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
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'smother 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
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)
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Many savvy pundits on X framed the 2024 election as a massive political realignment and Bluesky as a “copium” den for progressives in a bubble. Boy, were they wrong.
Waterhouse Lawyers is thrilled to announce that Gloria Cassimatis has joined our firm. Yes, Gloria is Michael Cranston's wife. Gloria worked at the ATO for 27 years. During her 10 years in Transfer Pricing she acted as the Competent Authority and negotiated many Avanced Pricing Arrangements (APAs) So we now have a transfer pricing and CGT expert. I'm so excited. 💃 Welcome Gloria #tax#transferpricing#ATO#APA
ATO Assistant Commissioner Jarred Needham said: "Honest businesses and the community expect us to work together to detect and disrupt phoenix behaviour."
Group, owner of ABC Bullion and one of Australia's largest precious metals businesses, has quietly settled its long-running legal dispute with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), ending more than a decade of litigation
The Australian Taxation Office has quietly pulled a number of web pages relating to its family trust tax distribution rules.
The Australian Taxation Office has quietly pulled a number of web pages relating to its family trust tax distribution rules, after denying it was pursuing Australian families and small businesses over historic paperwork errors.
In a now deleted bulletin, the ATO noted it had seen an uptick in GTDT related issues due to “inadequate record keeping, succession planning, intergenerational expansion of businesses and evolving private groups”.
The web page also noted that the tax commissioner had “no discretion to ignore the application of the historic tax rules” and could not limit the period over which FTDT applies.
Another page detailing the ATO’s interest amnesty offer, which allows trustholders to self-assess potential breaches and only face 20 per cent of the general interest charge, was also pulled.
That amnesty period is set to expire the day before the government’s three-year rollover relief window opens, when businesses and families are likely to restructure out of discretionary trusts into company or fixed unit trusts to avoid the minimum 30 per cent tax.
This means those who uncover old errors during this period will be potentially liable for the full general interest charge.
The ATO was approached for comment over both the deleted web pages and the amnesty date but had not responded by the time of publication.
Despite testimony from ATO Second Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn that the tax office did not have a “compliance strategy or project” in relation to FTDT or family trust elections, the issue is listed as a “priority area” for the ATO.
“We’re concerned there’s a lack of awareness about the compounding nature of FTDT, which is resulting in significant liabilities, so we want to help taxpayers get it right,” the ATO says on its website.
In a now delisted interview with the ATO assistant commissioner, the tax office conceded it was concerned about a “lack of understanding by taxpayers and their advisers” about the historic tax rules.
The transcript also notes a lack of awareness about the compounding nature of FTDT which is “resulting significant liabilities”.
Despite examples of historic FTDT liabilities of $47,000 ballooning to a bill of $890,000 as a result of the compounding general interest charges, Mr Hirschhorn told Senate estimates last month that no trust-holders who had fallen foul of the rules had yet been forced into bankruptcy.
Tax consultancy firm RSM Australia has raised concerns that small to medium business are being caught by the tax rules and penalised for “administrative and technical errors, in circumstances involving no mischief whatsoever”.
Mr Hirschhorn last month claimed the penalties were “deliberately set at a harsh level” to stop people from abusing family trust elections.
What has become clear over the last couple of years is that many family groups and their advisers have done things inconsistent with their family, trust elections, and have potentially triggered those harsh consequences,” he said.
Thomas Henry is a reporter for The Australian's Canberra press gallery bureau. He joined the masthead after graduating from the 2025 cadet program and holds a Bachelor of Economics from Sydney University.
