Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
“It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.”
DespiteTim Winton'sbest efforts, getting an elderly, frail woman onto a plastic chair floating in the Indian Ocean is an awkward, undignified business.
He and his wife Denise had hatched a plan with good intentions. Winton's mother loved the ocean but her ageing body refused to cooperate, so they were going to help her swim.
Songs from the Firefront by Tim Winton review – climate urgency verges on panic, with moments of wonder too The masterful Australian writer has become a kind of prophet – and his dramatic and moving new essay collection challenges us not to look away
Tim Winton has been working his themes for almost 50 years in a palimpsest of 32 books: family, manhood, land and ocean; what it is to be human and Australian; intimate pleasures and anxieties that feed his fiction. The distinctive quality of his new collection of memoir and essays, Songs from the Firefront, is urgency verging on panic. He’s an elder in his 60s, with limited time to get his messages across before we all go up in flames.
Living on the western edge of Australia, Winton has been an eloquent climate-change activist for decades. He has fought, with tenuous success, to protect Ningaloo Reef. He entrances us with Scheherazade stories that blend crystalline nature writing and terrifying facts. The loss has accelerated now, he says, and the danger is immediate.
At home, where he comes face to face with wildfire, storms and a cyclone, he reports from inside weather of unprecedented menace. He tells dramatic stories of destruction with fierce, dancing poetry: “The pressure inside the house changes. Any closed door chatters against its lock. Every ceiling fan dances on its long spindle. The concrete floor hums. The shutters give off long stuttering bursts like submachine-gun fire.”
Most insidious are invisible marine heatwaves off the Western Australian coast that kill fish, corals and seagrasses. Yet industry continues, Winton says, adding carbon to a heating climate that will make much of northern Australia – and the planet – uninhabitable. He enters the water with dread but he surfs and dives, reminding himself: “You’re alive. And you’re up to your neck in life abundant.”
Readers might turn away from unrelenting despair, so Winton alternates warnings with wonders. His stories have momentum, skilfully arranged in rhythmic waves of emotion. Eye-to-eye encounters with turtles, dugongs and whales (their antics leaving “flecks of black skin on the surface” and a vapour that “smells fishy, meaty, arsey”) are thrilling, to the point of exhaustion when he lingers on his paddle in a stiff wind.
I wish the pieces were dated to show Winton’s mental chronology. Many read as background to his latest novel, Juice, a futuristic global-heating scenario, a brilliant work that’s too grim for some. As he writes in his essay Staying, after enduring a cyclone: “People declare that you’ve taken a dystopian turn. In your thinking, your activism, your work. You’re sounding apocalyptic.” He wishes critics could see the carpet of dead honeyeaters and fallen trees around him.
He may not persuade disbelievers with his condemnation of capitalism and mining. Looking down his literary nose, he depicts the billionaire Gina Rinehart as a follower of Ayn Rand, the “hack novelist” and philosopher of individualism he knows as the favourite of prison reading groups.
Winton is a “greenie” who lives among his “redneck” neighbours with mutual goodwill but increasing wariness. He shows himself to be a complex character – “prosperous déclassé bourgeois”, Christian, intellectual, risk-taking idiot, white man on First Nations country – who has risen to the top of Australian literature while honouring his roots. His precise, beautiful writing is lit with metaphors high, low and hilarious.
“We looked like four noisy coke fiends trying to run a beach baptism,” he writes of the effort to carry his aged mother in her “swimming chair” into the sea. Most moving are the chapters written with the tenderness of an adult son towards his parents and a grandfather of kids who embody his concern for the future. Conversations with his father are circular poems of familiarity and forgetfulness. The narrative moves towards oblivion but is enlivened with laughter, messy home births and family photos.
This is also a writer’s book about writing. Winton’s profile of his “comrade” Helen Garner is a multifaceted gem of characterisation. He astutely begins and ends the collection by acknowledging “that book”, Cloudstreet, which launched him as one of Australia’s most celebrated novelists.
Winton’s nonfiction collections, published between novels, accumulate as an autobiography of experiences and ideas that evolve into fiction. You’ll have to go back to collections such as Island Home for his early relationship with the sea, and The Boy Behind the Curtain for his police officer father’s car crash and how that led the family into fundamentalist Christianity.
He has become a kind of prophet, calling out from the sun-bleached western desert. I can’t help pairing him with Richard Flanagan, that other masterful writer of place, who has changed minds with his essays from Australia’s south-eastern extreme about the disappearing forests and polluted waters of Tasmania. They don’t have all the answers but their clear voices inspire and challenge us not to look away.
Songs from the Firefront by Tim Winton is out now through Hamish Hamilton/Penguin
When I started reading Tim Winton’s 2024 novel Juice, set in a near-future climate-disaster Australia, my immediate impression was that it was his darkest book. On turning the final page, I feared there was every chance it would soon be read as history rather than fiction.
