Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is a scintillating saga about two families thrown together and finding common ground in "a big, old, rundown eyesore" of a house. Published in 1991 when the author was 31, it has the distinction of being his breakthrough novel and his most famous. For many, it also has the honour of being the great Australian novel. It isn't an accolade Winton takes seriously.
“I still can’t understand why that book worked,” he tells me. “It’s a big, baggy novel. It doesn’t have many conventional characters and it isn’t conventionally punctuated. I certainly didn’t set out to write the great Australian novel. I was just enjoying myself and seeing if I could get away with it.”
'Unapologetic about being an artist'
Winton has continued to get away with it, and deservedly so. His varied output – novels, plays, short stories, children’s books – has earned him popular appeal and literary acclaim. He has won Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award four times and has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize. In 1991, he was made a National Living Treasure. He knew at the age of ten that he wanted to be a writer. However, he could have been steered into doing something else.
“I came from a family of tradespeople. You honoured labour and the artefact. I had to somehow match the sensibility of the artist with that of the artisan. I’m unapologetic about being an artist, but I’m also in touch with my working class origins.” Winton’s novels unfold in prose that is both smooth-planed lyrical and rough-edged visceral. All but one play out in the wilds of his native Western Australia. “The books always start with place for me,” he says, “and then the people bubble up.” Many of those people are underdogs and black sheep who have been dealt hard knocks.
“That’s literature, isn’t it?” he says. “Broken people. If there’s no trouble, there’s no story. Whether it’s the more civilised problems of divorce or adultery in the Bloomsbury novel, or it’s Huck Finn and Jim trying to make their way down the river, or it’s a character in Faulkner trying to fight their way through the fog of history and the toxic manners of the South – it’s all people trying to negotiate trouble.”
On his new novel
Winton has come to London from Down Under to promote his latest novel. Like much of his work, The Shepherd's Hut begins with an upheaval: teenager Jaxie Clackton comes across the crushed body of his violent father. Fearing he will be blamed for it, and desperate to be reunited with the love of his life, he packs up and heads out across the vast backcountry's harsh saltlands – stopping only when he encounters a defrocked priest whose dwelling happens to be "refuge as much as exile".
It is an exhilarating tale of friendship and survival, one powered by a character so vividly realised that he doesn’t so much bubble up as spill over. This time around it wasn’t place that came to Winton first.
“I started with Jaxie’s voice and just followed it,” he reveals. “I was fond of this foul-mouthed, racist, sociopathic urchin. In the first draft, I wrote from the perspective of some other characters, but then I thought I was being evasive and just bottling out. I realised it had to be in Jaxie’s mind, and I had to be brave enough to try that on.”
It was a gamble. The character’s raw, abrasive vernacular and tough, uncompromising outlook is not for the faint-hearted. “You wouldn’t give him a lift or have him in your house,” Winton says. “And he was in my life for two years!” But the more time we spend in Jaxie’s company, the more we champion him. “The book is about the odds of surpassing your own past and exceeding the world you’re from. The world he is from is constrained. He wants it to be better for this girl that he loves. He wants there to be room enough in it for some tenderness or decency. Once you realise there is more to him you start to buy into his yearning,” Winton explains.
Finding inspiration
Jaxie's voice is an arresting mix of crude diction, broad slang and warped grammar. Equally vivid – and savage – is the landscape around him. "Once you go to the interior of Australia, or even along the coast, it gives you an impression of savagery," the author admits. It is no coincidence that Winton's literary heroes include landscape artists such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Thomas Hardy. The city rarely features in Winton's work. The closest we get are the forays into Fremantle from the ugly high-rise at the heart of his ninth novel Eyrie – and yet, as the author argues, "even then the natural world is leaning in."
His only novel to be set outside Australia was Booker finalist The Riders, which charted a father and daughter's frantic journey across Europe. It was a book he never planned to write, but after prolonged stays in Ireland, France and Greece, he found them "strong places which live in your mind."
Winton capitalised on his status as an outsider looking in to delineate his protagonist’s struggle. “If you’re going to make somebody miserable and uncomfortable, you might as well do it in alien circumstances. It was almost like a cruel science experiment – you take everything away from the guy, you make it happen in a strange place where he’s got no resources, no safety or familiarity.”
In his later novel, Breath, Winton drew on his love of the ocean and his passion for surfing – an activity he finds analogous to his other lifelong pursuit, writing. "Most of surfing is bobbing about in the ocean like a tea bag, waiting for a swell to come. Something shows up and as a surfer your job is to try to match its speed and ride its energy to the shore. That's like writing. You also wait, and when something shows up, even before you understand what it is, you have to match its momentum and catch up, keep up and milk it."
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Author John Irving wins literary peace award
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Making a change in the world
When not enjoying the great outdoors or having his characters explore it, Winton fights hard to preserve it by raising environmental awareness. "I don't go there in my novels," he says. However, in his "civilian life" he uses his influence to lobby policymakers, unite disparate groups, build bridges and change culture. He donated the prize money for his novel Dirt Music to a campaign to save Ningaloo Reef.
