Island Home

by Tim Winton

  Contents

  Also by Tim Winton

  I

  County Offaly, 1988

  The island seen and felt

  II

  Fremantle, 1999

  Settlers at the edge

  III

  Trigg Island, 1966

  Barefoot and unhurried

  IV

  Albany, 1973

  Disgust and enchantment

  V

  Cape Keraudren, 1997

  The corner of the eye

  VI

  Waychinicup, 1987

  The power of place

  VII

  Northam, 1995

  The downward view

  VIII

  Mitchell Plateau, 1993

  The steel cocoon

  IX

  Cape Range, 2009

  Land of flowers

  X

  Dodnun, 2006

  Paying respect

  Notes

  Other works referred to

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Tim Winton has published twenty-seven books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.

  ALSO BY TIM WINTON

  NOVELS

  An Open Swimmer

  Shallows

  That Eye, the Sky

  In the Winter Dark

  Cloudstreet

  The Riders

  Dirt Music

  Breath

  Eyrie

  STORIES

  Scission

  Minimum of Two

  The Turning

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  Jesse

  Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo

  The Bugalugs Bum Thief

  Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster

  Lockie Leonard, Legend

  Blueback

  The Deep

  NON-FICTION

  Land’s Edge

  Local Colour (with Bill Bachman)

  Down to Earth (with Richard Woldendorp)

  Smalltown (with Martin Mischkulnig)

  PLAYS

  Rising Water

  Signs of Life

  Shrine

  for Hannah Rachel Bell

  Turn home, the sun goes down; swimmer, turn home.

  JUDITH WRIGHT,

  ‘The Surfer’

  My island home is waiting for me

  NEIL MURRAY,

  ‘My Island Home’

  I

  County Offaly, 1988

  Black sky down around our ears, my son and I climb the stile in the frigid, buffeting wind. Hail slants in, pinging and peppering us. Neither the hedge nor the adjoining drystone wall offers much protection so we press on up the long, lumpy field toward the cottage and the waiting fire. Only moments ago the black slates and white chimney were plain against the crest of the hill; now everything but the tussocks at our feet is obscured by the squall belting down the valley. I expect my boy to be cowed by the stinging ice and the suddenly savage afternoon but he seems enchanted. He’s nearly four years old. The short, dull day has finally delivered some excitement. Waving his knobby stick like a marauding buccaneer, he swashbuckles uphill in his little orange wellies, and together we inadvertently ambush a large hare. The creature has been hunched in the hail-harried grass and for several moments it can only gaze up at us in terror. Finally it bolts. It zigzags up the incline from one tuft to the next. We look at each other a moment, the boy and I, and then with piratical hoots we give chase.

  Later by the fire he sets aside his hot chocolate to stare at the snapshots of home pinned to the wall. All the sun-creased faces of friends and family. Daggy hats and bare chests. Dogs in utes. The endless clear space behind people, the towering skies and open horizons. He lingers over the dreamy white beaches and mottled limestone reefs at low tide, sculpted dunes at sunset.

  ‘Is it real?’ he asks, cheeks rosy, hair in cockscombs from the towel.

  ‘Of course,’ I tell him, startled. ‘Don’t you remember? Look. That’s Granma. There’s Shaz.’

  But he fingers the sky and sea behind our loved ones as if the reality he once knew is now so distant, so unlike where we are, as to seem untrustworthy.

  ‘It’s home,’ I say. ‘Remember? That’s Australia.’

  It’s only been a year but that’s a big chunk of the kid’s short life and already home has begun to seem fantastic. Before this we were in Paris, which was lovely, though it was all hard surfaces and primly divided space. There were wondrous tunnels, cobbles and curvy walls, tiny cars and hurtling underground trains, but so many open expanses were barred and fenced off and it was hard for him to meet other children. The bourgeois kids in the neighbourhood were either strapped in and pushed along by au pairs or driven afoot in herds by barking teachers. At the weekends infants were paraded and brandished in cafés like fashion accessories, testimony to the good taste and excellent Gallic genes of their parents. Indoors these kids may have been urban gentry, but outside they looked like vassals. In Paris, playing on the grass was illegal. The only unscheduled social encounters took place in the queue for the carousel in the local square, or within the confines of a white-gravelled playground that was corralled like a saleyard. Kids who were unacquainted eyed each other off at a distance.

  In many ways Paris was an easy city to be in. There was beauty everywhere you looked. We’d never lived in an apartment before, and having to contend with the sounds and smells of others so close above and beside us was strange and exciting. But as winter set in and the fountains froze in candied cascades and we were forced to retreat indoors, there was something pent up in our little boy that couldn’t be ignored. I felt it in myself, this churning agitation, and didn’t understand it until months later, running madly uphill in an Irish hailstorm. For while I’d assumed our mounting mutual fractiousness was the result of cultural fatigue – the perpetual bafflement at local customs and manners – the real source was physical confinement and an absence of wildness.

