With special guest:
- Tim Winton
… in conversation with Bill Kable
For our regulars this week’s interview is a bit different. Due to technical problems we do not have a sound file of the interview with Tim Winton. However set out below is a transcript which we hope you will find interesting. In the interview we talk about Tim’s latest book The Shepherd’s Hut and also explore some of the issues raised in the book in a wider context. In particular we are interested in Tim’s thoughts about his characters, where they come from in his mind and the relationships between them.
Tim has often explored the relationships that boys form. In this book Tim’s feral young male comes to an uneasy and difficult peace with an old man living in the wilderness as a hermit. The relationship is set against the timeless and beautiful West Australian remoteness described in Tim’s usual colourful language even as his characters speak in a less literate way.
The attached sound file is an excerpt from a speech Tim presented in Melbourne earlier this year kindly made available to us by Tim’s publishers Penguin Random House.
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH TIM WINTON
Sydney 23 March 2018
BILL: Our guest today is the Boy behind the curtain, Tim Winton. Tim is the author of 29 books, he is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers and thinkers and essayists. Since his first novel in 1981 he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tim welcome to Dads on the Air.
TIM: Oh Thanks Bill
BILL: Tim in your new book The Shepherd’s Hut, is that a continuation of your exploration of the relationship between men and boys, men and their fathers/father figures?
TIM: Yes I have been writing about broken men and lost boys for a very long time more than thirty years so in a sense it is not new territory for me that’s for sure. I guess in this particular instance it is a particularly damaged boy and a particularly brutal father so yeah.
BILL: And after this thirty years of writing about it do you have a clear idea of what manhood is at this stage?
TW Oh I don’t know if I have any clear idea it’s like asking an old person on their death bed what the human condition is like they have some idea but they haven’t had long enough to study. I think I understand some of the challenges and pitfalls of manhood at this late stage of middle age I’m conscious of some of the limitations that men are either submitting to or are subject to. I think a lot of men are stuck where they began, they are stuck on the iron rails of a very narrow version of masculinity which is not good for women and not good for men.
BILL: I’ve read that your approach is to look for men being authentic, tender and honest. Do you think they are worthwhile things to aim at?
TIM: Of course. I think that narrow version of what I was talking about before; it is something that happens when we are boys when kids have the tenderness and the vulnerability and the dreaminess. I think it produces people with a very narrow range of emotional resources and we see the fruit of that in the way that those men become fathers and then replicate that; this kind of narrowness and impoverishment which is pitiful really and which has a terrible effect on the people around them. If your way of being a bloke makes women unsafe and diminishes their lives then that is not a decent way of being a person let alone a man.
BILL: Well in The Shepherd’s Hut it really focusses on the relationship between the old man and a young boy who says he is seventeen but I think he might be a bit younger than that.
TIM: Yes he is definitely a minor.
BILL: Anyway the relationship with women is really limited to Shirley, his mother and she had a pretty tough, boring not very exciting life didn’t she?
TIM: Yes there is a sense in the story that she had some kind of life before marriage but in a sense from the point she was married onwards her life was diminished. On top of that she suffered awful violence and humiliation at the hands of her husband. You know this fifteen year old boy his experience of women is to see them humiliated and dominated and he feels polluted by the fact that he has seen this and has not been able to defend her. Of course his experience of men is of brutes or were domineering, sullen, full of worthless rage so Jaxie’s modelling has not been very enriching. I guess the book follows Jaxie’s path as he tries to and then escapes from his home town and runs away out to the bush and then the goldfields and then the salt lake of Western Australia and you wonder if he will ever exceed, if he will ever leave his origins, ever leave the world he is from. I guess that is a question we are all faced with, can we ever leave the world we are from, the ideas we grow up with. Particularly if those ideas haven’t been very nurturing or very fruitful the sad fact is that many of us endlessly replicate the narrow palate of emotions and responses. Those things create trauma and like racism, misogyny is one of the great engines of intergenerational trauma. It attaches to families and metastasises and it resonates down the generations. The great challenge is how do we interrupt that, how do we liberate them from the world that they’re from and the reader wonders if Jaxie can ever exceed, outgrow or outlive his misogyny and find a way of being a man that’s fruitful, thats nurturing, that’s open, that’s vulnerable, that makes the life of people around him safe and happy. A lot of times people don’t realise there are a lot of unexamined privileges of power and we give off a kind of threat even if we are not conscious of it.
