Tim Winton has been working his themes for almost 50 years in a palimpsest of 32 books: family, manhood, land and ocean; what it is to be human and Australian; intimate pleasures and anxieties that feed his fiction. The distinctive quality of his new collection of memoir and essays, Songs from the Firefront, is urgency verging on panic. He’s an elder in his 60s, with limited time to get his messages across before we all go up in flames.
Living on the western edge of Australia, Winton has been an eloquent climate-change activist for decades. He has fought, with tenuous success, to protect Ningaloo Reef. He entrances us with Scheherazade stories that blend crystalline nature writing and terrifying facts. The loss has accelerated now, he says, and the danger is immediate.
At home, where he comes face to face with wildfire, storms and a cyclone, he reports from inside weather of unprecedented menace. He tells dramatic stories of destruction with fierce, dancing poetry: “The pressure inside the house changes. Any closed door chatters against its lock. Every ceiling fan dances on its long spindle. The concrete floor hums. The shutters give off long stuttering bursts like submachine-gun fire.”
Most insidious are invisible marine heatwaves off the Western Australian coast that kill fish, corals and seagrasses. Yet industry continues, Winton says, adding carbon to a heating climate that will make much of northern Australia – and the planet – uninhabitable. He enters the water with dread but he surfs and dives, reminding himself: “You’re alive. And you’re up to your neck in life abundant.”
Readers might turn away from unrelenting despair, so Winton alternates warnings with wonders. His stories have momentum, skilfully arranged in rhythmic waves of emotion. Eye-to-eye encounters with turtles, dugongs and whales (their antics leaving “flecks of black skin on the surface” and a vapour that “smells fishy, meaty, arsey”) are thrilling, to the point of exhaustion when he lingers on his paddle in a stiff wind.
I wish the pieces were dated to show Winton’s mental chronology. Many read as background to his latest novel, Juice, a futuristic global-heating scenario, a brilliant work that’s too grim for some. As he writes in his essay Staying, after enduring a cyclone: “People declare that you’ve taken a dystopian turn. In your thinking, your activism, your work. You’re sounding apocalyptic.” He wishes critics could see the carpet of dead honeyeaters and fallen trees around him.
He may not persuade disbelievers with his condemnation of capitalism and mining. Looking down his literary nose, he depicts the billionaire Gina Rinehart as a follower of Ayn Rand, the “hack novelist” and philosopher of individualism he knows as the favourite of prison reading groups.
Winton is a “greenie” who lives among his “redneck” neighbours with mutual goodwill but increasing wariness. He shows himself to be a complex character – “prosperous déclassé bourgeois”, Christian, intellectual, risk-taking idiot, white man on First Nations country – who has risen to the top of Australian literature while honouring his roots. His precise, beautiful writing is lit with metaphors high, low and hilarious.
“We looked like four noisy coke fiends trying to run a beach baptism,” he writes of the effort to carry his aged mother in her “swimming chair” into the sea. Most moving are the chapters written with the tenderness of an adult son towards his parents and a grandfather of kids who embody his concern for the future. Conversations with his father are circular poems of familiarity and forgetfulness. The narrative moves towards oblivion but is enlivened with laughter, messy home births and family photos.
This is also a writer’s book about writing. Winton’s profile of his “comrade” Helen Garner is a multifaceted gem of characterisation. He astutely begins and ends the collection by acknowledging “that book”, Cloudstreet, which launched him as one of Australia’s most celebrated novelists.
He and his wife, Denise, who is a sturdy sidekick in the essays, were broke young parents when the eccentric family saga – his 10th book – became his breakout. Cloudstreet has been voted Australia’s favourite book in an ABC poll, 35 years after its first publication.
Winton’s nonfiction collections, published between novels, accumulate as an autobiography of experiences and ideas that evolve into fiction. You’ll have to go back to collections such as Island Home for his early relationship with the sea, and The Boy Behind the Curtain for his police officer father’s car crash and how that led the family into fundamentalist Christianity.
He has become a kind of prophet, calling out from the sun-bleached western desert. I can’t help pairing him with Richard Flanagan, that other masterful writer of place, who has changed minds with his essays from Australia’s south-eastern extreme about the disappearing forests and polluted waters of Tasmania. They don’t have all the answers but their clear voices inspire and challenge us not to look away.
Songs from the Firefront by Tim Winton is out now through Hamish Hamilton/Penguin
