Tim Winton Talking Books

Now on BBC News, it's time for Talking Books.

Hello and welcome to Talking Books at Hay Festival.

Hay has been inviting audiences to talk, to

think, to read and to reflect for 30 years.

Over ten days 250,000 people will rub shoulders with some of the

world's greatest writers, thinkers and performers.

All here in the beautiful surroundings of the Brecon

Today I'm talking to the Australian author Tim Winton,

who once compared writing to surfing.

He's written 28 books for adults and children and his latest,

The Boy Behind The Curtain is about his childhood growing up

in Western Australia and the impact that's had

Now, most writers don't have a fish named after them.

Most writers don't have their face on a

But then Tim Winton is not most writers.

He wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, when

he was just 19 years old, and he's gone on to write nearly 30 more

books for adults and children, all very different, but to my mind,

all sharing an ear for language, and an

eye for the natural landscape, and he's pulled off that difficult

combination of both literary and popular success.

His latest book is called The Boy Behind The Curtain

and it's a series of essays, or true stories, about his life and the

Is The Boy Behind The Curtain the manual which explains what makes Tim

Well, I wouldn't be so direct as that.

But I guess I just got to a point in my life where

having made things up for a job for a living I was trying to explain

Why did you feel the need to do that?

You are a pretty self-effacing guy, you do not court

That's the thing, I wasn't initially writing them for a reader,

as just to understand where I've come from,

the kinds of person I've been, the kinds of versions of

So it's just sort of unpacking, I suppose.

There are things you forget about your own

life that re-emerge once you reach the lofty plateau of middle age.

How difficult did you find it writing

about yourself and were you any good at it?

No, I didn't feel I was any good at it, it was very hard

work, because as I've said, I've spent a lifetime making stuff up and

it's quite low responsibility really when you are a novelist.

I mean, you have a responsibility to the thing

itself to make it work, so that it's organically hole and authentic.

But when you are writing about yourself

in terms of giving an account of yourself

you are also including the

lives and well-being of others, and no one joined up

So, yeah, you have a kind of responsibility not to trample all

I just thought, this is why I'm not a

journalist, this is why I'm a novelist.

And yet I pressed on and I suppose I found accidentally I had a book.

Let's delve a bit deeper, the book has in my view, one of the most

arresting opening sentences I've read Ian Lawlor long time and I

wondered if you would read us a short extract from the beginning.

When I was a kid I liked to stand at the window

I hid behind the curtain in my

parents' bedroom with a 22 and whenever anyone

bead on them, I held them in the weapon's sight

They had no idea I was lurking there, 13 years old, armed and

watchful, and that was the best part of it.

Handling the rival indoors without adult supervision was

And I saw the sense in this regulation, and yet at 13 whenever I

have the house to myself I went straight to the wardrobe, and

through the rifle out. I handled it soberly with appropriate awe,

respect laced with fear, but then I carried it out, to the window and

aimed it at innocent passers by. This didn't only happen in a Time

Lord two, I did it for months, I stood behind the curtain alert and

alone looking down the barrel of a gun at strangers.

LAUGHTER Let's talk about this boy with the

rifle, why did you do it? Well, I guess this is what I was asking

myself during the writing and one of the reasons I wrote it and for a

while I forgot I even did it. We had just moved from suburban Perth, my

dad was a copper, he had been transferred to the south coast of

Western Australia to a town called Albani which at the time was an

active whaling town. I found myself amongst strangers, the weather was

different, it was British weather really. -- Albany. That's the

politest way I could describe it. I didn't know anybody and I was about

to go into high school for the first time. I think I just felt besieged

and in an alien place. I was anxious, I think. I would go to the

window and I would be calm and I looked down the rifle sight and be

able to contain the world and people to just this very narrow focus. But

it was a very dangerous thing, even with an unloaded rifle to be

standing at a window pointing it at strangers. Had I been seen, had the

rifle barrel snagged on mum's pristine curtain and the trajectory

of my life would have been altered, in a small town, my dad was the cop.