BILL: In speaking about those characters, when writing such a personal story as The Shepherd’s Hut do you feel the same about the characters as you did in your most recent book The Boy Behind the Curtain where in fact it was your own family?
TIM: Oh look! I come from a very different family than Jaxie Clackton mostly because there was no violence in our home but whomever I am writing about I am usually sympathetic to them. Unless you can feel what it is like on the inside of their lives it is very hard to write about them, it is very hard to write about them in a way that brings them to life. If you can’t somehow identify with your characters then they tend to look like puppets, a level of contempt, authorial contempt creeps in. I still recall what it was like to be a confused fifteen year old. I mean I was a boy at 13 in a country town who when faced with complexity; I went to High School in a town where I had only just arrived a week before, I didn’t know anyone, my first day in High School I was a bit overwhelmed really. I used to go into my parents’ room and pull out the family rifle and stand behind the window, behind a curtain and point the rifle at people as a way of calming myself down. I mean it is bizarre! Now I am horrified at what could have been a disaster for people. I didn’t put bullets in the rifle, I knew how to shoot I knew how these things worked but just the fact that I needed a rifle and I looked down the barrel of a gun at people in order to feel calm and in a weird way to control them. It was quite a masculine response to the world. But having said that it seemed to me that girls had a licence to share their problems, to talk and boys were expected to suck it up inside and “man up” whatever that really means, get out your rifle or your fists, whatever - one of those responses that we could all do without.
BILL: Yes that seems a long way away from the image that you have in everyone’s mind at the moment. Do you feel a responsibility towards Jaxie, I mean he is left in the car at the end? Do you wonder what happened to him?
TIM: Yes of course. Ever since I finished the final scene where he is stacking up the great western highway in a stolen vehicle eating goat chops and shotgun on the seat and heading up to meet his girlfriend he hopes or imagines will be waiting for him yes I wonder what his life will turn out to be, I wonder what his prospects are and hopefully the reader will have stayed with him, if readers have persisted with him this far they’ll wonder how he fares and you wonder if you can find a different way of being a man. Can he give up his machismo and his misogyny? But I guess you can ask the same questions about half the boys we know. Can they reach for something better or are they just going to endlessly replicate the patterns that have been put down before them? So many young men are just clinging to the script that people have put before them.
BILL: Tim, none of the main characters has any professed religion at this time in their life. Do you see any religious allegories in the scenes that are portrayed?
TIM: I’m aware that other people have but regardless of your religious tradition the idea of a young man going on a quest or undergoing an ordeal or a kind of a rite of passage as Jaxie seem to undergo during the course of this book we know that resonates in most or many religious traditions. The fact that he runs into an old bloke who is a ruined Irish Priest probably ups the ante a little bit later in the book but I think there are elements of people searching for something deeper or higher I think Jaxie as a profane, spiky, angry opinionated adolescent he doesn’t have much of a tradition of introspection, nobody talks about ideas in his family it’s all about knuckle down or knuckle up. But during the course of the story out there in the bush on his own he has lots of time to think and in fact people who find themselves in a wilderness situation are not just able to think, they are compelled to think, to contemplate and are really forced down to the ground of convenience so to speak. I think that part of what happens to Jaxie is that he gets to confront some ultimate things and although he had never thought much in abstract terms he had a kind of very flawed spirit life if you know what I mean in the form of this ruined priest who is not the most ideal mentor and not exactly what you would be hoping for in a guide for a young man but he does offer a form of masculinity and an avenue to think about life. By the end Jaxie is not quite the same boy that he was.
BILL: No and just thinking about the old man in the desert, Finton, can you see the attraction yourself of this hermit like existence?
