“Some mornings out in the misty ranges the world looks like it means something, some simple thing just out of my reach, but there anyway.”
The Turning was the first short story collection I ever bought, aged nineteen, browsing the shelves of my local bookshop. I don’t know what compelled me to pick up this book, with a blood-spattered fish and bait hook on the cover. I hadn’t heard of Tim Winton and didn’t realise he was – or would become – Australia’s greatest living writer. Something about the blurb or the prose must’ve lured me in – like the fish on the cover, I took the bait and got hooked.
Set in Angelus, a Western Australian fishing town, The Turning features surfing, cray-fishing, shark attacks and road-trips. It’s a stunning linked collection, where the stories intersect and characters reappear, viewed from new angles at different stages of their lives.
At nineteen, I’d read enough fiction to recognise something special in Winton’s prose. Here was a writer with a gift for describing characters and landscape. In the opening story, ‘Big World’, a teenage boy called Biggie has “a face only a mother could love … He’s kind of pear-shaped, but you’d be a brave bugger calling him a barge-arse.”
Narrated by Biggie’s best friend, ‘Big World’ explores the end of youth and the journey into adulthood. Leaving high school, the boys are “feverish with anticipation” yet somehow their “crappy Saturday job” in the local meatworks becomes full-time, their days spent “hosing blood off the floor” and packing cow hide, their arms “slick with gore”.
Desperate to escape the meatworks and “the January of our new lives”, the boys take a roadtrip across Australia, the landscape “shimmering with heat” and “the sky as blue as mouthwash.” Throughout ‘Big World’, Winton describes the environment with such vibrancy. The boys’ excitement is palpable as they “buzz north” towards Perth: “The longer we drive the more the sky and the bush open up.”
Rich with vivid descriptions, ‘Big World’ is infinitely re-readable. Like much of Winton’s work – stories, novels, memoir – the prose feels so transportative. Winton’s writing makes me feel like I’m there with the characters – he takes me to landscapes that I want to return to.
First published in The Turning, Picador, 2004
A Personal Anthology 