Though only 32, Tim Winton is already one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Since writing his first novel as a teen-ager, he has published four additional novels, two books of short stories, and three children's books. His novel Shallows won the Miles Franklin Award (the Australian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature) in 1984, as did his most recent novel, Cloudstreet, in 1992. In the United Kingdom, Cloudstreet was named the 1992 recipient of the Deo Gloria Award, given for the best religious novel written each year internationally.
The person most puzzled by this overwhelming response is Tim Winton himself. He did not expect his anti-religious Australian culture to give him much of a hearing. But the more he tells tales spinning spiritual visions of a world where the distinctions between the natural and the supernatural are blurred, the more passionately his audience yearns to hear. And while his culture--not unlike the United States'--is driven by rugged individualism and a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, when he speaks of community and belonging he strikes a chord deep in the Australian psyche.
David Batstone interviewed Tim Winton for Sojourners while the author was in the United States to celebrate the U.S. release of Cloudstreet (Graywolf Press). Batstone was founder of Central American Mission Partners, assistant professor of theology and culture at New College in Berkeley, California, and author of From Conquest to Struggle: Jesus of Nazareth in Latin America (SUNY, 1992) when this article appeared. - The Editors
David Batstone: Your writing style and imagery--for instance, a pentecostal pig speaking in tongues--consistently bring writers like Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and maybe even William Faulkner to mind. Do you have a conscious affinity with novelists from the U.S. South?
Tim Winton: Oh certainly. For starters, Flannery O'Connor is one of my favorite novelists. Perhaps I am drawn to the South due to the particularity of the region, the fact that it could never be mistaken for being anywhere else. For instance, take southerners' weird propensity to actually take religion seriously, much more seriously than it is taken in most of Western culture, so seriously as to produce strange cults and bizarre Protestant sects.
As an intellectual Catholic, what Flannery O'Connor was attempting to say was that this passion was positive though misdirected. Put simply, she saw people desperately struggling against the big questions without equipment. As a result, all of the heroes in her books become anti-heroes. One of my favorite O'Connor characters is in Wise Blood, a man who so desperately doesn't want to believe that he establishes "The Holy Sanctified Church of Christ without Christ." He can't help himself.
In a way that is the same motivation that drives Oriel and Lester in Cloudstreet. They are desperately trying not to believe that there is Anything out there because, through the tragic accident involving their son, God has not produced the goods in their lives. They thought they had a miracle when their son survived the accident, but it then turned out not to be the miracle they had originally thought; they only got half the kid back.
They are furious because things didn't work out the way they wanted. So they spend the rest of their lives trying to negate the fact that they do believe.
It is that passion, repression, and weirdness that connects me to the South. People in the South often capture the gospel in the midst of the grotesque, which might be quite appropriate.
Batstone: Nevertheless, your affinity with the South seems ironic. While this is generalizing, Southern culture practically "sweats" religion, while Australia is not only an irreligious culture, but a decidedly anti-religious culture.
Winton: Australia is undoubtedly an anti-religious, anti-clerical, anti-establishment culture. And with good reason. The first European Australians were basically victims of the church, most particularly the Protestant establishment. With the exception of the Irish Catholic prisoners, the convicts sent to Australia had no solace or succor from the church at all. In fact, the clergy were often the ones who were handing out the lashings.
Therefore, there is still a wide perception that the church is on the side of the bosses, the overseers. If you were a church-goer it meant you were one of "them," or a least sucking up to "them." It meant that you wanted to be something other than working class.
So we live with a contradiction in Australia: one of the most anti-religious European cultures on the most spiritual and religious of continents. It's tragic--40,000 years of aboriginal wisdom completely ignored.
Batstone: In many of your short stories and novels, there is an attempt to blend the spiritual wisdom of that aboriginal culture with the best of what your own faith tradition has to offer.
Winton: I have been forced to at least begin to come to terms with the truth that there are "many mansions" and many ways and many wisdoms. What were aboriginals doing out there for 40,000 years walking about, feeling like they belonged to their land, and belonged to their stories and to their dreams? How can we say that God was absent?
Batstone: It is not lost on me that the mystical, angelic figure in Cloudstreet is an aboriginal man.
Winton: In many ways he represents those centuries of know-how and wisdom that we white Australians have ignored for the last 200 years. For the European, Australia has always seemed like an alien land. It has not been friendly to European sensibilities or European agriculture or European settlement. It has taken us years to learn not only how to survive off the land--which was struggle enough--but also how to come to terms with it as an entity.