In one sobering section of his memoir The Boy Behind the Curtain, Winton explains how trees have been "exterminated" in parts of Western Australia, making the region "a land scraped naked". Are we seeing change? "People's minds are changing," he concedes, "but at the same time their leaders are turning into infantile bombastic morons undercutting that popular change and traducing the aspirations of ordinary people.
“I love the world, especially my part of it,” he adds. “I feel duty-bound to defend it. I’m trying to find a way for people to be in touch with their own love of their own place and their own family. Because it’s not just an ideological thing any more, it’s an existential thing. We’re at a time in our history when we know our behaviour is changing the planet, and what we do in the next 30 years will affect not just our children and their children but people we’ll never meet,” he adds.
I take my leave of this committed activist and compelling novelist, hoping that he will continue to tirelessly speak out – but also calmly sit still, waiting for those waves to come.
The Shepher’s Hut is published by Picador
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In numbers: China in Dubai
The number of Chinese people living in Dubai: An estimated 200,000
Number of Chinese people in International City: Almost 50,000
Daily visitors to Dragon Mart in 2018/19: 120,000
Daily visitors to Dragon Mart in 2010: 20,000
Percentage increase in visitors in eight years: 500 per cent
The Internet
Hive Mind
four stars
Our legal advisor
Ahmad El Sayed is Senior Associate at Charles Russell Speechlys, a law firm headquartered in London with offices in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Hong Kong.
Experience: Commercial litigator who has assisted clients with overseas judgments before UAE courts. His specialties are cases related to banking, real estate, shareholder disputes, company liquidations and criminal matters as well as employment related litigation.
Education: Sagesse University, Beirut, Lebanon, in 2005.
At a glance
Global events: Much of the UK’s economic woes were blamed on “increased global uncertainty”, which can be interpreted as the economic impact of the Ukraine war and the uncertainty over Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Growth forecasts: Cut for 2025 from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. The OBR watchdog also estimated inflation will average 3.2 per cent this year
Welfare: Universal credit health element cut by 50 per cent and frozen for new claimants, building on cuts to the disability and incapacity bill set out earlier this month
Spending cuts: Overall day-to day-spending across government cut by £6.1bn in 2029-30
Tax evasion: Steps to crack down on tax evasion to raise “£6.5bn per year” for the public purse
Defence: New high-tech weaponry, upgrading HM Naval Base in Portsmouth
Housing: Housebuilding to reach its highest in 40 years, with planning reforms helping generate an extra £3.4bn for public finances
ABU DHABI ORDER OF PLAY
Starting at 10am:
Daria Kasatkina v Qiang Wang
Veronika Kudermetova v Annet Kontaveit (10)
Maria Sakkari (9) v Anastasia Potapova
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova v Ons Jabeur (15)
Donna Vekic (16) v Bernarda Pera
Ekaterina Alexandrova v Zarina Diyas
Ms Yang's top tips for parents new to the UAE
- Join parent networks
- Look beyond school fees
- Keep an open mind
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Series info
Test series schedule 1st Test, Abu Dhabi: Sri Lanka won by 21 runs; 2nd Test, Dubai: Play starts at 2pm, Friday-Tuesday
ODI series schedule 1st ODI, Dubai: October 13; 2nd ODI, Abu Dhabi: October 16; 3rd ODI, Abu Dhabi: October 18; 4th ODI, Sharjah: October 20; 5th ODI, Sharjah: October 23
T20 series schedule 1st T20, Abu Dhabi: October 26; 2nd T20, Abu Dhabi: October 27; 3rd T20, Lahore: October 29
Tickets Available at www.q-tickets.com
Stat Fourteen Fourteen of the past 15 Test matches in the UAE have been decided on the final day. Both of the previous two Tests at Dubai International Stadium have been settled in the last session. Pakistan won with less than an hour to go against West Indies last year. Against England in 2015, there were just three balls left.
Key battle - Azhar Ali v Rangana Herath Herath may not quite be as flash as Muttiah Muralitharan, his former spin-twin who ended his career by taking his 800th wicket with his final delivery in Tests. He still has a decent sense of an ending, though. He won the Abu Dhabi match for his side with 11 wickets, the last of which was his 400th in Tests. It was not the first time he has owned Pakistan, either. A quarter of all his Test victims have been Pakistani. If Pakistan are going to avoid a first ever series defeat in the UAE, Azhar, their senior batsman, needs to stand up and show the way to blunt Herath.
Squid Game season two
Director: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Stars: Lee Jung-jae, Wi Ha-joon and Lee Byung-hun
Rating: 4.5/5
MATCH INFO
Hoffenheim v Liverpool
Uefa Champions League play-off, first leg
Location: Rhein-Neckar-Arena, Sinsheim
Kick-off: Tuesday, 10.45pm (UAE)
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
Banned items
Dubai Police has also issued a list of banned items at the ground on Sunday. These include:
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Political flags or banners
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Bikes, skateboards or scooters
Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Porsche Macan T: The Specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4-cyl turbo
Power: 265hp from 5,000-6,500rpm
Torque: 400Nm from 1,800-4,500rpm
Transmission: 7-speed dual-clutch auto
Speed: 0-100kph in 6.2sec
Top speed: 232kph
Fuel consumption: 10.7L/100km
On sale: May or June
Price: From Dh259,900
