Words from the west Down Under

Easy-going ex-surfer Tim Winton is an ordinary bloke with a brilliant talent. The author of Cloudstreet tells Angela Long about his love of the Australian landscape and why his new novel took seven years to write

Some writers can invest their work with a mystic significance, with a message to the planet embedded in their prose. On the other hand, some more grounded artists say what they do is just straightforward creation - and yet it can be far more effective in addressing universal human dilemmas.

Tim Winton, ponytailed forty-something with an unassuming manner, falls into the latter category. The Australian author of works including Cloudstreet, the magical novel which also delighted Dublin audiences when it was presented as a five-hour theatrical experience here in 1999, he looks a bit of an old surfie, which he is. Like many old surfies, he loves nature, the sea, sky, and the majesty of the scenery inland as well.

Luckily for us, he also loves to write, and has done since he was a teenager in the late 1970s, when he had his first stories published. His first novel, An Open Swimmer, came out when he was 21. He has just published Dirt Music, a story in which the scenery is the star, almost as much as the few twisted characters. The action moves from a tough fishing town north of Perth, the West Australian capital, to Broome, the infamous pearl fishing town in the north-west, and goes right up to the tropical far north.

"I enjoy writing about landscapes and the places I love," Winton says, during a flying (only just, thanks to Aer Lingus) visit to Dublin to promote Dirt Music. "I don't have any messages, there are no big ideas I'm putting across. I write because I love it." Despite that, there are big themes in his fiction: memory, identity, how people can take themselves to the edge - very much a theme in the new novel. It was seven years in the writing, and part of that involved some hugely enjoyable field research.

"Travelling around up north is my idea of a good time. I've been going up to the Kimberleys [a rugged mountain range rich in mineral ores\] for years. A friend has a very remote fishing camp in the Admiralty Gulf, which is five-and-a-half hours in the air from Perth . . . it is the distance from Mexico to Canada, and yet you're in the same state. (These sort of distances are taken for granted by Australians, but the thought does make Europeans gawp.)

"Up there it is ravishing, in both senses of the word," Winton says. "It is an unbelievably gorgeous natural world." He lived in a cave for a time, as his "hero", Luther Fox, does in the novel, and endured cyclones and crocodiles. "The thing is you have to be on the lookout for crocs all the time you are in your boat, and if they get too close just give 'em a whack with the paddle."

He is a relaxed and easy-going bloke, the unassuming son of a policeman from a working-class suburb, a man who dotes on his wife and kids, and loves a beer and song with his friends. He lives in Fremantle, a port town about half-an-hour's drive from Perth, a hedonistic place which went all nouveau-riche about 20 years ago and has since, to an extent, recovered. Fremantle, less fashionable, has a much more hippie air.

He grew up in Scarborough, a beachside suburb of Perth which, although regarded locally as nothing special, has, believe me, aqua sea, surf like billowing ice cream, and seemingly endless fine blond sand. "You could see if the surf was up from my schoolyard," says Winton. "And if it was, I was in it. It was the same for a lot of us . . . in fact, it was the same for some of the teachers!"

However, he is also an ordinary bloke with a brilliant talent. He found it young, when he started to write "just because I love reading so much . . . and my family liked yarning, telling stories, the old campfire tradition, but it was Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain who made me this." Humour is an important part of his fiction's appeal, though it is subtle; in Dirt Music it is largely confined to some of the dialogue among certain characters, with all the dry economy of words that is the quintessential Australian wit. He says his characters are often said to show the frontier spirit, which would be strongest in Australia in the west, the last state to be founded, which has in Perth the most isolated modern capital city anywhere: it is a five-hour flight there from the eastern state capitals of Melbourne and Sydney. "West coasts are like this . . . they are the last places to be settled, it's harder to live there. This is what I think people really mean when they talk about frontier spirit . . . showing courage and endurance in the face of adversity. It is also 'this is mine, now you bugger off, I'm hanging on to this and I don't want to share with any Johnny-come-more-lately'."

He distinguishes between this frontier spirit and the spirit, if that is the word, of Pauline Hanson, erstwhile leader of the One Nation Party and a severe critic of government aid for aboriginals and asylum-seekers. "It's not the same thing with Hanson. Those people are just nostalgic for Australia of the 1950s, when everybody was white."

He speaks of Australia's current government policies, especially with regard to refugees and Aboriginals, with disgust. The Liberal Party, under Prime Minister John Howard, has frozen moves started by its Labor Party predecessors to give Aboriginals native land and higher status. "It is so terrible that, after the start of something fine and decent, all that should be stopped." He shakes his head, lost for words, disappointed.

Winton has been to Dublin briefly a few times before, but knows Ireland better than that. In 1987, he lived in the gatehouse of Leap Castle, in Co Offaly, for six months, on foot of a kind offer by the owner, who lived in Australia and was an admirer of Winton's writing. "He heard I was going to Paris (to take up a writing fellowship) and rang up to say, 'I hear you're going to be out of Australia for a while, would you like the use of my house in Ireland?' " Much of Cloudstreet was written during that sojourn. It took about two-and-a-half years to complete that novel, his Booker Prize-short-listed The Riders took five, and now seven for Dirt Music. "The older I get the longer it takes. When I was young I was hungry, impatient, I felt I had so much to say I had to get out there." He is pleased to hear that Dirt Music was reviewed favourably in the Irish Times (May 26th). "Ireland is one of the places, along with the American South, where I would really like to be 'got'," he says, meaning "understood". "They are places where people felt excluded, forgotten, yet became distinctive, and created better things, in many ways, than the dominant culture." West Australia is obviously also in the picture here.

As we are talking, he breaks off to admire a painting on the wall. It's simple, abstract, even stark , but with a big splash of colour that warms it. No wonder he likes it. That combination of sparse elegance and passion is a trademark of his prose.

Dirt Music is published by Picador in hardback, priced €21.99