I mean, I could have been shot! Family is important to you and the

book indeed is dedicated to your mum and dad and they make many

appearances in the book, not all of them flattering. I wonder what they

did make of reading it. They said, Tim, did you have any idea what your

dad will make of this, soiling himself in public? I said, you don't

know my dad, he's going to love this. Mum reads it to him in bed

once a month. She took it to a group and the ladies laughed like drains,

as they say. You touched at the beginning on how this book enabled

you to work through some things that have influenced your fiction and one

of the re-occurring themes, it seems to me, our chaos, accidents and

chance, the way that life in weight spins on a dime. I'm thinking in

your novel Cloudstreet how Sam pickles loses his fingers right at

the beginning of the book and Fish has the accident that many ways goes

on to define the whole of the book. I just wondered where that came

from. I think it came from our family culture which was defined by

the old man's job. Dad was a traffic cop. We would go to the police

picnic, the Christmas picnic every year, and as families we would hive

off into our groups, they would be liquor and gaming over there, heavy

haulage up there, the vice families would all gather around the cake and

the merry-go-round and we were in traffic. Traficant subgroups, we

were in accidents. All our dads and mums were in the job, as it was

called, but when we asked what is your old man do, yeah, the old man

is in accidents. Accidents were family culture, employment, dad was

a motorcycle cop and his job was to go and either stop people from

speeding, or fine them for speeding, or pick up the pieces when it all

came unglued. So in a sense we lived in a very safe, nurturing household

where mum and dad did everything they could to keep disorder outside.

But, you know, dad, whether he liked it or not, brought havoc home with

him every night, every day. And some days you could tell, some evenings

if he came in, you could tell that he even at a prank and you knew it

had been a serious one, or a fatal, the old man's been out at a fatal,

which sort of made it sound very normal but it's terrible. He'd come

home, his mood would be different, he would smell different, he would

smell of disinfectant and petrol and this weird iron smell, that was

human blood. This confluence he would bring home with him physically

you would pick upon as a kid. Trauma was sort of central in a lot of ways

to our happy life. Through my dad's work I was seeing how quickly and

how often people's safe, predictable happy lives were changed in a

moment. You were literally T-bone and by life, something would come

along and smack into you and that's been my bread and butter as a

novelist in a way. Your father had an accident when you were five and

you had a serious accident when you were 18, which in the book you

described as a gift. I wondered why that was. It's taken me a long time

to realise that some of the terrible things that happened to us in our

lives and do providers certain opportunities, and in my case I went

to an 18th birthday party, I went late and someone dropped me off just

as the cake ran out and I got a lift home with somebody and I woke up in

hospital. We'd gone through the front wall of a girls' school in a

car and I was in hospital for a while. Physically my life changed as

a result. And what it meant was in breach really, was that I hurtled

faster into the writing life. It intensified my vocation in a way.

There were certain physical things that I had planned on being able to

do. By this stage I was committed to being a writer. I always knew that

was a dead gig when it came to making a living but I thought I

would do that and I'm a big strong lad, I could work on it building

site, or work as a deckhand on a lobster boat. After the accident I

just couldn't do that. Do you honestly think you would not have

been a writer had you not have that accident? I would have been a writer

but I would have been on a slower train. All of my friends were having

a good time and I think I wrote three books before I was 24th and

got married and had a baby. I was really strangely intensely focused.

