Of Tim and God

It’s been a Tim Winton sort of week -the man of the muted Hawaiian tea shirt, sand swept shorts and tied back pony tail-  master of the Australian language and psychic of the landscape.

'For while Perth had bulldozed its past and burried its doubts in bluster, Fremantle nursed its grievances and scratched its arse'

Tim is God- literally- omnipresent at the moment.

He’s been on my bedside table; on telly; in The Big Issue; on the stage; in my weekend magazine; across the screen; and talking to a middle aged,  middle class melange at the ANU last week where the theatre booked out and he was beamed like Scotty into the adjoining spaces.  

Someone asks him if he keeps notes or a diary and he responds that he ‘sort of does’. I’ve seen what a writer’s notes look like: scraps of paper torn off the ends of monthly bills and junk mail fliers with snippets of observations, crumpled and crinkled and poking between brick stacks of newspapers and sniffed and thumbed magazines – a mind map in chaos.

I’ve had Eyrie since the day it was released, but I have been resisting the temptation to open the pages as I want the ‘time to be right” – the time when I can put everything else aside and just read from cover to cover, immersed again in a world drawn by a master craftsman with his pencil and paper manuscript.  

The Turning is playing at the Nishi building with it’s challenge to completeness – fitting given Tim’s reply that he doesn’t need a story to have a nicely tied ending. Here the scaffolding is the building, the timber cut-offs the substance, is it coming or going or being?

The Western Australian government site says that: Travelling to Wittenoom presents a public health risk from exposure to asbestos fibres which may result in contracting a fatal disease, such as mesothelioma, asbestosis or lung cancer.  But the ghost town is in the news again with proposed changes to legislation to allow asbestos related disease sufferers  to make a second compensation claim on their illness. And I’m back to Dirt Music – the words and the music, its verandah wines and the bone in the bed. 

And I wonder is that is Lucky Oceans playing with his back to the camera framed in a doorway sliding up and down the frets?

Maybe it’s the vastness of the landscape, the fury of the sea, the remoteness  and ruggedness, the sense of coming into being, a place where escape, forgottenness and isolation is still possible, that produces the likes of Tim Winton, Archie Weller, The Pigram Brothers, Robert Drewe, the Waifs.  

My granddaughter came back from One Direction gasping for air – Tim’s writing does it for me!

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Art work of the Week

The Nishi Building New Acton