  As the big storm ripped overhead my wife came in and sat by the fire. She ruffled our son’s hair and gave me a quizzical look. It was as if she’d instantly registered the change of mood.

  ‘When we get home,’ the boy declared, ‘we’re getting a dog. In a ute.’

  Later that night, as he slept in his loft, we spoke at length about his little declaration. We knew what he hankered for wasn’t really a pet, or the car it came in, but what they stood for – his Australian life. And the wild spaces that made it possible.

  The island seen and felt

  I grew up on the world’s largest island. The bald fact slips from consciousness so easily I’m obliged to remind myself now and again. But in an age when a culture examines itself primarily through politics and ideology, perhaps my forgetting something so basic should come as no surprise. Our minds are often elsewhere. The material facts of life, the organic and concrete forces that fashion us, are overlooked as if they’re irrelevant or even mildly embarrassing. Our creaturely existence is registered, measured, discussed and represented in increasingly abstract terms. Maybe this helps explain how someone like me, who should know better, can forget he’s an islander. Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea, Australia the economic enterprise. There’s no denying the power of these conceits. I’ve been shaped by them. But they are hardly the only forces at work. I’m increasingly mindful of the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations. The island continent has n
ot been mere background. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family. Like many Australians, I feel this tectonic grind – call it a familial ache – most keenly when abroad.

  Living in Europe in the 1980s I made the mistake of assuming that what separated me from citizens of the Old World was only language and history, as if I really was the mongrel European transplant of my formal education. But I hadn’t given my own geography sufficient credit. Neither, of course, had those who taught me. It wasn’t simply about what I’d read or not read – my physical response to new places unsettled me. It was as if my body were in rebellion. Outside the great cities and the charming villages of the Old World, I felt that all my wiring was scrambled. Where I had expected to appreciate the monuments and love the natural environment, the reality was entirely the reverse. The immense beauty of many buildings and streetscapes had an immediate and visceral impact, and yet in the natural world, where I am generally most comfortable, I was hesitant. While I was duly impressed by what I saw, I could never connect bodily and emotionally. Being from a flat, dry continent I looked forward to the prospect of soaring alps and thundering rivers, lush valleys and fertile plains, and yet when I actually beheld them I was puzzled by how muted my responses were. My largely Eurocentric education had prepared me for a sense of recognition I did not feel, and this was confounding. The paintings and poems about all these places still moved me, so I couldn’t understand the queer impatience that crept up when I saw them in real time and space. Weren’t these landforms and panoramas beautiful? Well, yes, of course they were, although a little bit of them seemed to go a long way. To someone from an austere landscape they often looked too cute; they were pretty, even saccharine. I had a nagging sensation that I wasn’t ‘getting it’.

  In the first instance I struggled with scale. In Europe the dimensions of physical space seemed compressed. The looming vertical presence of mountains cut me off from the horizon. I’d not lived with that kind of spatial curtailment before. Even a city of skyscrapers is more porous than a snowcapped range. Alps form a solid barrier, an obstacle every bit as conceptual as visual and physical. Alpine bluffs and crags don’t just rear up, they lean outward, projecting their mass, and their solidity does not relent. For a West Australian like me, whose default setting is in diametric opposition, and for whom space is the impinging force, the effect is claustrophobic. I think I was constantly and instinctively searching for distances that were unavailable, measuring space and coming up short.

  The second and more significant thing to unsettle me was that every landform bore the inescapable mark of culture and technology. Of course even remotest Australia shows the signature of human activity – ancient fire regimes have shaped habitats and there are paintings and petroglyphs in places that seem at a glance to have been forever unpeopled – but many Aboriginal adjustments, amendments and embellishments are so discreet they hardly register as impositions; in fact to the unschooled eye they are invisible. In Europe, however, the most dramatic and apparently solitary landscapes are unmistakably modified. Around every mountain pass and bend it seems there is another tunnel, a funicular, a fashionable resort or a rash of reflective signage.

  It took a while to understand that the source of my mounting dismay was a simple lack of relief from my own kind. I had never encountered places so relentlessly denatured. Above the snowline there was always a circling helicopter, and beyond that a tracery of jet contrails attesting to the thousands travelling the skies at every moment of the day and night. Down in the valleys and along the impossibly fertile plains, nature was only visible through the overlaid embroidery of the people who’d brought it to heel. Whether I was in France, Ireland, Holland or the more rugged Greece, it seemed that every field, hedge and well was named, apportioned and accounted for. It was a vista of almost unrelieved enclosure and domestication. Those rare spaces not fully inhabited or exploited were unambiguously altered. Where once there’d been forests there were now only woods. Conservation reserves were more like sculpted parks than remnant, self-generated ecosystems. Even the northern sky looked colonized, its curdled atmosphere a constant and depressing reminder of human dominion. As a boy I’d viewed the sky as a clear and overwatching lens, but at my lowest homesick moments in Europe that same eye looked sick and occluded.