Winton shares that fear. In his essay collection, Songs from the Firefront, he drops the fiction and personally sounds the alarm on what he sees as a catastrophic combination of climate change, capitalism and demagogic politics. “We are at a turning point in human and global history,” he writes in “Exiles at Home”. “Our moment of truth is now. The storm is upon us, the firefront is here … my generation faces a legacy of shame at a scale humans have not had to contemplate before.”
Two years since Juice, Winton, a 66-year-old husband, father and grandfather, says his “spirit is bruised” and he is “deeply troubled by this moment and by the many ways it is not being confronted by our representatives”: “on current trends and policy settings, we’re sending our descendants to hell”.
There’s a telling connection between “Exiles at Home” and “Rednecks”, which opens with Winton and his wife, Denise, who live in small-town Western Australia, handing out “Yes” pamphlets for the 2023 Voice referendum. He argues that the Albanese government “ceded the initiative to a coalition of scaremongers and scoundrels”, leading to a vote that was less about amending the constitution than “testing the status and value of Aboriginal people”. “It wasn’t just the repudiation of an idea but the rejection of a class of people. The damage it did to already vulnerable people is incalculable. It was a moral failure of leadership.”
Winton says he has “always had a soft spot” for rednecks but believes a shift in the social make-up of communities, particularly post-Covid, has created a “new redneck” and their default stance is “aggro defensive”. “The live-and-let-live folks I used to know are being supplanted by – or are in the process of becoming – performative rednecks … All their views about masculinity, race, immigration, gender and climate are reactions to change. Denial is the whole point. And a paranoia that’s entirely unprecedented.”
I doubt Winton’s thoughts will win him any popularity contests, especially in his home town where he’s considered a greenie who clings “to what’s left of my ponytail”. This is a risk he is willing to take. He admits to feeling rage. He supports the “young people of conscience and courage” and their non-violent protests but worries what will happen if “they’re forced to resort to other means”. Spoiler alert: in Juice, activists kill the rich. The result on the page is direct and straightforward. There’s no time for “You and the words”, as his wife teases him at one point.
This is Winton as we rarely see him. Aside from his environmental activism, including for his beloved Ningaloo Reef, he is not a public figure. Songs from the Firefront extends and deepens the revealing personal stories he tells in his 2016 memoir The Boy Behind the Curtain. This is the oops! Winton of “Timmy Made a Mistake”, which involves a grandson and a stingray’s barb, and the loving son of “The Swimming Chair”, centred on his mother, Beverley, a “swimmer who can no longer swim”. This is a man who tells dad jokes. The meditations on his family are full of love, devotion, understanding and gratitude. As his mother and father near the end of their lives, his tenderness of heart, mind and touch is beautiful to witness.
These intimate essays have the storytelling his readers cherish, as well as his laconic sense of humour. In “Half-Time Placenta”, his daughter, after giving birth at home as the Wintons like to do, asks her dad to cut up the placenta so she can eat it afterwards, as her mother did. He agrees because “a father likes to be useful” but waits until it cools down, which is another Timmy mistake. “Sawing a cold umbilical … well, it lacks a certain romance, I’ll tell you that for free.”
When I related this story to my mother, who adores Winton’s writing, she pulled a face. As I said to her, trust me, it’s LOL funny. The entertaining and informative “With Respect!” starts in 1982 when Helen Garner comes into 21-year-old Winton’s world as a reviewer of his first novel, An Open Swimmer. This “collision of the great and the small” was the start of a lifelong friendship.
Overall, Winton, a four-time winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, spends little time on his books. The final essay, “That Book”, is the exception. No prizes for guessing that book is Cloudstreet, which he started writing when he, Denise and their three-year-old son spent a stint in France, Greece and Ireland. His thoughts on its genesis and its public and critical reception, 35 years after publication, are fascinating. “Would I write it differently if I were to attempt it now? Very probably.”
He is relieved that’s not happening in today’s polarising and censorious times: “Chances are, I wouldn’t have the mad, joyous front to try a book like Cloudstreet now.” His readers are relieved too. On the day I wrote this review, ABC Radio National announced the results of a listeners’ poll to decide Australia’s top 100 books. Cloudstreet, which its author admits “has its flaws, no question”, was No. 1.
Hilary McPhee met Tim Winton in the 1980s after his first publisher rejected his idea to write short stories. She recalls the joy of nurturing the young Australian author.
Hilary McPhee
Anyone with half an eye on Australian writing in the early 80s was aware of Tim Winton, the talented young West Australian writer who, unlike most of his contemporaries, was taking on the large themes like those of Melville, White and Hemingway.
“It’s as if Winton has impatiently bypassed the adolescent revolt stage, and gone straight for the big questions,” Helen Garner wrote when she reviewed An Open Swimmer, his first novel, which Allen & Unwin published in 1982.
Winton was just 20 and had won the Vogel Award for a new writer.
