Breath by Tim Winton
How a childhood in Australia has shaped the life and works of Tim Winton.
The award-winning author of The Turning talks about his adolescence, his family, and the unheard stories that are worth telling, in the P.S. section of Breath.
You have a wonderful feeling for the coming-of-age moment. Why does this experience play such a role in your writer’s imagination?
I guess I’ve always been interested in the way a person can understand himself or herself in terms of who they were at that crucial age. Adolescence seems to resonate forever. We’re reacting to it for the rest of our lives, haunted, beguiled, or fleeing from it. A lot of us see that our lives could have gone in all kinds of directions depending on the choices we made or that were made for us during that weird, teetering period, and none of us ever experiences it in exactly the same way — so it can be fruitful stuff to write about.
In many of your stories the landscape seems almost a character. What aspects of Western Australia stimulate your imagination in particular?
Landscape has been important in my work, yes. Coming from a continent that is relatively sparsely populated means that I’ve grown up in an environment and culture where people are dwarfed by space
and landforms. Physically and mentally dwarfed. Western Australia in particular is a huge land mass with very little drinking water. It can be a difficult and dangerous place in which to live and travel. It’s tough, I guess, but fragile as well. It leans in on you, impinges upon your imagination. It offers
a bit of perspective and demands a little bit of humility. You could say that it sets the agenda, and in my case I think that’s true. My stories come from place, from landscape. The place first, the characters and their problems second. The place defines everything that follows.
Your characters seem always on the edge of danger or the unexpected. And yet you are frequently trying to rescue them. What draws you to these kinds of events?
I think Westerners have come to live such safe lives, lives that feel impregnable, where the vagaries of weather, food supply and so on seem to have been ironed out and domesticated. At times our sense of security is merely a skin over the top of a lot of hidden turmoil and danger and chaos; sometimes it is an illusion. Looking back I see that I have written a lot about chaos intervening suddenly. Lots of accidents, upsets, unexpected turns. Maybe my interest comes from the way these unexpected detours present people with defining moments. Despite the horror, the fear or the danger, they offer characters insight and a chance to exceed their routine selves. I have, in an odd way, been exposed to this in my own life. My father was a traffic cop who specialised in dealing with fatal accidents. I suppose I became attuned to mayhem and its properties at a tender age. Having seen and heard about so many people in extremis has had a lifelong impact on me.
In an insightful interview with Andrew Denton, you talk about nearly drowning as a boy. What images did you take away from that experience?
Well, I spent a lot of time in the water as a kid. I was mad about it; I’m still mad about it. Given how many times I’ve come close to dying in the water, the fact that I persist might just indicate a certain madness. Maybe danger or potency is what draws me back. It’s the same with the terrestrial environment. These places — the landscapes and beaches and reefs — are vivid and intoxicating because they are not passive, anodyne tableaux but living, seething systems with teeth. Their power is part of what makes them beautiful. When surfing or free-diving for abalone, you’re in a wild, brilliant and changeable ecosystem that can stroke you one moment and slap you down the next. Whatever happens it won’t be personal, so there’s comfort there! The ocean has taken a few bites at me (and a few out of me, too, come to think of it), but I think I’ve done more damage than I’ve sustained, and realising this has been a part of my environmental education. Still, every time I’m in the ocean I’m that little boy who can’t decide whether to be terrified or enchanted. Home, or the absence of it, is so important to you as a writer.
In the brilliant Cloudstreet, for example, a woman creates another home for herself behind her own house. Can you talk briefly about the ways in which your early family life shaped you?
My instincts are small and local. I’m attuned to region and place, I suppose. In many ways
I am a provincial. A fairly well-travelled provincial, I have to say, but that’s part of being
Australian — everywhere is so damn far away that we have to take an interest and be extra aware of what’s happening out there in the big world, so a certain paradoxical kind of cosmopolitanism is simply inevitable. That’s the up side of being on an island and sharing no borders. And the great thing is that an Australian writer can stay home now and write for an international audience without fearing that they’re too marginal or strange or…provincial. Yes, home is important to me and to my work, and the need for it or the loss of it is visceral. The places we know intimately become sacred and sustaining. Places make a claim upon us. Like the character from Cloudstreet who is compelled to pitch a tent in her own backyard for reasons she doesn’t quite understand. My grandmother lived in a tent in an inner-city suburb of Perth, Western Australia, for over thirty years. God knows why. But some of that stubbornness may have rubbed off. This was a woman who didn’t care if people thought she was eccentric or difficult. She was a stayer. My family told stories, weaved themselves a big, crooked tapestry to entertain themselves and try to make sense of their lives. They were simple folk but bold enough to assume that their stories were worth telling, and I think they passed that on.
From Breath. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright © 2009 by Tim Winton. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
