Living on the Edge

Tim Winton became a storyteller out of raw fear. As a 12-year-old uprooted from suburban Perth, Australia, and replanted in a small port town when his policeman father was transferred, the new boy was an immediate target. Winton diverted the school bully by regaling him with harrowing road-accident stories gleaned from his dad’s experiences. It proved a quick-thinking escape tool and served as excellent practice for someone who, from the age of 10, was determined to be an author.

Winton, a two-time Booker nominee, has always drawn unapologetically from life for his prolific fiction — eight novels, three short-story collections and multiple children’s books, including the Lockie Leonard series. His connection to Australia’s coastline is his other great inspiration — given its vast, arid interior, the country’s seaboard is home to the majority of the population and, as Winton notes, “nowhere else on the continent is the sense of being trapped between sea and desert so strong as in Western Australia.” That geographical connection gives a distinctly regional flavor to prose of universal scope and marks Winton as a deeply Australian writer (he was anointed as a Living Treasure by Australia’s National Trust in 1998). So do his literary inspirations — Australian greats like Randolph Stow, Patrick White and Xavier Herbert. All three, he says, “helped me hold my nerve — to see that it was O.K. to write about your own isolated and unimportant region in your own voice.”

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Land’s Edge was first published in Australia in 1993 but is only just now making its international debut. The book is not so much a memoir of seaside living as a timeless meditation on place and the intimate affirmation of a writer’s life lived on his own terms. Winton’s intention, he says, was to capture “a particular lifestyle in a certain far-flung environment,” and the work is crammed with salient details. He writes about the pleasures of beachcombing, describes whales being carved up (an experience Winton, who became an active environmentalist in the mid-1990s, pinpoints as “the earliest inklings of an ecological consciousness”) and gets chased by an angry lothario after interrupting a pair of lovers in the dunes.

The beach-dwelling hermits and exiles Winton comes across — “along the coast I met solitary men in squatters’ shacks surrounded by raw bush and sea, and I saw a life for myself out there until I began to sense their fear” — give shape to the sad-sack losers, gamblers and drifters who pop up across his work from 1982’s An Open Swimmer to 2001’s Dirt Music and beyond. Here, too, are Winton’s experiences of the sea, the surfing and free-diving linchpins of 2008’s Breath: “I take a breath and dive to where the water is cooler, deeper, where the pressure rings the changes through my whole body. I relax, drifting down, feeling the water run over my skin like a tremor of lust. The sea rings and quacks and clicks. My heartbeat is soft and regular. I am gliding, flying, with the country unfolding below.” And like his characters Fish in 1991’s Cloudstreet and Vic in 2005’s The Turning, Winton has come close to drowning: as a 9-year-old, out on a routine lobster-hunting expedition with his father and uncle, Winton was momentarily trapped under their dinghy when it was overturned by a series of rogue waves.

In his beachcomber days, the rhythms of coastal weather dictated daily activity: “On the west coast … the morning is for the beach and the afternoon is a time to find shelter.” Today, Winton says, “I still get up at dawn every day and go out in a dinghy and pull my lobster pots,” before confronting every writer’s fear of “having to pull something out of the air.” And he still calls Western Australia’s coastline home. “If there’s swell, I surf. If the water is particularly clear, I snorkel. If the sea is flat and the wind is calm, I fish. The rest of the time I work — indoors, in my head.” It’s a weird existence, he says, this life of “lobsters, waves and paragraphs. But there it is,”

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