’t last long enough – I never reached that level of despair. And even in the book, Vic’s life is infinitely more miserable than any adolescence that I had. It’s not a picture of my family life. And even Vic doesn’t blow anybody’s head off. So it’s not as if “boy takes up gun, boy is in despair, life can’t get any worse”, there’s no inherent logic that he’s going to do that. People do that, but in the same way that women run over their babies or whatever. People take steps that they can’t un-take…how did we get into that?

AB: Well, on a lighter note, there are other specific moments in your books that I’d like to ask about – whether they’re tall tales, or your own experiences or your imagination.

TW: Here we go…

AB: I’ve got two in particular: the shot kangaroo kicking Quick in the stomach in Cloudstreet…

TW: It’s never happened to me, but I know stories from family members where something close to that had happened. I think people don’t realise, despite what a powerful animal it is, that you can be disembowelled by a kangaroo, when it’s cornered or threatened. A big male in particular will just open you up. But no, I can’t say I haven’t shot more than my share of kangaroos in my youth, but I’ve never been kicked.

AB: Good! The other moment is in Dirt Music, near the end, where he’s playing with sharks like they’re dogs.

TW: I’ve done that, yeah – a number of times. It’s incredible. In fact, a documentary was being made about me while I was writing Dirt Music and they got footage of it, to prove it. A friend of mine has a camp up in the Kimberley and he’d do it everyday. And, the strange thing is that I know a lot more about cetaceans than I do about sharks and I understand that dolphins, and whales to some extent, have a kind of play factor in their culture, but it’s interesting to me to see that sharks have the capacity to play too. Initially we would just, over and over again, with a big barramundi head on a rope, just throw it out and play a tug-of-war with these things and sometimes they’d be dragged up the beach, they’d roll back down, do a lap then come back up for some more. And when the fish head was all gone they’d keep coming back, like dogs, like a Kelpie, like “can we do it? Can we do it again?” And they responded to physical contact. All the things you wouldn’t normally associate with sharks. So they are quite sociable. Crocodiles are quite sociable as well, but probably not the same capacity for safety.

AB: Yeah, more mobile on dry land.

CB: When reading Cloudstreet, I was surprised by the intense sympathy I felt for the mass murderer in that scene when his son has drowned and they’re not going to allow him to be buried beside him. Your writing seems to me to be moral, in a sense, without being preachy…

TW: How unfashionable!

[laughter]

CB: Do you think that novelists have a moral obligation to their characters and to their readers?

TW: That’s a good question. I don’t think the novelist has any more moral obligation than any other citizen, but I think all citizens, you know, live in a moral universe and I think they’re responsible, morally, for all their actions. And I think, in the end, you can only bring your own sensibility and therefore your own morality to the story that you’re writing about. If that means you have to be kind to your characters, then that’s probably false hope. If you can’t feel for them, then how can you expect your readers to feel for them? So, if you’re not feeling what it’s like to be the bad guy, who was based on Eric Cook, the last man to be hanged in Western Australia, and was denied being buried next to his drowned, retarded son – if you can’t feel his anguish, his pain, then you can’t make the character real. And also, if you’re not inhabiting each of the characters, they’re not accessible to a stranger, you know, who’s actually the reader, someone you’ll most likely never meet, who lives in another culture, another place, speak a different language. You’re crossing so many weird conceptual boundaries. So you do have a moral obligation, but whether that means that your book has to uplift people or it has to make them better people, I don’t know. I hope that I change people; that I shake people up or leave an impression, but sometimes you’ve got to be a bit careful of yourself when you think that. The best I can hope for is that I’m moved by the experience of living through the writing of the book, which takes infinitely longer than it takes to read, and that if I still have some residual feeling about everyone in the book then maybe there’s some hope. Mind you, I am so over them by the time I’m finished that there’s not much feeling. They’re like people that I used to love.

CB: In the ‘Global Reach’ session last night, when you read ‘Big World’ [from The Turning], I noticed the narrator mentions an idiot fishing from a truck at the school leaving party… The same scene is in ‘Boner McPharlin’s Moll,’ which I’d just read. But Boner is no longer that “idiot”. The way you switch perspectives is so sympathetic. Was this a conscious effect or did it just happen?

