Tag Archives: Tim Winton

Dinner in the Strangers’ Dining Room

Posted on 12 February 2023 | 3 comments

[I originally put up this post in my old blog on 23 May 2005, but didn’t retrieve it when I moved to the WordPress platform. I’m republishing it now mainly because I’m about to write something about Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Haunted by the Past. The post also has a sadly ironic note from John Hughes, and a reminder that the late George Pell was on the nose in some quarters well before the child sexual abuse revelations. It’s also a reminder that the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards used to be presented at a slap-up dinner.]

Tonight the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were announced at the traditional dinner in the Strangers’ Dining Room in Parliament House. I had been planning to go with my friend Moira, but she was ill, so after some phoning around I found a most satisfactory replacement in my young neighbour and budding writer Jack.

It was a fabulous evening, full of talk – speeches, conversation, argument – and celebrity spotting. Premier Bob Carr sang the praises of his Premier’s Reading Challenge, then undercut this necessary self-promotion by remarking that it was nice to be able to impose one’s values ‘in the nicest Stalinist way’ and going on to riff on the idea of flying banners all over Sydney’s bearing the Stalinist slogan: ‘Life has become better, comrades. Life has become merrier.’

The address for the evening was to be given by Amanda Lohrey, but she had been incapacitated by a fall, and her speech was read to us (with passion) by Susan Ryan. It was an apologia for secular liberal democracy, framed as a response to some remarks by Sydney’s Catholic cardinal George Pell. Where he had said that secular liberal democracy was empty of values, she argued that on the contrary it thrives on diversity and so is full. The speech did have the feel of an essay looking for a place to be aired rather than an address tailor-made for the occasion. But it was excellent to be reminded that the frisson of irritation that remarks like the Cardinal’s inspire in me can be the occasion for careful thought. (The phrase ‘to we liberal democrats’ did occur in the speech as given. I didn’t get hold of a written copy, so I won’t hold that syntactical atrocity against Ms Lohrey: it may have been Ms Ryan hyper-correcting her. I’m sorry to report, though, that I did not detect a shocked collective intake of breath from the audience.)

I was sitting at an awe-inspiring table. Apart from Jack and me and two other ancillary men, there were Nette Hilton, Wendy Michaels, Julie Janson and Ruby Langford Ginibi. Nette, Wendy and Julie were judges. Ruby, it turned out, received the special award, given each year as a kind of lifetime achievement award. I was sitting next to Ruby, and can report that she stays on message: she takes very seriously her calling to educate whitefellas about Aboriginal history, and she was full of information (about the two Aboriginal bowlers who dismissed Don Bradman for a duck; about the rolling back of Aboriginal education under the Howard government; about John Howard’s motives for refusing to apologise for the stolen generations; about the devastating and ongoing consequences of Aboriginal dispossession). She was also very funny, and I got to feel a little special because it fell to me to help her get various things – the envelope containing her speech, her glasses, a little photo album – out of the bag on the back of her wheelchair.

And as for the prizes, I was struck by the humility of most of the recipients. By that I mean that they gave the impression that their subject was more important than they were.

Gillian Cowlishaw, wispy grey-haired author of Blackfellas White fellas and the hidden injuries of race told of a conversation with two Aboriginal women in Burke:

Gillian’s friend: She wants to tape us for her book.
Sister of Gillian’s friend: If she want to tape me she’ll have to f***in’ pay me.
Gillian: If you want me to tape you, you’ll have to f***in’ pay me.
Gillian’s friend: Well, at least she’s learned the language.

Tony Kevin, awarded for A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of SIEV X, referred us to the web site on the subject and predicted that one day someone from Australia’s security institutions would break ranks and tell the truth about what happened: and only then would we know if what he has written is true or false. How’s that for humble?

Katherine Thomson, given a prize for her play Harbour, spoke about the waterfront skulduggery of not so long ago, and reminded us, as we hardly need reminding, that our industrial relations troubles are far from over. (I’m remembering the last moments of Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: ‘Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.’) She told a funny story: when she first approached the Maritime Union of Australia to research the play, she went with an open mind and told them so. She was introduced to one group of wharfies like this:

This is Katherine. She’s writing a play about Patrick’s. It’s not necessarily going to be on our side, but that’s OK, because if it isn’t we know where she lives.

