Island Home - Tim Winton

A Landscape Memoir, by Tim Winton


Lyrical, poignant, beautiful. In this age of connected world, virtual world, and a world affected by changing climate, a narrative so grounded in geography, which, if not a contrasting thoughtchain, a reminder to reclaim the space we inhabit physically, in the way we know it, learn it, regard it, revere it, not in the way of possessing it, but owning it as one owns experience.

I have read Cloudstreet by Tim Winton long time ago, and more recently a memoir. I love the life in his language, there is so much energy and movement in it, almost like music, almost like dance, almost like beating poetry.

Wish to note down so many sentences that read like poetry. A few following:

In the semi-arid range country where I live these days, the heavens draw you out, like a multidimensional horizon. For most of the year the arrival of a cloud is something of an event. Along the south coast where I spend my adolescence, the air boils with gothic clouds. There the sky's commotion renders you so feverish your thoughts are closer to music than language. In the deser the night sky sucks at you, star by star, galaxy by galaxy, until you begin to feel you could fall our into it at any moment. In Australoa the sky is not the safe enclosing canopy it appears to be elsewhere. It's the scantiest membrane imaginable, barely sufficient as a barrier between earthbound creatures and eternity. Standing alone at dawn on the Nullarbor, or out on a saltpan the size of a small country, you feel a twinge of terror because the sky seems to go on forever. It has perilous depths and ocenaic movements. In our hemisphere the sky stops you in your tracks, derails your thoughts, unmoors you from what you were doing before it got you by the collar....

There is no denying the fact that there's something physically relentless about Australia, but there's also something hanuntingly paradoxical, for to even the most reverent observer it sometimes feels as if this contineent is more air than matter, more pause than movement, more space than time. The place is still itself. It continues to impose. It imprints itself upon the body, and in order to make sense of it the mind is constantly struggling to catch up. This is why, despite the postmodern and nearly post-physical age we live and work in, Australian writers and painters continue to obsess about landscape. It's not that we are laggards. We are in a place where the material facts of life must still be contended with. There is so much more of it than us. We are forever battling to come to terms. The encounter between ourselves and the land is a live concern. Elsewhere this story is largely done and dusted, with nature in stumbling retreat, but here our life in nature remains an open question and how we answer it will define not just our culture and politics but our very survival.