The great aboriginal tenet is that the land does not belong to you, but that you belong to the land. For that reason they believe that there are dire consequences from always doing things to the land. And that is exactly what we Europeans typically do: We do things to objects, mold them into our image. We do not allow ourselves to be done by.
For the aboriginals this land isn't just your home, it is your icon, your sacred place, your umbilical cord. To be separated from the land is to be put into limbo, to be stuck between life and death. European Australians have had a lot of opportunity to learn that and figure it out, but with the exception of a few individuals, we have not listened to our continental wisdom.
In Cloudstreet, the black man serves as the conscience of the people, a "guardian angel" who is rejected. Quick, one of the primary characters to whom he appears, pretends that he is not even there. He doesn't act on anything the black man says until the end of the book, when practically against his will he listens to some of the very simple things the guy is saying: Learn to belong, don't break community. Basically, he is saying, "It is a grave offense to break a place."
The house located on Cloudstreet is another metaphor which addresses that value. Two families spend nearly 20 years learning how to respect and listen to the house, which speaks to them. They cannot do anything to it; they end up getting done by it. Yet, paradoxically, when offered the choice of leaving it, they stay. That is my own romantic whimsy, I suppose. Wouldn't it be nice if we stayed in our tribal-family-communal arrangements instead of always doing the Protestant thing: separate, divide, and conquer oneself, or put another way, when in doubt divide!
Batstone: How has your storytelling been influenced by your own experience with community?
Winton: For about 10 years, we lived in a pretty loose conglomerate of households around a parish. We tried and failed, primarily because we were all too young and didn't have experience and leadership. Without models it is really difficult to go out and set a community up in such an artificial way, because the expectations we place on it are typically very unrealistic. Everything had to be perfectly true, perfectly right; it had to fit.
Of course, it never does. There is always something over which you can walk out of the meeting. Besides, we were too arrogant and full of hormones to listen to anyone else.
Nevertheless, that is where I learned how to hold onto the faith. Though I was often fairly miserable during those years when things weren't working out well, it was there that I learned what little I know about spirituality. Ultimately, I discovered we need to learn to be mature enough to stay in a community despite ourselves.
Batstone: In the United States, the faith community is increasingly faced with a cultural issue to which you are likely accustomed: How do we create metaphors and images that express and reflect spirituality in an environment where religious categories and understanding cannot be assumed?
Winton: It always will be uniquely difficult. I am deeply interested in a Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo. Endo has an even more extreme problem because he is trying to write about Christianity in a culture that is absolutely alien to it. He describes Japan as a "spiritual swamp" where Christian faith cannot properly take root.
Of course, our situation in European culture is quite different than that. Most of our religious language has adapted the same rational categories that have been used by the wider culture: facts, efficiency, productivity, getting the job done, know-how. There is a limited capacity to discover spirituality in the land, to dream visions, to see the numinous in the midst of the ordinary.
In the bush of Australia, on the other hand, you see quite weird and wonderful things. Once you take the aboriginal's instinctual apprehension of the animation of landscapes and of origins and combine that with the white bushman's love of telling a tall story, the notion of a factual, "efficient" reality becomes very limiting.
Batstone: What makes white Australian culture unique from that of the other colony which spawned off from England, the United States?
Winton: In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes suggests that for the British prisoners being shipped to Australia wasn't like being transported to Alcatraz, it was more like being shot out in a space capsule to the back end of the universe. The only similarities to their old life were that the skies were up there and the ground was down here. All our early colonial memories revolved around starvation, not overcoming.
For that reason we do not have the myths of the frontier, of bravely charging West. Our myths are those of survival. Culturally we have a stoic propensity to expect the worst.
Batstone: That collective sense of pessimism is evident in many of your characters in Cloudstreet, and they respond to it in quite different ways.
Winton: That's right. Sam Pickles is a character who reacts to it quite passively through heavy gambling. He isn't optimistic enough to actually go out and make his own way. Like most gamblers, he thinks he is breaking even. So while one family in the story believes that the only way to get anywhere is by hard work, the other believes it will get there by luck. And neither of them is particularly effective!
Batstone: The one character who especially became three-dimensional for me was Oriel, the hard-working, spendthrift, efficient matriarch of the Lamb family. You must have intimately known an Oriel Lamb at some time in your life.
