Tim Winton has always been associated with the waters of Western Australia. He swims, he surfs, and his love for the sea has fed into many of his novels. He gave that passion close attention in Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir, which was published in 1993.
Now he is turning his attention to how Australia's terra firma has shaped him as a person and as writer. As he says, "I grew up on the world's largest island". Penguin will publish the four-times Miles Franklin winner's Island Home: A Landscape Memoir in September under its Hamish Hamilton imprint.
The book investigates how Australia as a physical entity determined Winton's ideas, his writing and his life. As he puts it: "This country leans in on you. It weighs down hard. Like family. To my way of thinking, it is family." The book also argues that greater care needs to be given to the land, failure to do so will be to our detriment and that of the country.
In it he writes: "To be a writer preoccupied with landscape is to accept a weird and constant tension between the indoors and the outdoors. I am so thin-skinned about weather and so eager for physical sensation I seem to spend a shameful amount of energy fretting and plotting escape, like a schoolboy. Sat near a window as a pupil, I was a dead loss. And I'm not much different now. I can't even hang a painting in my workroom, for what else is a painting but a window? My thoughts are drawn outward; I'm entranced."
Penguin publishing director Ben Ball said the book had two strands: extraordinary insight into how the mind of one of our great writers works and how the identity of Australia is more a geographic experience than a political or economic one. "When we're away we pine for the landscape and we don't factor that in enough. In this book, you are where the bare foot meets the earth, right next to Tim."
Island Home will be published on September 23 and will cost $39.99
