Loved and scorned for his sincerity, ‘perpetual boy’ Tim Winton ages poetically in Songs from the Firefront

Detailed summary

In Tim Winton’s new collection of essays and reflections, we glimpse the world-making of Cloudstreet, via his parents’ stories, but also a loving ruthlessness.

To the surprise of nobody, last month Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991) won a poll of Australia’s top 100 books run by ABC’s Radio National. Winton’s novel has regularly topped such polls in the years since it was published.

A similar inexorability attaches to the response that appeared in my social media feed decrying this result. I belong to a perverse caste of people whose disdain for Winton goes up in direct proportion to his broader national and international acclaim. One expressed relief that, “at least it wasn’t Trent Dalton”.

Review: Tim Winton – Songs from the Firefront (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin)

These respective positions on Winton – unabashed love and weary disdain – are hard to square but, like any dialectic, we have to credit each thesis with seeing something that the other cannot.

Those who love Cloudstreet, however, do not feel moved to produce detailed reasoning for their love. It is like asking someone why they love their dog. There are things that they can point to, but in the end they just love them and that’s all there is to it. Those who hate Cloudstreet will first of all insist they don’t hate the novel; they just find it problematic. A familiar litany follows – too white, too Christian, naff vernacular language, the women are weird. Cloudstreet, they say, is evocative but ultimately mawkish settler apologia; no wonder Australians love it so much.

In the final essay of Winton’s new book Songs from the Firefront, he meditates on the strange adulation and vituperation of “That Book”:

Those who find Winton’s work mired in nostalgia will not be disappointed if they thumb through the essays and reflections in Songs from the Firefront. But the relationship to the past that powers Winton’s writing and funds his appeal is missed if one writes it off as sepia-toned amnesia. In an age of accelerating alienation where humans now willingly outsource their speech to machines, should we really be so quick to scorn serious remembering?

Winton wrote Cloudstreet in his…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from The Conversation AU. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.