John Hughes, gonged for The Idea of Home: autobiographical essays, placed his book in relation to the Demidenko fake, and the way it did the dirty on, among other things, real stories of migration. He attributed his ability to complete it (at the rate of 20 pages a year) to the persistent encouragement he received from other people, especially Ivor Indyk.

Sherryl Clark, recognised for her verse novel for young readers, Farm Kid, used her moment at the mike to remind us of the tragedy unwinding in the country as the current drought continues.

Samuel Wagan Watson, who won the poetry award and the Book of the Year award for  Smoke Encrypted Whispers, was modest in a different way. He said among other things that knowing he’s won the award but not being able to tell anyone made him look constipated to his friends; that writing poetry is a tough game – ‘Before I got published, you know, I used to be white.’

Steven Herrick (please note the spelling – we got it wrong in the magazine recently), receiving his second award, this time for By the River, showed us the medal and said that when he shows his other one to school students, there’s always someone who points out that it’s silver. In trying to convince them that he’s not a loser, he tells them that the premier gave him $15 000 as well as the medal. So, he said, when he leaves, his audience is probably left with the impression that he is a loser and Bob Carr is very rich.

Tim Winton, whose excellent The Turning was the only prize-winning book I’ve read, was brief, said with obviously genuine discomfort that he felt he had robbed the other writers on the shortlist of something, and then thanked many people, including, with a nod towards Amanda Lohrey’s speech, ‘the loyal, dogged, civilian reader’.

And on top of all that, I caught up ever so briefly with a number of friends, and did a little professional fence-mending, possibly some bridge-building. It was a terrific night. Jack said he had a good time too.

Posted: Mon – May 23, 2005 at 05:57 PM

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Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning & Tim Winton’s Island Home

Posted on 17 December 2015 | 10 comments

Magda Szubanski, Reckoning: A Memoir (Text 2015; Bolinda audiobook read by Magda Szubanski)
Tim Winton, Island Home: A Landscape Memoir (Hamish Hamilton 2015; Bolinda audiobook read by David Tredinnick)

9781925240436.jpg We listened to Reckoning on a car trip fromSydney to Brisbane and then part of the way back. It’s hard to imagine a book better suited to such a trip.

Magda Szubanski, a superb comedian as the fat, unloved but ever optimistic Karen in Kath and Kim, and the bustling farmer’s wife in Babe, here comes out as a complex, thoughtful person with quite a lot to say and the ability to say it well. I particularly admire her way with similes. As you’d expect of a celebrity memoir, it gives us the background story on a number of her well-known and much-loved parts, as well as her more obscure commercial and critical failures. Unsurprisingly, it goes into her family history, but though there are elements of celebrity-misery-memoir in the story that emerges of a depressed mother and a rigid, disciplinarian father, the narrative transcends that category to become something much more interesting.

There are many strands. Possibly the most interesting is Magda’s quest to understand her father. She tells us at the start that he was a teenaged assassin, an ally to Jews who put his own life at risk, and a member of the Polish resistance during World War Two. A key element of her own life story is her gradual uncovering of the details and significance of that, and of its implications for how he related to his own children. There’s also her struggle with weight, and the agonising story of her coming to terms with her sexuality, of coming out to her family, and then to the world is a revelation. (That is to say, I vaguely remember that when she came out my response was something like, ‘That’s interesting – Oh look, something shiny!’ For her, it was a major decision: she had to face the possibility that her career and any number of important relationships would go down the drain, and she also had to face head-on the internalised version of the vicious oppression that comes at Lesbians and Gay men.)

Magda Szubanski reads this audio book, and I recommend this as a way of receiving it. Perhaps it would be funnier read on the page: there’s plenty of wit, but Szubanskidoesn’t play for laughs. She does, however, do the voices: her father’s Polish accent (‘Ach, Maggie’), mother’s soft Scottish burr, her own childhood pipe, and any number of show-biz types (her impression of Mark Trevorrow is uncanny).
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islandhome.jpgWhen we’d finished Magda’s book, we moved on to Tim Winton’s Island Home. Sadly, we lasted only about 40 minutes into it, and even that was a struggle. The book itself is interesting. Winton writes about the meaning of the land in Australian sensibilities: we have more geography than culture here, he says; the long Aboriginal custodianship of the land has had a very different impact from the ubiquitous naming and taming of Europe, and the last two centuries have not erased that.

