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

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. Penguin 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”: Some people despise the novel for its ‘nostalgia’. Others tell me they wish I’d write more books like it, that they miss the soft, happy, sunny world of the Lambs and the Pickleses. But I don’t recognise my book in any of this. Somehow the misery, the fear, the mutilations, the beatings and murders have evaporated from those readers’ memories. Sometimes a notable book simply has to bear the size of its own footprint. Would it have provoked such strong feelings if it had sold a thousand copies and not taken up so much cultural space? Who can know. 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? The vanquished wisdom of childhood Winton wrote Cloudstreet in his twenties, having spent his childhood in the 1960s in the then new Perth suburb of Karrinyup. The mood at this time was one of rapid progress. Milkmen, outdoor toilets and trams were being replaced by freeways, supermarkets and television. So, how was Winton able to so evocatively recreate the prelapsarian Perth of the 1940s and 50s? In the family vignettes that make up one of the main lines in Songs from the Firefront, particularly those dealing with his parents, we glimpse the roots of how this remarkable act of historical ventriloquism was achieved. In the first instance, a picture emerges of a particularly close family. Winton’s imaginative ties were not just to his parents but to his grandparents and the broader extended family. More decisive still was the fact that Winton seems to have absorbed the world of his forbears with intense interest. Most normal children learn to slink away when their parents start to talk to their parents about the olden days. But the young Winton seems not only to have stayed through countless hours of world-sustaining generational reminiscence but to have hit the “record” button. The essay “Ancient of Days” consists almost entirely of dialogue between Winton and his father on the occasion of the latter’s 94th birthday. In the rhythm of their timeworn schtick we see the flicker of the family conflicts that his novels capture with such precision. “You’re late,” he says. “What are you doing here?” “Dad, those two sentences don’t belong together.” “What do I care? It’s my birthday.” “I thought you don’t care about birthdays.” “I don’t. Just another day.” “You mean you don’t wanna come?” “I don’t want any fuss.” Through these vignettes of family life, we experience something of the familial world that produces Winton’s fiction. The world is not without its ambivalences. What now seem like quirks in his parents would once have been maddening flaws. The mute force of their love was at times, we can suppose, experienced as an enveloping claustrophobia. Songs from the Firefront helps us understand how Cloudstreet’s mythopoeia is the transmuted expression of these intimate dramas; how Winton’s childhood formed in superimposition with the memories of his parents and their parents. Reading Songs from the Firefront we come up against a surprising realisation, which is that Winton has gotten older. Now in his mid-sixties, he is playing with his grandchildren and dealing with the frailty of his parents. He describes bumbling attempts to help his age-ravaged mother swim in the ocean. These hover between comedy and heartbreak. During his father’s painful medical treatment, Winton tries to assuage his suffering by playing Johnny Cash with mixed results. In these moments of divine comedy, the inevitable brutality of mortal life is solemnised by the paltry, plaintive gestures that get offered. Winton lends a recuperative dignity to the tragic farce of human existence. The fact that Winton has aged should not of course be surprising, but it is. Part of Winton’s charm seems to be a perpetual boyishness that inflects his writing and public image. That is not to say that Winton lacks maturity or moral gravity but to notice that his writing is flecked with the vanquished wisdom of childhood. Winton is not unique in this respect, but it is all the same a distinctive formation. The art theorist Carol Mavor’s book Reading Boyishly identified a certain “boyish” stance in the writing styles of J.M. Barrie, Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes and Donald Winnicott. Like these great writers, Winton’s work often sees the adult world with the hungry fascination of the precocious child. Proust’s remembrance takes on its most sublime resonance when it relays the ruinous love of Swann for Odette through the eyes of the narrator as a boy. Only a boy can see them as deities rather than deluded fools. Winton today. Penguin Random House In the family stories of Songs from the Firefront, one is left with a lasting impression of Winton as the good son. It has clearly been both a blessing and a curse. Either way, Winton seems to understand that this is not something over which he had much choice. The good son is not the one who refuses to see his parents’ failings, but the one who sees them all and accepts them. This, in many respects, is the cornerstone of Winton’s faith. His faith in the dignity of his forbears is of a piece with the