VOICEOVER:
'Cloudstreet is Tim Winton's classic story of two rural families, the Lambs and the Pickles, whose fates and fortunes collide after disaster strikes and they both move to Perth. There, they find themselves sharing a huge ramshackle house in Cloudstreet - a big, sad two-storey affair in a garden full of fruit trees. Over 20 years, their lives become entwined and the shared family experiences, birth and death, marriage and adultery, joy and loss, bind them together in ways they could not have anticipated.'
JENNIFER BYRNE:
There it is. There's the man who brought it. Peter, how does it stack up, do you reckon?
PETER GARRETT:
Look, it stacks up fantastically, Jennifer, and when you asked me which book I wanted to recommend, I recommended this one because when I first read it, I loved it. I thought I'd read a great Australian novel. And I like Tim Winton's writing a lot. But coming back to it the second time has been an extraordinary journey. It's better than I imagined and there's much more in it than I imagined. I think it's a true classic. And to be honest, it's great literature which is very readable, and it touches chords deep inside all of us, I suspect, and difficult to find the words, really. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience sitting around in a week or two in January and getting into it again.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Did you cry?
PETER GARRETT:
Oh, yes. Look, it's community, it's the community of these people and their character and the characters that he draws out of them and it's the way in which they confront their own humanity and their limitations, and it's ultimately about the fact that this thing goes on. The young boy is born and they have the barbecue and the picnic down by the river, but there's so much more in it. The writing is extremely powerful, imaginative, evocative, but not showy. It's got a really gutsy sort of Australianness to it, I think in a real sense, without being corny or cliched, and, yeah, I think it's going to be one the great books of all time.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Mem.
MEM FOX:
I couldn't agree more. I could not agree more. When I said I hadn't read any books since October, of course, I read these two books and I read them both in three days because I just immersed myself.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
You only read the right-hand side.
MEM FOX:
I really need to read these books, and when I saw this, when I looked at Cloudstreet, which I remember loving when it first came out. It's thick, it's a really thick book, and I had to read it for this program and it felt like homework for half a second, OK? Until I started to reread it. If you have not read Cloudstreet, your life is diminished, it's diminished. If you have not met these characters, this generous community, these tragedies, the humour. It is so funny. Every so often, there's a sentence where you just burst out laughing. And it could be in the middle of a tragic paragraph and you just howl, you just literally laugh aloud. It is so wonderful.
MARIEKE HARDY:
Oh, I agree that your life would be less for not reading this book, but I also agree the rereading was so much richer than I remembered or imagined. So, I think, read it, and then really enjoy when you reread it. It's just... It is Australian... But reading it felt like coming home. It feels like looking through the plane window when you're flying back into the country. It really does. Bugger the citizenship test, know Don Bradman's birthday, get everyone to read Cloudstreet before they enter the country.
PETER GARRETT:
It's a really good suggestion.
MARIEKE HARDY:
I think so. Because maybe if it is how we want to be, then why not aspire to that sense of community and maybe that's all we are yearning for. And I think to have that heart and that sense of family coming first, I mean, that's no small feat. That's something for us all to aspire to.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
I hadn't read it for years, since it first came out, and I got about five paragraphs into the first... And then, all of a sudden, I remembered, cos it starts where it finishes. So, in reading the start, I remembered the end. I just burst into tears.
MARIEKE HARDY:
There's lots of crying, isn't there?
JENNIFER BYRNE:
Jason.
JASON STEGER:
It's a book that just gives you a huge amount of pleasure. You know, there are few books that have given me as much pleasure as reading Cloudstreet, and the first time was wonderful and then reading it again, as everybody here has agreed, is fantastic. I mean, I think it's really about connections - family connections, connections with the past. Australia's connections with Indigenous people, with personal histories, and I think he does it in this sort of wonderfully gentle compassionate, humane way. And it's all in this fantastic language. I mean, this is, this is... I think it's Tim Winton at his best. And I talked to him a couple of months ago and I asked him whether he thought he was onto something special when he was writing Cloudstreet. And he said one thing that he did notice was that he was in this rhythm when he was writing it, and that's the sort of sense that he got. But he also told me this very, very alarming story, because he wrote a lot of it when he was overseas. He left the manuscript on a bus. He was going into Rome airport with his family. He had his wife and his children. They'd been overseas for quite a long time. They had all their possessions with them. He was carrying this big suitcase, one child, and they were marching... I think it was in Rome, it was either Rome or Athens airport, and all of a sudden, there was a tap on his shoulder and there was this bloke saying, "Excuse me, excuse me." And Tim said, people are always stopping me because I've got long hair, people either want to sell me drugs or buy drugs. So anyway, it was a bloke from the bus saying, "Is this yours?" And it was the case in which the manuscript was, right? Two-thirds of Cloudstreet. He didn't have a copy of it. And he said, he dropped the bags, dropped the child and he virtually kissed this swarthy bus driver because it was the... Can you imagine if he'd lost it?
JENNIFER BYRNE:
No.
JASON STEGER:
I think, thank God, we owe an awful lot to this bus driver in Italy.
MARIEKE HARDY:
We should build a statue of him somewhere, I think.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
That's right. The man who saved Cloudstreet.
JASON STEGER:
There are bits that are just wonderful in the book.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
When you talk about rhythm, it's the rhythm of a hymn, almost. It's the rhythm of a river. And what struck me reading it and I'd be interested to know what you think, Peter, that it's like there's the top layer which is beautifully constructed, the characters are so... all that. But there's this under, as John Irving would call it, the undertow, but there's this thing pulling through which is visceral, which is deep, which is partly about the rhythm. It's quite Christian, a lot of its symbolism, isn't it? The fish and the lamb and then the rebirth and... But whatever it is... Did you see, there's another level, that it's getting to you?
PETER GARRETT:
Well, I think there is. He's a great writer about our landscapes. I mean, he's written really well about the coast and, of course, water is one of the big metaphors here. But he writes about the physicality of our landscapes and whether it's sort of, you know, railway cuttings, or bits of the desert, or the coast, or the estuaries where they go fishing occasionally, and he casts that landscape across the top of the lives that people are leading and their emotional landscapes are sort of contrasting against the landscapes of things they're doing at different times. What I think is also incredible about the book is that rereading it, I think that clearly some of the characters are depressives and all the sort of conditions that we know about through the lives that we lead.
MEM FOX:
Anorexics. Which I didn't know about the first time.
PETER GARRETT:
No, no. It was incredible to discover that. So, there's that. There's also the fact that the musicality comes about because the way in which he writes about people's conversations with one another is extremely natural. You know, it's just quick, it's just very boom, boom. You get two or three of these pages of people arcing into one another and then a big reflection of one of them about the deeper meaning of what it is they've just said. It's very masterful to do that. It's great.
JENNIFER BYRNE:
And it's true. It's cool, it's fabulous. It's Cloudstreet. And all those people who vote in the polls, you know what, you're right. That is the club for another month. A big thanks to tonight's book clubbers. Thank you very much, Peter. Thank you, Marieke. Thank you, Jason and thank you, Mem. It's been great to have you.