Island Home - Tim Winton

Title: Island Home – a landscape memoir

Author: Tim Winton

Publisher: Penguin         

Publish date: 2015

ISBN: 978-1-926428-74-1

Book Quote:

‘But at the first glimpse of the King Leopold Rages, as gold as roo fat in the afternoon light, he jerks upright and slaps his thigh like a man who’s just won a chook raffle.’

From an unpromising start of swept-together generalizations, this collection – I’m not sure either ‘memoir’ or ‘book’ would be entirely appropriate, despite the title – moves from high-handed assumptions to meditative observations in a curve that suggests not so much a story-plan as an imperative from a publisher. The production of something touching and memorable by sheer force of incorrigibly good writing and a genuine listening mind rather than an initial need to ‘say something’.

It’s unfortunate that the most bombastic bits are huddled towards the start. It’s irritating to read statements like the light (in ‘Australia’, mind – the whole of it) being ‘like no other’ and being ‘big’, comparing it to Northern European light. Well duh, latitude and climate. For some reason Winton singles out Europe as the one and only possible counterfoil to Australia – and mainly Northern Europe at that. Possibly consciously or unconsciously, because that’s where settlers mainly came from initially. If consciously, it’s disingenuous. If unconscious, it’s sloppy. Having lumped all of Australia as a comparable, he goes on to negate an earlier comment about even the natural mountain ranges in Europe to present a finite barrier as opposed to the open sea and desert near Perth, in detailing residence in another area of Australia where mountains loom just as oppressively. It’s not the European mountains or the Australian desert that are oppressive, it’s the writer’s perception, and no checks and balances seem to have been made in the headlong dash to write something. The destruction of the bushland to build Perth is decried, but the text is joyous about going out into the bush to fish turtles or crayfish. He deplores urban sprawl but the first chapters show him buying a sprawling house, complete with turtles, which (to add to the irony) he makes sure are ‘gone’ before he moves in. It’s all very irritating. In this mash, occasionally a vivid and Wintonesque simile is thrown in to keep the punters going.

Then the pace slows down from the Publisher-Hop to some more considered reminiscences on boyhood experiences. There is increased illumination from the trademark similes and expressiveness here. Nonetheless, the ego-centric nature of autobiography is off-putting. Who cares what this particular person did in their youth, and why would they make the assumption that I’m interested? For me it raises hackles and hostility. Were the same material presented in the form of fiction, it would be another matter. I find ‘a child did this, saw this’ is much more acceptable than ‘I did this, saw this’. I’m more open to suggestion and persuasion through fiction. Interestingly, I rather wonder if Winton was having this debate internally while writing. There’s a curious passage describing the specific quality of the joy of surfing:

‘… but the beauty of these things lay in how they worked, how they caused stuff to happen elsewhere. The way a storm in the Antarctic produced an echo that became a completely distinct event in my own world. From some unspeakable terror across the horizon came a day of pleasure for me. Surf was old energy transformed.’ 

It’s a perfect description of the creation of fiction. All fiction is memoir. It must needs be, as however acrobatic our rearrangements are, we are but creating from materials we have to hand. It seems that at this point in the writing process the author realized this, and the rhythm changes again.

From here we are given what are more a series of persuasive texts: political and ecological pieces, which break with increasing frequency into meditations on the minute details of the natural landscape. This portion is much more measured, with a reserved, humbler approach that’s infinitely easier to accept. As the pace decreases, the accuracy of the descriptions increases exponentially, bringing the reader painfully close to the dust and spinifex, the very air of the land the writer is so passionate about. In an episode about tracking black-flanked wallabies, great care is given to precise naming of all the flora and fauna. ‘Stygofauna’, ‘black-faced cockatoo-shrike’, ‘zebra finches’, ‘white-bellied sea-eagles’, ‘euro’, ‘spinifex’ and ‘spinifex-pigeon’. The respect accorded to flora, fauna and geological and meteorological formations directly mirror the care with which Winton uses adjectives and similes: precise to a pinpoint. At the climax of the wallaby scene, the cave he finds the wallabies in is ‘the size of a child’s bedroom’. The comparison masterfully brings the alien scene into acute intimacy, bypassing all between. 

