Entropy, 2006 from New Colour Works, Narelle Autio
Australian author Tim Winton has a way of witnessing the magical in the mundane; the poetry of the everyday, and this is especially so when it comes to coastal Australia. The beach.
Ever since Cloudstreet was compulsory highschool reading, I’ve been hooked on Winton’s words: Dirt Music, The Riders, An Open Swimmer, Breath, The Turning and, more recently, Land’s Edge. In almost all of his works, the ocean plays a pivotal role, if not a key character.
This short (just 104 pages) ‘coastal memoir’ looks back on the author’s own life lived in coastal suburbia, and his pursuit of a childhood dream of hot, sunburnt days at the beach, followed by long afternoons (cooled by the Fremantle Doctor) of escapism into the world of literature. His blunt, raw honesty is inseparable from his deep spirituality and sense of awe in the face of nature’s “blessings” and “miracles”. (“Blame it on a childhood of Sunday Schools… Call them marvels or natural wonders.”)
Winton’s vision of coastal Australia is perfectly complimented by the dream-like underwater prints of Sydney-based photographer Narelle Autio. Any Australian that grew up on the coast – the edge – will see themselves and their own stories in this tiny, poetic book, in which Winton manages so adeptly to explain the inexplicable. It’ll make you proud to be an Aussie kid that grew up in the ‘burbs.
“Robert Drewe has long argued that almost every Australian rite of passage occurs on or near the beach. The beach is where we test and prove our physical prowess, where we discover sex; it is often the site of our adulterous assignations, and where we go to face our grown-up failures. In the end, it is where we retire in the sun to await the unknown.” – Tim Winton, Land’s Edge
bookreviewed 