TW: I think, over time, once I realised what was going on – this was over quite a period of time – the fact that some people know who each other are, but don’t really know who each other are, is part of living in a small community. You know, there’ll be a guy and that’s him, and he’ll be famous because he’s the guy who lit his own fart at the end of year party, melted his nylon jocks to his arse and had to go to hospital. That’s how he’ll be known, forever! Or someone will have been dumped by so-and-so – y’know, that’s it for the rest of her life, right into middle-age, she’ll be that person who, for three weeks, went out with this football guy who dumped her. So, I guess, once I realised that I was writing about this community at this particular time, and the impact it was having on one particular family, but also on these other peripheral people. And the most peripheral person of all, probably, is Boner. And yet, as you go on through the book he becomes the sort of accidental centre of everyone else’s, in a way, moral universe. And yet he’s this guy who doesn’t even speak. He’s trash, but he’s not what he seems. In a way, he doesn’t even understand what he is or who he is, and neither does his best worst friend, or worst best friend, as she thinks of herself. It’s an interesting story. It was the hardest one to do and the last one to be finished. I couldn’t get it right and I was in a bit of a dither. It kept getting longer and longer and longer.

AB: Do you have a long editing process, when you’ve finished a first draft, or does it vary between projects?

TW: I don’t know. It does vary. I mean, I go through periods when I edit so hard as I go that by the time the thing’s finished there isn’t anything to be done. And I don’t enjoy it very much. I’ll go sentence by sentence, and I’ll work on that sentence. I’ll have pages and pages and fucking pages of it and then I’ll put that sentence on the page. But usually by the end of that process, by the time you’ve got your twenty pages, you know, they’re pretty right. Other times you’ll have a quick bang through, then you’ll go back and fix it up. But, part of the thing that’s stayed with me over all the time, while technology’s changed and the speed of things has changed, is hand writing. You know, now you can publish a book inside six months or even eight weeks really. I mean, when you finish a book you can have it out there, instantly. In the old days you’d finish a book, type it up yourself or get it typed up, put it in a box, send it to someone on the other side of the country, in my case, or the other side of the world, and wait for them to make their mind up. Then they would send it back to you with all their comments on the manuscript, you’d do it all out again, and it would go on and on. Then the proofs would come. Now, you press a button, it goes to the publisher’s email, comes back to you, then it’s suddenly in proof form. You know – blam! It’s instant. And so the temptation is to resist that sort of speedy thing, where you can get to the end too quick. This process brings out a lot of hurried books, and for me, that’s why I stick with the handwriting. It looks just like my shitty old handwriting for as long as possible so that I’m not letting myself be convinced that it’s finished, because the first time you print it out on a computer, man, it looks better than most of the books I had published in the eighties. The average printer is better than published, so you suck yourself into thinking it’s finished. I mean, it looks great – the margins are justified, the type-face is good – so, the longer you can make it provisional and conditional, so you’re not conning yourself, the better.

AB: There are supernatural instances in some of your books, I’m thinking of the shifty shadow in Cloudstreet and the ghosts in The Riders. Is this something you believe in, or something that you believe is useful in fiction?

TW: That’s a good and rather difficult question. I’m open to it. I don’t think it’s imperative to be definitive about it either in fiction or in life, but I think life’s just a lot odder and stranger than we think. You know, why is it that my wife’s dog knows that she’s coming home twenty minutes before she arrives? And I think that’s probably just a biological thing in the same way that, why is it that two hundred birds all turn in the same nanosecond and all know which way they’re going, why is it that you can swim into a school of fish and they’ll all behave as one creature, you know? Is there a biological correlative to the collective unconscious? I think there probably is. Now, is that natural or is that supernatural? I think sometimes you’ve just got to open up your terms of reference and think, well what’s nature and what’s natural? If it means things that make the hair stand up on the back of my head about nature, in nature, then that’s nature. And, I’m okay with that. I don’t quite know what it is, but…

CB: That scene when you’ve got two brothers out surfing and the water shifts between them – man, that’s just the most…[Catherine shudders] maybe because I have a phobia of sharks.

TW: Yeah?

AB: Apparently she’s seen sharks in swimming pools.

CB: Yeah.

TW: You wouldn’t be patting any sharks on the head, then?

CB: No. I’d be imagining that they could grow legs and run up the beach.

TW: Oh, god. Well, you know, and I think I even said it in that interview with Denton [for ABC], that great old British scientist from earlier in the century, what’s his name? J. B. S. Haldane. He said that the universe is “queerer than we imagine, indeed queerer than we can imagine,” especially at a time when queer meant something quite specific. But he was probably right on both cases, given that we are probably all a bit queerer than we imagine.

AB: To generalise…

TW: Oh, yeah let’s!

AB: What would you say the differences and similarities are between New Zealand and Australian fiction?

TW: Fiction only?

AB: Or literature generally. Or character, culture. Whichever you’d prefer.

