Tim Winton’s ‘landscape
memoir’ indicates his central thesis: that the sense of place that is unique in
Australia is what shapes him, and if we follow Winton’s logic, all of us (if
only we would allow it). While the chapters are not completely sequential, he
opens in County Offaly, Ireland, in 1988, and ends on Anzac Day (in what feels
like a recent reflection). Most of the memoir is about Winton’s Australian life
and the local landscape, though he does take us to Europe on occasion– where he feels
that architecture cannot compensate for the lack of a wide sky since he ‘was
calibrated differently to a European’ (p.14).
For various personal reasons of my own travels, I really
enjoyed the chapters that dealt directly with expatriate issues: ‘The Island Seen
and Felt’, ‘Waychinicup, 1987’, and particularly the essay, ‘The Power of Place’.
Winton has spoken on these matters before – that sense in which he is a writer
on the wrong side of a continent on the wrong side of the hemisphere. Here he
links questions of language, and engagement with place, to the colonial
hang-ups and the need for Australians to embrace the land more directly, as he
has so wonderfully demonstrated in this memoir. Despite misgivings about urban development
and threats to the land from commerce and mining, Winton remains optimistic
that a cultural shift is occurring on his island home:
Most of us are better at claiming
than being claimed, and when it comes to thinking about land and home this is a
hard lesson Australians have been learning since settlement. But after two
centuries of demanding and seizing, many non-indigenous Australians have
finally begun to commit. Our reverence, from love, in a spirt of kinship to the
place itself’ (pp.221-222).
I very much valued reading Winton’s insights into place, not
only from a geopolitical, post-colonial outlook, but also for the language he
brings to bear in the descriptions of ‘rocks and stones and trees’ (to sound a
little post-Romantic). The memoir is an object lesson in itself, in other
words, to the idea that Australian writers and painters need to engage more deeply with the land in their works, for that is what is not only distinctive but
ultimately what is important, moving towards an understanding of the sacred.
Not for crown or state, but kindship to family and love of place.