It is interesting also, that although throughout the volume (and in line with the title) Australia is obdurately referred to as an ‘island’, presumably to emphasize its isolation and uniqueness. Towards the end it suddenly becomes a ‘continent’. A step made together with the acceptance of its great variety and abundance, and a much increased hopeful outlook towards to future, barely stated but definite. 

In all, 3.5 out of 5 Moose-Hoofs up. The annoyances are such that I can’t give it more. However, despite all, it was worth the read, and provides some potent food for thought.

To The Islands - Randolph Stow

Title: To The Islands       

Author: Randolph Stow

Publisher: Text Classics 

Publish date: 1958 (Original), Revised edition Angus and Robertson Sydney 1981, Text Classics 2015

ISBN: 9781925240290

'He fed her until she was satisfied, and then she reached out and touched his shoulder with her hand, and leaned over and rested her forehead there. In that way they sat for what seemed like a long time in that timeless place, naked brown woman by naked white man, and he stroked the loose skin on her back with tenderness, wanting to laugh, wanting to weep.'

___________________________________________

This novel won the Miles Franklin Literary Award when it was first published in 1958. It was written after Stow worked for a few months as a ration storeman at the Anglican-run Forrest River Mission in far north Western Australia, and draws heavily on the experience. This edition was re-edited by Stow in 1981, with some portions of the original deleted (according to his own introduction to this edition). I have to say, it doesn’t strike one as a novel written by a 22-year-old. Not this life-time round, for sure.

The story revolves around an Anglican minister reconciling his oncoming death with his faith, his self-doubts, and his environment. The Australian Outback provides a Shakespearean exile-setting of liminal harshness, peopled by the half-familiar, half-inscrutable Aboriginals.

The novel is extraordinary. One level of intrigue is that it tells of a case of extreme indigestion of The Wasteland, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Medieval Mystery plays, Shakespeare (Lear in particular, self-confessedly), Baudelaire, Cervantes, Walt Whitman, the Bible, and Aboriginal Dreamtime narratives among others. Gobbets and echoes from Western literature drop into the dust of the Outback, as incongruous and fascinating as the main character that stumbles through the narrative.

Another level is the sentence structure, and the narrative structure that inversely echoes it. On the sentence level, the initial third or so of the book is overtly fluid in construct, with multiple and inverted clauses, subjects far from their objects, and pronouns frequently ambiguously placed. There is little demarcation between scenes. Time is not linear, nor is much attempt made to clarify where or how the characters are moving or what they are doing. So we’ll suddenly hear of a protagonist stop leaning against a tree, when last time we 'saw' then there were inside a building. Even the names seem to be deliberately confusing, with most of the characters being variously referred to either by their first names, surnames, or their personal pronoun being misplaced altogether so that numerous re-reads are needed to guess who is doing what. The effect is a gauzy haze of impressionist prose with pinpoint ‘plums’ of clarity. As the novel progresses this pattern morphs, via poetic jumps and rhythm, into a much more consistently direct diction. It abandons the passive voice and looking-glass grammar. Utterly perversely, the more the diction straightens up, the more the narrative disintegrates into stanzas of what might be termed associative meditation. Clarity is insanity, and confusion is the real world.

A third level of uniqueness is the yearning portrayal of the many dissonances between the white settlers and native Australians. The gulf between them is tectonic, pushing up strange behaviours where they are least expected. It isolates not only each individual character with a cocoon of silence, but the reader as well, bouncing one about in a muffled cotton-ball through a suspicious and hostile dreamscape. But within the haze of the novel’s Gethsemane-like wanderings, the communication gap is sometimes a vast canyon, and then suddenly barely a trickle of water on a flat plane. Both the unbridgeable weight of  silence and the fervent desire for it to be gone are, I think, uniquely Australian, and something echoed repeatedly in the country’s literature, but rarely so accurately given emotional coordinates.

In short, the novel is indeed more than deserving of the accolades it has won and its status as a classic piece. Don’t pick it up if you want an easy read. It is difficult, and I haven’t even started to scratch the surface. Five moose-hoofs up out of five, with both ears up as well for emphasis.