Cirrus@Austlit

'Wincey - but really - wincey, a baby word from a nursery rhyme is what was doled out by the metre...' (Publication abstract)

'I vividly recall how I felt in the middle of 1984, the moment my father came home from work and announced we were going to be leaving Albany and moving to Northam. Albany is on the south coast of Western Australia, the jewel of Minang territory. Northam is in the heart of the WA Wheatbelt in Nyaki-Nyaki country. Dad worked for Elders WA as a stock agent. He was a loyal and proud company man. He even drank Fosters because Elders owned Carlton and United Breweries, which made the beer. In parochial and staunch Swan Lager heartland, to sup on eastern states' muck was nothing short of sacrilegious. It could poison you.' (Publication abstract)

' Have a friend who says she weeps every time the plane descends over her hometown of Johannesburg. She has been away from South Africa for forty years but she is brought to tears whenever she catches sight of the city she left at the age of twenty. She never wants to return to live there permanently, but every time she flies in she is blindsided by emotion she cannot explain.' (Publication abstract)

'Tim Winton is arguably Australia's most widely read contemporary novelist. His books have been translated into eighteen languages, adapted for television, stage and film, and won him Australia's most prestigious literary award - the Miles Franklin Award - four times. In 2013, Winton published his eleventh novel, Eyrie (Penguin, 2013). The book follows Tom Keely, a man who spends his days alone in a stuffy flat of a tan-brick apartment block in the middle of Fremantle, unemployed, disgraced, divorced, gradually drinking himself into oblivion. His solitude is disrupted by a meeting with his neighbour, Gemma - a woman he hasn't seen since she was a little girl from the end of the street, running away from chaos at home. Gemma and her grandson, Kai, force Keely into an entanglement with ugly, difficult things. The book, at once a personal story, is also a harsh reflection of Western Australia during the mining boom and the changes it wrought to the state's cultural and political priorities. In this interview, from different sides of the world, Winton discusses Eyrie, the importance of Western Australia in his work and the relationship between the popular and the literary in Australian publishing.' (Publication abstract)

'Writing about my experience of making music in Perth is a strange thing, because as soon as a 'scene' is bound and gagged by the written word it is finished, petrified, swept up into the Rolling Stone archives and forever considered 'history'. It might be revered and glorified, but it's still long gone. This could be a very restricting view to take on a community like Perth, which is still just as inspiring and productive as it ever was. I can't pretend to understand where 'music scenes' begin or end. It seems a futile and narrow-minded pursuit. So before I begin, I want to say that this is merely a reflective exercise. There was never a 'golden age', and if one does exist I can't see it, because it's floating all around, invisible and omnipresent.' (Publication summary)

'My older brother took an interest in the sea first, and, as with everything he did, I followed close behind. By the time he was ten years old, surfing and fishing and diving had become obsessions. He was devout; I was cautious. But in his gravitational pull I ended up spending many of my childhood days down the port beach in front of our house in Geraldton, on the central rural coast of Western Australia. Fishing for herring from the edge of the reef. Spearing for the skippy and sweetlip that hid in the dusty green shallows, the water warm with the Leeuwin Current that flowed south from Indonesia.' (Publication abstract)

'I'm sitting IN the climate-controlled archival room at the Battye Library in central Perth, reading through old Police Gazettes. With a fifty-year buffer maintained to preserve the dignity of extant convicted criminals, the gazettes begin in 1905 and end in 1964. The journals record job availabilities and relate general policing news, but it's the recording of arrests and accompanying mugshots - pictures of wanted men and missing women and children - that I am interested in.' (Publication abstract)

'A young man - scarcely more than a boy - stands on a rock beside the deep sea. A whale surfaces next to him, almost within reach. I can't say if the boy knows the whale, but he knows of the whale: all his life he's watched families of them travel along this coast. Recently, he learned the words of one such journey.' (Publication abstract)

'I thought Batavia was the story I was carrying on my trip to the Abrolhos in the first weeks of spring. You know the one - the Dutch East India Company ship that ran aground there in 1629, delivering 316 people to a cluster of tiny islands in the northern part of the archipelago where some endured a murderously mutinous attack at the hands of their fellow travellers. Only 116 arrived safely in the Spice Islands, half a year later.' (Publication abstract)

'I'm perched ON the western edge of Australia, looking out on the buoyant and impressive Indian Ocean. The vista, if I turn back towards my city, continues to be dominated by cranes. A city transformed by capital and mining; a population that has grown faster than we've ever seen. From the time this place was a colony, population has been a struggle and particularly during the cycles of our boom times. If I put on my long-distance goggles and look north, I'd see the mining capital laid out in all of its exploration logic, and the waste left after the extraction has taken place. Laid out all over that red earth.' (Publication abstract)

'On the South-West boundary of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, in the centre of Australia, an unmarked red-dirt track turns left off the Lasseter Highway. For the few kilometres still within park lines it's known as Docker River Road. Beyond that point it becomes Tjukaruru Road, leading to Western Australia through Aboriginal freehold land.' (Publication abstract)