Tag: Tim Winton

‘Blueback’ by Tim Winton

Tim Winton is one of Australia’s best-loved writers. Cloudstreet is frequently voted Australia’s favourite novel. Winton wrote ‘Blueback’ for children; however, the novella is as worthy of adult attention. (If you’re in any doubt about that, please read Katherine Rundell’s brilliant essay ‘Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise’.) Like Cloudstreet, ‘Blueback’ deals with concepts of home, the fierce pull of a place.

10-year-old Abel Jackson lives in Longboat Bay on the Australian coastline. His father, a pearl diver, was killed by a tiger shark when Abel was young. He lives with his mother Dora, subsisting off the land and the sea. Diving for abalone, Abel comes across an enormous blue groper; he names the fish Blueback and thus starts a lifelong companionship.  

Like many children in rural Australia, Abel has to go away for secondary school, but his heart remains in the bay: “I’ll wither up and die away from this place, he thought as they bumped off down the gravel road. This is my place. This is where I belong.”

Dora and Abel battle to save their bay from the rapaciousness of mankind: divers strip the reef bare; developers want to turn the bay into a holiday resort. Abel fears for Blueback’s safety: “That summer he learnt that there was nothing in nature as cruel and savage as a greedy human being.”

Dora is the hero of the tale. Through years of dogged campaigning, she succeeds in getting the bay declared a marine sanctuary. Abel grows up, becomes a marine biologist, and travels the world with his wife Stella. But all the while, he yearns for Longboat Bay. Stella suggests they move back: “Do you want to be homesick or to be home?”

Tim Winton is an environmentalist, and this book is a clear cry for conservation. For me though, it’s also the story of how our hearts have a way of pulling us home.

First published in Australia, Pan Macmillan, 1997. Now available Penguin Group, Australia, 2014

‘Big World’ by Tim Winton

“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