structuring role of faith in his work more generally. That Winton is a writer of faith is painfully embarrassing to the secular cynic. It seems an unforgivable capitulation and raises the still more troubling question of sincerity. How is it possible to distinguish sincerity from sentimentality? A feeling that is truly expressed from its sentimental performance? In many ways, the scandal of sincerity is at the heart of the bifurcation in opinion on Winton. Those who enjoy Winton see no scandal. Those who don’t simply cannot believe that he believes. They cannot buy it. Is it too much, they ask, for at least the fig leaf of irony? The natural world This question of sincerity also arises in the other throughline in Songs from the Firefront, which are the encounters Winton has with the natural world, particularly the coasts and oceans with which he is now indelibly associated. These often take the form of quiet epiphanies. In this respect, this new book is a sequel to earlier “landscape memoirs” like Land’s Edge (1993) and Island Home (2015). Like those earlier books, Songs from the Firefront features limpid nature writing. Winton paddle-boarding amongst the whales and dugongs of Shark Bay. Winton hiking in the labyrinth of arid canyons in Cape Range next to Ningaloo Reef. Winton is not blind to his own pretensions and the romanticism of these quests is leavened by servings of self-mockery. But in the end, any qualms about his own human ridiculousness must give way to the plain and overwhelming fact of the more-than-human worlds that he meets. It is hard not to read about the “alpine white” glimmer of a humpback whale calf sliding metres beneath Winton’s board and not feel a slight shiver of awe. Or, to read of the “brassy backs” of dugongs galumphing in the tepid sea-meadows and not have one’s heart warmed: Beneath you, the mother and calf truffle away with their blunt, rubbery snouts, ploughing pale furrows and leaving a brown plume in their wake. There may be better sentences about dugongs grazing but I somehow doubt it. The effortless poetry in Winton’s writing allows us to sell it short. He conjures his vital images from the improbable resources of the oral archive of a lost Australian vernacular. But the sinews of these spoken idioms tauten the moments of encounter that might otherwise fall into misty cliché. Dugongs in water. Itsuo Inouye/AP Human mortality and animal alterity come sharply together in the tale he recounts in Songs from the Firefront of “Roo”. Winton’s morning surf is interrupted by an aging kangaroo standing incongruously at the water’s edge. Or, as Winton has previously called it, the land’s edge. Winton tries to sidle past, but the roo moves towards him and starts to square up. Taken aback, Winton stops and stares into the weathered face of this roo and realises that the animal is blind: It wasn’t safe to get within kicking distance, but I could smell him, see the ticks feasting on his face. His mouth was slack, his eyes milky[…] He was there for an hour, lurching in the wash, a silhouette not so different from that of a man. A persistent prejudice opposes sincerity to worldliness. The immersive immediacy of family and nature in Winton’s writing can make us forget that he has spent most of his working life enmeshed in the culture of letters. Loving ruthlessness But several essays in Songs from the Firefront remind us that, like all great writers, Winton is a great reader. The best of these is his brilliant meditation on the work of Helen Garner, “With Respect”. Winton and Garner seem at first a very odd couple, the boyish Christian surfie from outer suburban Perth and the acerbic chronicler of Melbourne’s inner-city. Garner’s cautious endorsement of his first novel An Open Swimmer (1982) in a review for the National Times meant the world to the young writer: “Helen-bloody-Garner”! ‘Helen-bloody-Garner!’: Winton’s friend. Darren James/Text Publishing “With Respect” was originally presented as lecture at a symposium on Garner at the University of Western Australia that I attended. Although the intersection of Winton and Garner fans is a little hard to make out in the Venn diagram, the latter found themselves surprised and entranced by Winton’s speech. It turns out none of us had read Garner in quite the way Winton had, which was as a friend, mentor and rival. The loving ruthlessness of his reading of Garner was quite moving. Above all, what Winton valued in Garner’s writing was its refusal to compromise. It was against this resolute refusal that Winton was able to whet his prose. Songs from the Firefront returns its readers to some of Winton’s more persistent themes. These take on a new hue at the author’s time of life. But the elegiac mood is shaken by the more urgent moments in the book; by a firefront that seems to be rounding on us with the change of wind. Well known for his campaign to save the Ningaloo Reef from fossil fuel extraction, Winton’s most recent novel Juice (2024) was a frightening portrait of where our addiction to hydrocarbons is sending us. In the background of Songs from the Firefront is a world that seems now unremittingly ablaze. Along with the water’s edge and the land’s edge, there is now the fire’s edge and what might lie on its other side.