The sea brought new people here, driven by the Roaring Forties onto the cays and reefs that lie just below the surface. Australia was ‘discovered’ by Dutchmen who failed to hang a left, who waited a day too long to come about and ply north for Batavia. They met the land in terrible midnight rendings, in screaming and the grabbing at flotsam, and the land that saved them appalled them. The coins and clay pipes and pots of those wrecks lie stashed in many a fibro house along this coast. Plundered booty from Dutch wrecks is the outlawed form of beachcombing. The blasting of reefs is behind us, but the relics are still salted away. They are sobering souvenirs. When they come out of desk drawers and from behind wardrobes, unwound from their swathes of cotton wool, they are strangely hard to handle, almost unpleasant to touch.
My week is shaped by weather and tide. In shops and on verandas the state of the sea will give me conversations where they mightn’t otherwise exist. I live the split-shift life I learned at the mouth of the Greenough River: outside in the mornings, inside when the breeze comes in. I work indoors and am mostly fiddling away at interior things, but several times each day I catch myself looking outward, squinting for something on the horizon. From my fibro house I see the dunes that I seem never to have been without. I fish and dive and the sea is still rich as my memory of it. I am small and I know it and am grateful to have it spelled out to me week after week by the shifting sea and the endless land at my back. Gifts and signs wash ashore here on the hard white beach, and I stoop with my kids, some days, and pick them up and hold them to the light.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges his debt to the following works: Australian Seashores by W.J. Dakin, Angus & Robertson, 1980, used with permission; The Confessions of a Beachcomber by E.J. Banfield, Lloyd O’Neil, 1908, 1974; ‘Footprints’, from A Beachcomber’s Diary by John Blight, Angus & Robertson, 1952, 1987, reproduced with permission; Veranda by Philip Drewe, Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1993; ‘The Dry Salvages’ by T.S. Eliot from The Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, 1944; The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo, Heritage Press, 1961.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NARELLE AUTIO
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery
COVER
Snorkellers, Clovelly, NSW, 2001
series: Watercolours
type C print
80 x 120cm
CHAPTER 1
Before School, 2004
series: Watercolours
type C print
80 x 120cm
CHAPTER 2
Black Marlin, 2004
series: Watercolours
type C print
80 x 120cm
CHAPTER 3
Bait fish, Manly, NSW, 2001
series: Watercolours
type C print
80 x 120cm
Big Wednesday, 2004
series: Watercolours
type C print
80 x 120cm
CHAPTER 5
Untitled #3, 2002
series: Not of this Earth
pigment print
66 x 100cm
CHAPTER 6
Cocoon, 2006
type C print
58 x 86cm
CHAPTER 7
Splash, Cottesloe, WA, 2004
series: Watercolours
type C print
80 x 120cm
About the Author
Tim Winton has published twenty-one books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-five 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.
ALSO BY TIM WINTON
Novels
An Open Swimmer
Shallows
That Eye, the Sky
Cloudstreet
The Riders
Dirt Music
Breath
Eyrie
Stories
Scission
Minimum of Two
The Turning
For younger readers
Jesse
Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo
The Bugalugs Bum Thief
Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster
Lockie Leonard, Legend
Blueback
The Deep
Non-fiction
Down to Earth (with Richard Woldendorp)
Smalltown (with Martin Mischkulnig)
Plays
Rising Water
Signs of Life
Shrine
PENGUIN BOOKS
Penguin Group (Australia)
250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Group (NZ)
67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Plantagenet Press, 1993
Published in paperback by Pan Macmillan Australia, 1993
Published in paperback by Picador Australia, 1998
This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2010
Copyright © Tim Winton, 1993
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Design by Allison Colpoys © Penguin Group (Australia)
Photographs, including cover photograph, © Narelle Autio,
courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery
Colour reproduction by Splitting Image Colour Studio Pty Ltd, Clayton, Victoria
eISBN 9781742538068
penguin.com.au