You had at the age of ten still up in front of your classmates and

said, "I want to be a writer." What was their reaction? I think I said I

am going to be a writer. The presumption that then seems much

more breathtaking now. I had never met a writer until I went to

university and I didn't know I would go to university because people like

me didn't go to university when I was a kid. I don't know where they

came from. I think I wrote a good poem that impressed the student

teacher and maybe it was just that shot of adrenaline of approval that

someone finally understood what I thought about myself. You don't get

many moments in life when someone agrees with you fundamentally. And I

got a good enough Mark. But everyone laughed, you know, and they were

right to laugh. What a ridiculous thing to say and what a ridiculous

thing to try to beat, particularly in Australia in the 60s. To be a

writer and make a living, it's all wrong. As I've said before I grew up

on the wrong side of the wrong country in the wrong hemisphere,

being a literary novelist. My goodness. We talked about your

accident at 18 and then you talked about how you wrote feverishly and

in many ways those early years are characterised by your desire to

write but it was also an economic necessary, wasn't it? You had a

young family. And I write you had three desks in your study? Yes. If

you got stuck on one project you could wield the chair over to the

other one. Explain that. We were young and poor and I was writing

almost a book every year, I think I wrote almost ten books in my 20s. I

guess because I can but mostly because I had to. So I had this room

that was essentially an enclosed veranda. The stumps were gone so the

stomach it was sloping down, you know, the chairs of the -- the

wheels of the chair rolling forwards. I had three desks on this

veranda which was freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer. If

I got stuck on something I just couldn't afford to try and figure it

out so I would just leave it because I'm a great void of conflict, and I

would just go on to do something else. The problem would solve itself

in my absence. Yes. And then you had this enormous success with your

novel Cloudstreet, which has been described as the great Australian

novel. It sold in its hundreds of thousands. Did that take the

pressure off quiz like financially, yeah, it saved our bacon. I have a

certain affection for that book. Quite literally that Christmas my

wife drove down to the city, we had no money in the bank at all. She

went and asked if we could have come I think it was 150 bucks, if they

could spot us 150 bucks to get us through Christmas, to buy some food,

and maybe buy the kids a couple of presents. She had to do this

humiliating song and dance at the bank. It was only a few months later

that we were getting calls from not just the branch manager but the big

executives at the bank asking if we would like to come out to lunch. We

politely declined. It was really that close. We were desperate. That

made life a little easier for us. In every sense except walking down the

street. Suddenly we were visible. We were living in this tiny fishing

town and I was the only male in the town that wasn't either a skipper or

a deckhand and we had a big veggie garden and I had long hair. Everyone

thought I was a drug dealer until I was on television as this writer of

Cloudstreet. I was an overnight success after ten books. It has not

all been plain sailing because you write in the book, you describe it

as having a nervous breakdown, when writing another novel called Dirt

Music and this is not you at the beginning of your career, this was

20 years in. I'd been writing this book for seven years and I thought

I'd finished my last draft and I told my publishers it was all good

to go and they announced it to the world that there was this book

coming from me. It had a slot, it was all real, and then there was

this day when it was finished, my wife left to go to work and I'm

wrapping it up to send this dirty great thing off, she got home at the

end of the day and I were still there wrapping it up, unwrapping it,

looking through. I had this sick feeling that it wasn't fair. I

wanted to just burn it and run away and never speak of it again. It felt

like people's jobs were on the line and I made this commitment to

people. As part of my family upbringing I just couldn't let them

down, because they would be so disappointed in me. I got up in the

middle of the night one night and just thought, stuff it, I got on my

bike and I wrote down to the office in the dark and I got a ream of

green photocopy paper, sharp and 20 pencils, and started again from the

beginning and rewrote the entire novel in pencil in 55 days and

nights. I think the first night that I wrote I went for so long that I

stopped and it was dark and I think was the second day or night after

the second day and I just kept going in this kind of red-hot fury. I

finished the book and sent it off and it got published. I would never

do that again. Some of the endings of your books some readers find

rather vexatious. I'm thinking in particular of your novel The Riders

and you talk in this book that you are a novelist who resists the full

shape of closure. I wonder why you do leave the door ajar. I think it

reflects the openness of life. I think closure is a construct.

Closure as a therapeutic idea has merit, there is no question. But for

most of our lives we don't have resolution because it's not

available. In many instances it's not possible. So many of us die

without getting to the end of the sentence. But the idea that you

would wrap everything up at the end of the book seems cheap to me. A

thought about your relationship with the natural landscape, because I

don't think anybody can read a Tim Winton novel without smelling the

salt, feeling the sea on their skin. I did wonder, is landscape

ultimately more important to you than plot? Yes. Landscape's where I

begin, it's the first character. It dictates the logic of what's going

to happen in the story. It dictates who the characters will be, what

kind of people they will be, what sort of lives they will lead. And,

of course, in Australia landscape is really significant. You know, in the

shaping of character. You are a great surfer... I don't know if I'm

a great surfer, I'm a recidivist surfer, I've been doing it since I

was five years old and I'm keener than I was when I was a teenager.

You still surf? Yeah, I love to surf, it is liberating. It is a bit

like a writing for me. Writing, and light reading, when it's going well

as a reader it's the same as when you are a writer, you are in the

eternal present tense, you are taken up with riding the momentum of the

wave. As a novelist and that is kind of what I do as well, I go up to the

desk every morning, I wait, I bobbed around, and I'm waiting for

something to show up. It is some event from across the horizon, some

energy that I turn around and try to match its speed and ride it to the

beat and the feeling is divine when it works.

LAUGHTER Thank you.

Tim, it's been great, thank you so much. Tim Winton.

Hello. We are seeing a big leap up in