The book is interesting, and I hope to read it some time. But my companion and I found David Tredinnick’s reading intolerable. He did that thing of not trusting the words to do the work, but injecting emotion and significant intonations. The effect was to constantly draw attention to the words rather than to what they were trying to say. You could tell that Winton was struggling to articulate something, but it was being read to us as pronouncements of wisdom from on high. I see from Bolinda’s site that David Tredinnick is a frequent reader for them. I hope this performance isn’t typical.

Added later:
aww-badge-2015Reckoning is the twentieth book I’ve read for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Tim Winton’s That Eye, the Sky at the Book Group

Posted on 2 April 2015 | 5 comments

Tim Winton, That Eye, the Sky (McPhee Gribble 1986)

1TETSBefore the Meeting: That Eye, the Sky isn’t an obvious choice to discuss at a book club close to 30 years after it was published. It’s even less obvious, given that one or two of our members have disparaged Winton’s work (apart from Cloudstreet) fairly comprehensively. But we were looking for a film–book pairing and a couple of us – at least, I hope it wasn’t only me – remembered being moved by John Ruane’s movie based on this book. And it’s short.

I have mixed feelings about Tim Winton’s work. I loved The Turning, felt that the slow bits of Dirt Country were adequately compensated by other elements, especially the ending, and found The Riders close to pointless. His chapter in Big Surf, last year’s  essay on class  and his Palm Sunday oration about asylum seeker policy are all marvellous. Generally, I love his sentences. So, though I had loved the film (apart from a dimly remembered unease about the Peter Coyote character), I approached That Eye, the Sky with cautious optimism.

The narrator, Ort (short for Morton), is the 12 year old son of ex-hippies, living poor on the outskirts of a Western Australian city. His father has a car accident which leaves him in a coma then pretty much vegetative until the very last pages. Henry Warburton, a man Ort and his angry older sister Tegwyn have seen living rough under a nearby bridge, turns up and helps the family, bathing the incapacitated father and doing odd jobs. Henry, it turns out, is a bit of a loose cannon, but before his looseness becomes completely apparent he converts Ort and his mother to his peculiar brand of Christianity. Meanwhile, Ort is the only one who sees a strange light that hovers over their little house – possibly an after-effect of Ort having been comatose and died, twice, when he was little and had meningitis; or possibly Ort’s contact with a reality beyond this one.

The complex web of relationships is beautifully done, including Ort’s belligerent friendship with the boy from across the road, but I wasn’t convinced by the magic realism, if that’s what it is, and there were whole swathes where it felt awfully as if Tim Winton was wanting to tell us about the Bible. I was reminded of what someone said about Rob Reiner’s movie Stand by Me: there’s a lot of swearing and other stuff that lets the movie get away with its moments of tenderness. Well, Ort’s matter-of-fact description of bodily functions, and the final revelation of Henry’s moral dubiousness aren’t enough for this book to get away with its spiritual message. Not that there’s anything wrong with non-institutional Christianity – I just don’t believe in it in this book. The device of the uncomprehending child narrator – ‘What Ort Knew’ if you like – becomes annoying as one feels the ventriloquist author behind him:

The forest moves quiet tonight. Jarrahs move a long way up and out of sight. Now and then I hear little animal noises. All these trees are dying, and all these little animals will have nowhere to live. One day the whole world will die and we’ll die too. My back hurts and my bum stings and the backs of my legs too. I’ve got no clothes on out here in the forest. Prickles and burrs and twigs stick in me all over. I rub them in, squirm and shake around. It hurts a lot. I’m hurting myself. I want to hurt myself. I want to.

It made me yearn for the easy flow of Winton’s own unmediated prose.

The meeting: We couldn’t find a copy of the film anywhere. So what we had was dinner, each other and the book!

(That much was uploaded prematurely. Here’s a bit more about the meeting.) Perhaps because two of the six of us arrived late, the discussion of the book kept up for most of the evening. Each new arrival would be asked for an opinion and that opinion would set us all off again.

My impression is that we were all uneasy about the book’s supernatural/ religious/ spiritual elements , which just weren’t integrated into the story. On the other hand, when I singled out as implausible the passage where Ort summarises the Bible, someone said that a childhood friend of his had told him about this fantastic story of a bloke who gets nailed to a tree. So not so implausible.

Interestingly enough, the book triggered a spate of reminiscences: of country childhoods, of vengeful boyhood impulses involving urination, of helplessly witnessing someone’s life spiralling towards disaster.

As someone said, irritating but compelling.

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