Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman, a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back on music. There's too much emotion in it, too much memory and pain.
One morning Fox is observed poaching by Georgie Jutland. Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life and home of Jim Buckridge, the most prosperous fisherman in the area and a man who loathes poachers, Fox above all. But she's never fully settled into Jim's grand house on the water or into the inbred community with its history of violent secrets. After Georgie encounters Fox, her tentative hold on conventional life is severed. Neither of them would call it love, but they can't stay away from each other no matter how dangerous it is, and out on White Point it is very dangerous.
Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, Dirt Music is a love story about people stifled by grief and regret; a novel about the odds of breaking with the past and about the lure of music. Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is "anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity." Even in the wild, Luther cannot escape it. There is, he discovers, no silence in nature. Ambitious, perfectly calibrated, Dirt Music resonates with suspense and supercharged emotion, and it confirms Tim Winton's status as the preeminent Australian novelist of his generation.
Dirt Music
( dir. Gregor Jordan
)
Australia
:
Aquarius Films
Wildgaze Films
,
2019
16563725
2019
single work
film/TV
'Georgie Jutland is an unconventional woman in a conventional town, living with her widowed partner, Jim, and his two small children. An encounter with enigmatic poacher Lu, an outsider to the community, reignites her sense of purpose and this unlikely affinity leads them both to find where they truly belong. Based on the Booker Prize shortlisted novel by Tim Winton.'
Source: Screen Australia.
Epigraph:
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but there
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself –
Finite infinity.
– Emily Dickinson
Dirt Music : Music for a Novel by Tim Winton
Tim Winton
,
Lucky Oceans
(editor),
ABC Classics
,
2001
Z932648
2001
anthology
This double CD features one disc of classical music and one of Dirt Music ("anything you can play on the front verandah ... without electricity", according to one of Winton's characters in the novel Dirt Music). The music is written and performed by both Australian and non-Australian artists.
Dirt Music
( dir. Phillip Noyce
)
2006
Z1274365
2006
single work
film/TV
Literary Journeys : Mapping Fictional Travels Across the World of Literature
John McMurtrie
(editor),
Richmond
:
Hardie Grant Books
,
2024
29529174
2024
anthology
criticism
'From Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Kerouac’s On the Road, Cervante’s Don Quixote to Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the journey has long been an archetypal story. The genre’s inherent escapism is the perfect vehicle for fuelling dreams of being outlaws and romantics, for taking us outside of our own lives and across the world. From the comforts and confines of our homes, this book brings to life some of the most significant, exciting, dangerous, tragic and uplifting journeys ever written about. Tracing the chronological growth of the journey as a literary device, this volume showcases the breadth of different authors’ grapples with this narrative structure. Literary Journeys will take you on the most important journeys in literature, over eight centuries and across over 30 countries. ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS An team of fifty-five expert contributors includes literary critics, academics and authors such as John Sutherland, Maya Jaggi, Robert McCrum, Kimberly Fain and Alan Taylor.'(Publication summary)
'The somatic effects of empire can be found in Tim Winton’s “pneumatic materialism”, an aesthetic preoccupation in his novels with moments of anoxia, or the deprivation of oxygen to the brain. This essay will consider how Winton's novel engage with pneumatic materialism in response to questions of uneven development traditionally associated with the Global South, thereby disrupting clear South–North distinctions. By blurring his concerns across the North–South divide, Winton shows a willingness to think of empire as a series of relations that are not bound by national or territorial borders so much as by substances in the air. He does this, I argue, in his use of the breath.' (Publication abstract)