TIM: Oh yes there are lots of hermits in my work. When I look back right to my very first book An Open Swimmer a lot of the stories were where a young man bumps into an older man who is living on his own and that used to come from my earlier life when I was 17, 18, 19 even 20 I used to drive down south on the West Australian coast and I used to bump into all these blokes with cars up on blocks or in their shacks or caravans or living in tents in the middle of nowhere and some of them were mad or mostly mad but they had run away from trauma, some of them had been to war, some of them had just run away from their families or the taxman and I was always fascinated by the lives they were leading and I always was interested in hermits I guess, the hermit tradition and the contemplative life of people who would park themselves out there and think about stuff or pray or try and work out the world in isolation and the busier your life gets the more attractive that looks I guess.
BILL: Finton at one point says “I am hardly the man to turn to for wisdom” but I think he does impart some wisdom to Jaxie as you said before if for nothing else he broadens his horizons.
TIM: Yes Finton is a person who has a really troubled past, he has obviously done something terribly wrong that he can never atone for but there is kindness in him, there is tenderness in him and when this dishevelled boy walks out of the shimmering distance on the salt lake he presents a very threatening figure to the old man but eventually he becomes not just a friend to the old man but the old man actually sees in the boy, almost all boys, he sees you know the possibilities of youth. This old guy wants Jaxie to succeed, he wants him to live he wants him to prosper and in a way he becomes a kind of a chance, if Jaxie can survive, if Jaxie can get free then it’s almost as though Finton McGillis ruined Irish priest can redeem himself, if he can save just one child and so a lot of the story revolves around the spiky relationship between three people in very different generations with different backgrounds but there’s this kind of dance going on a brutal ultimate thing about people doing what they can to carry life forward. And without spoiling it for the reader he pays the ultimate sacrifice he steps out and gives himself so the boy can survive.
BILL: If nothing else he has I think imparted into Jaxie the idea of peace and that seems to be the ultimate thing he is searching for. From your experience with younger male surfers do you think that is what the youth of today want? Is that what they are searching for?
TIM: I don’t know what they are searching for but they definitely need more guidance than they’re getting. When you consider how toxic the culture is I mean I’ve raised boys and I have grandchildren, but when I look back it was hard to impart good values to your kids twenty years ago and it is much harder now when you consider that boys in particular are exposed to images and ideas about women that a person of my generation might see only once or twice in their twenties a kid of 8, 9, or 10 can be exposed thirty times in a morning because they can go to the internet and the availability of devices it is just pouring out these toxic ideas and tropes I suppose so I think it is a huge challenge. Men in particular have a responsibility to step up and change the narrative so that when young people are repeating this poisonous stuff, the kind of things they are saying about girls and women and the assumptions they are making about their own superiority and women’s lack of status it is when men don’t respond to that, and say come on buddy pull your head in, do you realise what you are saying, if you are silent when that stuff is happening kids take it as tacit approval. I think a lot of men need to step up, I don’t think we take full responsibility I think that between men and boys the men lack all conviction, they lack gravity.
BILL: I think that is a common problem and it steps beyond men to parenting in general and a lot of parents these days seem afraid to parent and it makes you wonder when you read this book what advice you would give to Jaxie?
TIM: It’s hard to know where to start really. Yes well Jaxie is in a position in extremis it’s triage time for Jaxie. The work needs to be done earlier. And you’re right a lot of the heavy lifting gets done these days by teachers and by sports coaches who find themselves in loco parentis and they are dealing with people who have been unparented, young boys in particular who either by indulgence or neglect are without borders, without guidelines without a healthy template on how to be a person. When they come into the sports clubs or the classrooms it is pretty amazing to see who has to pick up the pieces. And that extends to the justice system where our detention centres and jails are heaving with those boys. They are consigned to a future as if they are on rails.
BILL: It is a fascinating topic and if we had the time, particularly you, it would be great to keep talking but we have reached the stage of the program where we ask our guests if they would like to pick a song so Tim Winton would you like to pick a song for us.
TIM: Yes I remember from when I was a boy a Harry Chapin song Cats in the Cradle. It is just a song that as I have grown up, I think I heard it once from the boy’s perspective and now I hear it from the old man’s perspective. It’s a song about seizing the moment, don’t put off the relationship until you’ve got the time and we’ll have a good time then. Now is the time for the good time.
Tim Winton
Tim Winton has published twenty-nine books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel,An Open Swimmer, won the Australian Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.
Song selection by our guest: Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin