Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Island home : a landscape memoir (edition 2015)by Tim Winton
Work InformationIsland Home: A Landscape Memoir by Tim Winton
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. As Tim Winton said, 'I grew up on the world's largest island.' This ‘island’, Australia, or continent as most people think of it, has had humans living there for thousands of years. These original people had over these millennia to come to an incredibly in-depth understanding of their landscape and how to tread lightly on it. It was a similar relationship to his locality that inspired Tim Winton as a child. Growing up in Karrinyup amongst the coastal landscape of beaches, rock pools and swamps meant for a fantastic childhood, but also the very soul of the land percolated into his very being and became the well of inspiration for his writing. His experiences growing up also gave him a passionate desire to see the wildest places of his nation saved for future generations. For the past 200 years, the European immigrants have taken much from the land and the native Aboriginals, and have left it polluted and devastated. Winton has spent time in the UK and other places, but the bond with this hard and frequently dangerous landscape have had a lasting impression on him. This is an enjoyable book to read as Winton is such a talented author and it is a good companion volume to Land’s Edge, which I think is even better than this. This extremely well written book brings the West Australian landscape alive and is a wonderful example of how we are part of our landscape and need to embrace this experience. It is like a series of place-based vignettes where the landscape contributes to the understanding of historical and social issues in each chapter. no reviews | add a review
Awards
'I grew up on the world's largest island.'This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton's beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how this unique landscape has shaped him and his writing.For over thirty years, Winton has written novels in which the natural world is as much a living presence as any character. What is true of his work is also true of his life: from boyhood, his relationship with the world around him - rockpools, seacaves, scrub and swamp - was as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets of the south-east, walking in the high rocky desert fringe, diving at Ningaloo Reef, bobbing in the sea between sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, with its rhythms, its dangers, its strange sustenance, and learned to see landscape as a living process.Island Home is the story of how that relationship with the Australian landscape came to be, and how it has determined his ideas, his writing and his life. It is also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet. Much more powerfully than a political idea, or an economy, Australia is a physical entity. Where we are defines who we are, in ways we too often forget to our detriment, and the country's.Wise, rhapsodic, exalted - Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country makes us who we are. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.3Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Elizabethan 1558-1625LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
It conjuring up many of my own growing up memories
The language was so rich I will need to read again to get full value.
( )