  On bright days the light was slate-blue, pretty in a painterly sort of way, and heartening after such long periods of gloom, but it lacked the white-hot charge my body and spirit yearned for. I was calibrated differently to a European.

  In a seedy cinema on the rue du Temple, watching Disney’s Peter Pan with my son, I found that although we were all gazing at the same screen in the flickering dark, I was seeing a different film to the rest of the audience. What seemed fantastical and exotic to the Parisian kids looked like home to me. I knew secret coves and hidey-holes like those of the Lost Boys. I’d grown up in a world of rocky islands, boats and obscuring bush. To my mind the only setting that was alien – even whimsical – was the cold, lonely nursery in the Darling family attic. The wild opportunity of Neverland with its freedom from adult surveillance was deeply, warmly familiar. Watching the movie for the umpteenth time and seeing it anew, forsaking story and focusing greedily on the backdrop, I understood what a complete stranger I was in that hemisphere. But acknowledging my strangeness made those years abroad easier to digest and enjoy.

  When I was born in 1960 there was about a square kilometre for every person on the island continent. Fifty-five years later the population has doubled, but density is still exceptionally low. Despite a peopled history of sixty thousand years, Australia remains a place with more land than people, more geography than architecture. But it is not and never has been empty. Since people first walked out of Africa and made their way down to this old chunk of Gondwana when it was not yet so distant from Asia and the rest of the world, it has been explored and inhabited, modified and mythologized, walked and sung. People were chanting and dancing and painting here tens and tens of thousand of years before the advent of the toga and the sandal. This is true antiquity. Few landscapes have been so deeply known. And fewer still have been so lightly inhabited.

  People learnt to live differently here because circumstances were unique. Instead of four seasons there were five, sometimes six. Water was scarce. The soils were thin and infertile and the plants and animals were like nothing else on earth. Living here was a specialized affair. Australia is hatched and laced with ancient story and human experience, and yet there has always been a lot of space between these gossamer threads of culture. They are strong but so unifyingly taut as to be hard to distinguish, especially by those who go looking for signs of building or evidence of perennial habitation.

  Those who became the Aboriginal peoples of this continent were almost always required to live nomadically. Their occupation of many regions was seasonal, even notional. Distant but precious country was held by skeins of song and webs of ritual, so even country that was not physically occupied was never empty. Places were intimately known and culturally vital but culture rarely imposed itself in concrete terms. Artifacts and constructions were largely ephemeral and icons required seasonal refreshment. Just as a child was ‘conceived’ by appearing as an image in a waterhole before a woman became pregnant, culture originated in and deferred to country.

  Two centuries after this way of living was disrupted forever, Australia is still a place where there is more landscape than culture. Our island resists the levels of containment and permanent physical presence that prevail on most other continents. It probably always will.

  I’m not saying Australia has no culture or that its cultural life is inconsiderable. But most Asian and European countries can be defined in human terms. Mention of India, China, Italy, France or Germany will quickly bring to mind human actions and artifacts, but at first blush Australia connotes something non-human. Of course the genius of indigenous culture is unquestionable, but even this is overshadowed by the scale and insistence
of the land that inspired it. Geography trumps all. Its logic underpins everything. And after centuries of European settlement it persists, for no post-invasion achievement, no city nor soaring monument can compete with the grandeur of the land. Don’t think this is a romantic notion. Everything we do in this country is still overborne and underwritten by the seething tumult of nature. An opera house, an iron bridge, a tinsel-topped tower – these are creative marvels, but as structures they look pretty feeble against the landscape in which they stand. Think of the brooding mass and ever-changing face of Uluru. Will architects ever make stone live like this? Consider the bewildering scale and complexity of Purnululu, otherwise known as the Bungle Bungles. It’s like a cryptic megacity wrought by engineers on peyote. Humans are unlikely to ever manufacture anything as beautiful and intricate.

  Few visitors to these shores arrive seeking the built glories of our culture. Generally they’re here for wildness, to experience space in a way that’s unavailable, and sometimes unimaginable, in countries where there is more culture than landscape. I’m no self-hating utopian. And giving the natural world its due does not make you a misanthrope. I’ve spent my life in the pursuit and maintenance of culture. I’m in awe of the uncanny brilliance of humans. I love being in the great cities of the world. And it’s true – some buildings are gifts rather than impositions. But I am antipodean enough, and perhaps of sufficient age, to wonder now and then whether architecture is, in the end, what you console yourself with once wild landscape has been subsumed.

  Space was my primary inheritance. I was formed by gaps, nurtured in the long pauses between people. I’m part of a thin and porous human culture through which the land slants in, seen or felt, at every angle: for each mechanical noise, five natural sounds; for every built structure a landform twice as large and twenty times as complex. And over it all, an impossibly open sky, dwarfing everything.