TW: The only thing that I can think of is from the outside and not so much now but of my past experiences of New Zealand. What interests me is that there seems to be more of a Protestant influence on this culture. The difference between Australia and here is not just about scale and size, I mean obviously there is that and there’s the weather, but there’s the non-Catholic element. It’s not just a Latin thing, it’s a conceptual view. There’s less of a sacramental view of the world in a Catholic sense. There’s less of that chaotic richness that the Catholic world brings and quite a lot of that’s simply to do with the fact that we had the Irish and you didn’t. This is much more of a Scots oriented, Scots Presbyterian even, culture and it’s vividly present in the literature. Even in film. So that’s one reason. That’s something that I think. I might be wrong. And I think scale is different. You’ve got more communities, more settlements, more towns and less land than we have. The focus is different – a little more social, in a way. In Australia there’s just infinitely more land than there is culture. The other thing is that you’ve got a much more mature accommodation of your indigenous population and some of that comes from having a treaty – not that that was a clean process. And also, you’re closer to the pacific and we’re in Asia, in a sense. I’m two hours from Indonesia and I’m seven or eight hours to Auckland. And, I mean, Western Australia’s on the Indian Ocean. It’s got India, Indonesia, Africa as neighbours. And in a strange way, and this does my head in; you guys are so close to L.A. but your culture’s still much more focussed on London. There’s a cultural difference as well.

CB: Your characters’ pasts seem just as important and interesting as their futures. Their stories expand back as much as they go forward from the internal starting point. In terms of this and in terms of history and race, do you think that as a writer you need to be conscious of Australia’s colonial past?

TW: Well, I think it’s impossible not to be. The past is present in everything we do. It’s not just about Australia, it’s about the way we all live our lives. In a sense, our immediate future will have more impact on your lives than it will on mine. What people have put into the air, in terms of carbon, in the last generation, will decide the future of the planet. And that’s just a physical, almost sacramental manifestation of the idea that we’re talking about. Everything that happens in the past stays. Nothing goes away, it’s all present – in DNA, in memory, in collective unconscious, you know, it’s in our biology. Every bit of shit that was put in the river gathers up in the fish and ends up in your body. And there’s things in families that stick around, you know, violence doesn’t disappear from families. In a cultural sense, the origins of cultural violence don’t dissipate either, they stay and they mutate.

CB: Characters’ relationships with the landscape seem so central to your work. There’s a lot of talk in the media about Perth being the first city that’ll have to be evacuated due to global warming. Does this have a profound effect on you as a writer?

TW: Yeah, it has a big impact on my life. You can see the effects daily. I mean, up in a plane, you can think: shit, there’s hardly any vegetation to start with. We tore down a whole incredibly diverse woodland, to make our wheat belt, which feeds everybody, and which kept Saddam Hussein in business for a couple of years, and now it’s all turning to soil. We’ve got twenty-two percent water capacity, it hasn’t rained for years, and now we’re drinking the sea. I presume you looked at the Jared Diamond stuff or Tim Flannery’s stuff to find out about those statistics – that’s what they’re both saying. So, now we’ve got two desalination plants and we’re drinking the sea. I keep thinking, well, you know, I’ll be dead in a few years, but my kids and their kids – what’s it going to be like? Plus, W.A.’s very flat; my house will be gone in the sea level rises a few inches. My house will be gone, my town will be gone. 700,000 homes in Australia have already been marked out by the insurance companies as unsalvageable and uninsurable. Not that I’m worried or anything.

AB: I know that in Lockie Leonard and Shallows you explore some environmental issues. Do you have any other plans to put your talent for writing towards that sort of purpose?

TW: I worked on the Kimberley campaign for years. We’re facing down a huge new battle for the Kimberley because the oil and gas industry has picked it as one of the world’s biggest natural gas deposits. And that just happens to be in one of the world’s last great wilderness areas. It’s also the greatest rock art region in the world. The last languages of aboriginal Australia, which are still alive and their cultures are still alive. They have the oldest iconic image in history, you know with the head that radiates lines. It’s all still there and they’re going to be digging it up. So, there’s plenty to be going along with in terms of activism.

AB: Catherine, do you have anything else to ask Tim, or shall we let him have a five minute breather before the Listener arrives?

CB: We did want to know what your favourite seafood recipe is, you being a keen fisherman and all…

TW: It doesn’t involve very much, mate, you know. First you take your animal, then you cut it into fine slices, and you eat it raw. Sashimi’s my thing, so long as it’s a sustainable product, you know. I think people need to be more literate about what you eat from the ocean. We’ve got to educate producers and providers. I’m a patron of the Marine Conservation Society and we’ve got a booklet that you can take to the fish shop and think, let’s have a look at these species, what state’s it in, should I buy this or shouldn’t I? And then say, maybe I won’t, and tell the guy that I’m not going to buy that mate because this one’s in strife. In the same way that you can educate people not to eat whales or battery hen eggs or dolphins or veal – the best way to do this is to withdraw your money. Everyone says it can’t be done. Bullshit it can’t. You just put them out of business. Anyway, you take your very fresh, very sustainable animal, and take a sharp knife and cut a few pieces off it.