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''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.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Dedication: for Hannah Rachel Bell
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Epigraph:
Turn home, the sun goes down; swimmer, turn home.
–Judith Wright 'The Surfer'
My island home is waiting for me
–Neil Murray,
'My Island Home'
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
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Tim Winton’s Palimpsestuous Australianness in Island Home : A Landscape Memoir
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia , vol. 9 no. 2 2018;'Taking as a starting point the metaphor of the palimpsest, this essay explores Winton’s sense of being Australian in his 2015 landscape memoir Island Home. Sarah Dillon’s distinction between the palimpsestic and the palimpsestuous, which draws on Foucault’s own differentiation between the workings of archaeology and genealogy respectively, provides the wider frame. A palimpsestic reading of Island Home along the lines of Abraham and Torok’s reflections on mourning and loss, more specifically their theory of the psychic crypt, throws light on Winton’s “inexpressible mourning” (Abraham and Torok 130) for the loss of an unshaken pre-apology Australianness. Complementarily, a palimpsestuous approach to the text evinces the emergence, among the traces of white nationalism, of a new pattern in Winton’s latest additions to his palimpsest of a nation in Island Home. Read horizontally rather than vertically, Winton’s book reveals an interest in what he calls “an emotional deepening” (168), a new sense of relatedness that acknowledges the damage done to the Indigenous population at the same time that it honours the contribution of the rightful inhabitants of Australia to the current national narrative, creating, in this way, possible openings for non-Indigenous belonging.'
Source: Abstract.
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Eco-Memoir : Protecting, Restoring, and Repairing Memory and Environment
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Mediating Memory : Tracing the Limits of Memoir 2017; (p. 141-156)'Jessica White examines eco-memoir in two examples: Tim Winton's Island Home (2015) and Kim Scott's and Hazel Brown's Kayang and Me (2005). She explores how memory can describe the loss of an environ-ment but also promote its recovery, and the implications for each writer's identity. Her chapter argues that, alongside science, literary expressions of memory have an important role to play in raising awareness of the sustainable use and protection of our environment.'
Source: Introduction (p.6).
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I Pity the Poor Immigrant
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 1 2017;'Many years ago I read a now forgotten novel by a now forgotten author, which had a truly wonderful preface. It read, simply, this bloody book nearly killed me. I therefore dedicate it, dear Reader, to myself. There is a delicate irony at play, I think, in my long remembering this dedication while the book itself is erased completely from my memory. I’ll touch on the interplay of knowledge and memory in due course. What I want to start by saying, though, is that in my case, as in the case of that forgotten preface’s author, while writing can be a horrifically stressful business - and while writing this paper did indeed feel like it was going to kill me - the Author is emphatically Not Dead.' (Introduction)
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The Fiction of Tim Winton : Relational Ecology in an Unsettled Land
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , November vol. 17 no. 2017; (p. 63-71) Complicating the processes of belonging in place, for non-Indigenous Australians, is the growing realization that they live in a huge, diverse land, a place in which they are not native. The fiction of popular Anglo-Saxon Australian novelist Tim Winton echoes the understanding of poet Judith Wright, for whom “two strands – the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion – have become part of me. It is a haunted country” (Wright 1991: 30). This essay will explore Winton’s novels in which there is a pervasive sense of unease and loss experienced by the central characters, in relation to place and land. Winton’s characters – Queenie Cookson and her traumatic witnessing of the barbaric capture and flaying of whales; Fish Lamb’s near-drowning in the sea, and Lu Fox’s quest for refuge in the wilderness, prophet-like, after the tragedy of his family’s death – are all written with a haunting sense of white unsettlement and displacement, where such natural forces – the sea and its creatures, the land’s distances and risks – confront and re-form the would-be dominators. -
Review : Island Home
2017
single work
review
essay
— Appears in: Social Alternatives , vol. 36 no. 2 2017; (p. 56)'Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015) carries the sub-title ‘A landscape memoir’, and it will not surprise readers of Winton’s fiction that he handles the elastic form of the memoir with novelistic flair. He eschews conventional chronology, arranging a looser narrative mosaic befitting the mode of peripheral perception he celebrates: the power of 'vision beyond mere glimpsing', as he puts it in his earlier essay bearing the same sub-title, ‘Strange passion: a landscape memoir’ (1999). (Introduction)
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Winton Salutes Our Island Home
2015
single work
review
— Appears in: The West Australian , 22 September 2015; (p. 7)
— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir 2015 single work autobiography -
Tim Winton's Island Home Isn't Memoir, It's a Cultural Call to Arms
2015
single work
review
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 13 October 2015;
— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir 2015 single work autobiography -
When a Writer Keeps Watch on the Beat of His Heartland
2015
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 24-25 October 2015; (p. 29) The Saturday Age , 24-25 October 2015; (p. 29)
— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir 2015 single work autobiography -
Putting a Value on What Lies Beneath
2015
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 31 October - 1 November 2015; (p. 20)
— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir 2015 single work autobiography -
Bigger Fish to Fry
2015
single work
review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 31 October 2015; (p. 20)
— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir 2015 single work autobiography -
Tim Winton
Island under a Cloud
Rick Feneley
(interviewer),
2015
single work
interview
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 19-20 September 2015; (p. 4-5) The Sunday Age , 20 September 2015; (p. 10) -
Winton Will Always Call Australia His Island Home
2015
single work
column
— Appears in: The West Australian , 3 October 2015; (p. 91) -
Best Reads – End of Story
2015
single work
column
— Appears in: The Sunday Mail , 20 December 2015; (p. 24) -
Another Country : The Bush Is a Person, Wrapped in a Landscape
2016
single work
autobiography
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2016; Meanjin , Autumn vol. 75 no. 1 2016; (p. 46-55) -
A New Colonial Era of Publishing Lies Ahead
2016
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 21-22 May 2016; (p. 36)
Awards
- 2016 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
- 2016 winner Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) — Australian General Non-Fiction Book of the Year
- 2016 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Non-Fiction
- 2016 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards — Non-Fiction Book Award
- 2015 highly commended The Fellowship of Australian Writers Victoria Inc. National Literary Awards — FAW Excellence in Non-fiction Award