Winton: Well, my grandmother was a bit like that. Even though my grandparents' home was in the inner city, she lived in a tent in the backyard for 25 years. So when my mother was a prospective partner for my father, she had to go out to the tent in the backyard in order to meet her. It didn't seem strange to me as a child; I grew up thinking that everybody's grandmother lived in a tent. While my story is not quite journalism, it is a spinning of the ordinary, however much it seems like fantasy.
In a way, Australians have had that wonderful wackiness beaten out of us by the invasion of 30 or 40 years of American television. We have become more white bread and homogeneous. You can still find such characters--which we "sophisticates" call the eccentric--in the bush, but rarely in the cities.
Batstone: Within the writing guild, the story form seems increasingly shackled by the obsession with post-modern construction and literary analysis. As a teller of tales, how do you relate to that world?
Winton: To tell you the truth, I basically just ignore it. When theory becomes an end in itself, be that in theology or in literary criticism or film, count me out. Thanks a lot, but I'd rather go to the beach! It is distressing to me that writers go to school to learn devices; that is a great deception.
We do have a strong oral tradition in Australia, and that is a tremendous advantage for us as storytellers. Essentially what I was trying to do in Cloudstreet was whisper a story into the reader's ear.
In an oral tradition, events just unwind, moving first here and then over there, perhaps without any particular logic. My novel, then, is seeking to capture the spirit of the first white Australian storytellers who sat around the campfire. Usually they were lonely men and women, driving sheep or moving cattle. There was no entertainment, so to give their lives some shape and meaning they engaged in this ritualistic storytelling. One of the great Australian novels, Such Is Life, is mainly the spinning of a yarn around the fire.
Batstone: Many of your stories are told from the viewpoint of a child narrator. What is gained from taking a child's perspective?
Winton: Children are all we are until we have the wonder squeezed out of us by the educational system. However ludicrous it seems, we spend years learning a rationalist view of reality in an attempt to arm ourselves against the transcendent.
It's great to be working with agencies who have not lost their wonder. I guess that most of the apprehensions of transcendence and mystical sensibilities that I experience are gained in an instinctive way rather than in an intellectual way. So, my characters are typically apprehending but not understanding, getting it without getting it. They are not the kind of people who define what they are sensing.
In that respect, I think children have the capacity to not worry so much about the answers to life but are more content to figure out what the questions are. That's enough; there can then be a certain matter-of-factness to the transcendent.
Batstone: You realize that you are driving the rationalists among us insane with such multiple images of reality?
Winton: Certainly this sense of multiple levels of reality is not part of the white, Anglo-Saxon tradition. You get more of it in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We don't have a strong sense of passion, and for that reason we have problems fully comprehending the Passion as well. It is discomforting to our kind of breed; a bit too much alabaster statue with blood pouring out of it. In the Protestant world, we have sought to extricate anything physical from our spirituality.
But as Quick learns in Cloudstreet, it is not about in and out, you and me, or us and them. It's just us and here. We spend a lifetime learning distinctions that do not exist, defining ourselves against other people and other worlds of existence. But at the end of the day, human life is whole.
From Cloudstreet
Lester and Oriel Lamb are Godfearing people. If you didn't know them you could see it in the way they set up a light in the darkness. You've never seen people relish the lighting of a lamp like this, the way they crouch together and cradle the glass piece in their hands, wide eyes caught in the flare of a match, the gentle murmurs and the pumping, the sighs as the light grows and turns footprints on the river beach into longshadowed moon craters. Let your light so shine.
Around them their six children chiack in the sand.
Get some wood, you bigguns, Oriel Lamb says. Hattie you look after Lon.
The beach widens in the light of lamp and fire. The children see sparks rising like stars.
These are farm people, though Lester Lamb has taken to being a policeman because the farm is on its last legs. Lester Lamb polices like he farms, always a little behind the moment. He'd quit the force if only his wife'd let him. Around town he's known as "Lest We Forget" and if he knew, it'd break his Anzac heart.
He unravels the prawn net and shucks off his pants. His scrawny white legs bring a smile to him.
I'll take the boys.
They're not tall enough, Oriel Lamb says.
Ah, the girls grizzle too much. Drives me mad.
Put on yer shoes, or yull be stung. Don't want any cobbler stings. Can't stand your grizzlin.
He laughs and remembers the last time he was stung, when they had to load him onto the flatbed and Hattie had to drive because no one else could, and they delivered him to the doctor in the main street naked and screaming like a breech birth.
Orright, he says, lacing up the old brogues his father left him, no stings tonight. Give us a kiss then.
by Tim Winton (Graywolf Press, 1992).
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