“I grew up on the world’s largest island.”
This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton’s beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir of how this unique landscape has shaped him and his writing.
For over thirty years, Winton has written novels in which the natural world is as much a living presence as any character. What is true of his work is also true of his life: from boyhood, his relationship with the world around him―rockpools, seacaves, scrub, and swamp―was as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets of the south-east, walking in the high rocky desert fringe, diving at Ningaloo Reef, bobbing in the sea between sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, with its rhythms, its dangers, its strange sustenance, and learned to see landscape as a living process.
Island Home is the story of how that relationship with the Australian landscape came to be, and how it has determined his ideas, his writing, and his life. It is also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet. Much more powerfully than a political idea, or an economy, Australia is a physical entity. Where we are defines who we are, in ways we too often forget to our detriment, and the country’s.
Wise, rhapsodic, exalted―Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country makes us who we are.
A very good travel through the history of settlement A very good travel through the history of settlement, the beauty of travel through Australia to destinations many Australian will never visit but an encouragement to learn more about far-flung places and their beauty and perhaps b e onspired to explore.
As an Australian I found this book quite lovely and … As an Australian I found this book quite lovely and it made me ashamed of how we have treated the Aborigines and also the need for us to be more ecologicaly minded.
Excellent Memoir Tim Winton’s Island Home had the same effect on me as Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore had in that it shines a light on what it means to be an Australian. Tim’s love for his island home is apparent on every page and I found it fascinating to read about how the landscape, sea and sense of place shaped not only him as a man, but his writing as well. I like the fact that he respects working people and loves the environment, clearly seeing the impact one has on the other. A beautiful book in every way.