It had been a long fight between Jerra Nilsam and the fish. He pressed the flat end of the oar against its brow. Globes of moisture clustered on its flanks. His father grinned in the stern. The engine was chuckling. Water parted like an incision behind. The fish grunted. His father said it was a turrum. The long fan of tail slapped the gunwale, the gills were pumping, and blood globbed the bottom of the boat.
These were the first words I ever read of Winton’s and re-reading this opening paragraph I can see how it resonates with the books and characters that followed – with Fish Lamb in Cloudstreet, with Lockie Leonard, with Ort Flack and his father in That Eye, the Sky, and with Scully in The Riders. The voice was distinctive, as were the images of the coast where Tim had lived all his life, and of the people he’d grown up with and heard about in stories brought home by his policeman father.
Author Tim Winton in 1995.
We were pleased but not too surprised when literary agent Caroline Lurie rang and asked if we’d like to talk about Winton, the youngest-ever recipient of the Miles Franklin Award for his second novel, Shallows. What did surprise us was that Tim’s initial publishers were willing to let him go.
Apparently he’d wanted to publish a collection of stories next – and Allen & Unwin “didn’t want him to”, Caroline Lurie said. Nor, probably, would most other publishers at that time. Received publishing wisdom maintained that collections of Australian short stories didn’t sell and that authors should be firmly discouraged from producing them.
Hilary McPhee AO is an Australian writer and editor.
We had published several collections, which had been well received – Barry Hill’s A Rim of Blue and Headlocks and Beverley Farmer’s Milk and Home Time. So we knew there was a readership out there if the stories were strong enough, and Tim Winton’s audience was growing.
For McPhee Gribble, this was the beginning of a 10-year relationship with Winton, although he lived as far from Fitzroy as it was possible to be, beside a surf beach on the other side of the continent, and was only able to visit once a year or so. He became a friend of us all and, for me, there was the huge satisfaction of being Tim’s editor as his international reputation grew steadily and as an unprecedented number of translations and editions of his backlist were sold overseas.
Tim Winton at Ningaloo.
Tim’s writing was like no one else’s from the start, and carved out for me its own space in my head.
He has always used rhythm to great effect, and short sentences and single words like blows. In the first paragraph of his first book he invents language like “globbed”. And somehow you trust him wherever he takes you – into natural lore, the workings of boats and the mysteries of fish. There’s a loving regard for the web of it all.
In the first year our letters were careful exchanges.
We had not met so he was unsure and rightly nervous of editorial advice, and we were tentative, not knowing yet how to anticipate his reaction to suggestions about the selection of stories and the style of cover designs. Western Australia was a long way off and we didn’t ring each other often.
We were all poor – his publishers always looking for ways for one of us to visit him, or for invitations that would include a plane fare for “the young Perth writer who is off and running”, as The West Australian newspaper liked to describe him. We were acutely conscious that Tim and his family were battling on our small advances and six-monthly royalty cheques as his list of books grew.
January 1975. Hilary McPhee, author of Media She. Neg: GL18061
From the dates alone, it would appear to have grown effortlessly. From 1984 and for the next 10 years a manuscript a year was delivered to us. Tim’s professionalism was striking. He would rework painstakingly, usually in his clear handwriting. We published Scission in 1985, quickly followed by That Eye, the Sky which was launched by Helen Garner at Writers Week in Adelaide. Here we saw the first signs of the guru status some people wanted to confer on him. Crowds of young people mobbed his signings and there were others who followed him everywhere. Tim’s Christianity was always a powerful undercurrent to his writing, and central to That Eye, the Sky, and was no doubt part of the aura some people wanted to see around him, of a young spiritual leader, which he did not seek out or enjoy.
Elizabeth Jolley wrote to us when That Eye, the Sky was published: “I am glad Tim has written it for I think it is a book which can do nothing but good in this world of books of ours.”
Australian author Tim Winton pictured at Pebble Beach, Exmouth, Western Australia. Picture: Frances Andrijich / The Australian,
Then came another collection of stories, A Minimum of Two, and the first of his books for children, a picture book titled Jesse after his firstborn son. Tim’s work was highly praised, his status as a “wunderkind” was constantly referred to and he was much in demand.
Overseas publishers began to sit up and take notice. Soon he was “wrestling with the Poms”, as we called it.
Letters came from editors in British publishing houses and agents interested in acquiring rights. Sometimes they made suggestions. “The surfing element we feel is fine. Indeed, it adds quite a lively visual edge to the story ... but I think we may have just a bit of difficulty with specifically Australian slang terms such as “dag” and “spack” or a more Australian vocabulary, such as “cacking” (which had us a bit puzzled).”
This advice, if heeded, would have watered down everything that had made them single out Tim’s work in the first place.
Extracted from Other People’s Words: The life and times of an accidental publisher, by Hilary McPhee (Melbourne University Press, $34.99) McPhee’s 2001 memoir of the small independent publisher she founded with Diana Gribble has been updated and republished by MUP)
