Island Home by Tim Winton

Author:Tim Winton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760142230
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2015-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

The power of place

It was comically presumptuous of me, but while I was still in high school I’d begun to think of myself as a writer. At seventeen I’d never met an author. My acquaintance with the world of letters was even narrower than my experience of life, and I wish I could say I went to university to quench a raging intellectual thirst, but in truth I enrolled for the sole purpose of writing stories. In fact I approached higher education in a spirit hardly different to that of my mates who signed up at tech to learn the plumbing game, or to train as sparkies. In my mind time was too precious to spend it waffling on about Literature. I intended to make the stuff – with my bare hands if necessary.

So my years at university were just an excuse to hole up in a shed in my parents’ backyard and write. Because the way I looked at it you learnt to write on the job, by writing. Which wasn’t the most nuanced way to approach the craft of fiction, but not far wide of the mark, as things turned out. What I didn’t know is that you also learn to write by watching and listening and remembering and wondering. And perhaps most importantly, by reading. As a result of four years’ intensive reading I got a sort of education despite myself.

My alma mater was an institute of technology, and all the utilitarian ugliness of the label was manifested in the campus itself. The aesthetic poverty of its buildings was bewildering and oppressive. With its nasty corrugated concrete facades and industrial-park sprawl, it had the air of a wholesale storage facility. I guess it’s one way of imagining a centre of learning – a bunker in which a billion units of information – bulk knowledge – are racked, stacked and filed. The interiors were worse: niggardly corridors, mean fittings, bolted aluminium windows, every seminar room reeking of cigarette smoke and nylon carpet. These chambers and halls were spaces that didn’t tempt a student to linger. I certainly never dallied a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Later in life I wondered what it must have cost people to work there year upon year. Imagine twenty years trying to teach Gerard Manley Hopkins in a Bunnings Warehouse. There are hospitals, air terminals and justice complexes more congenial.

Those years I was a student I was rarely comfortable on campus and I couldn’t quite commit to the institution. I was shy and a little wary, always keeping my distance, and in some ways I regret this now. It was such an exciting period – my world and my mind seemed to be glowing and expanding as never before and rarely since – and it saddens me to have so few friends from that time and such scant affection for the university itself. It might seem particularly ungracious to say this of a place with a lecture theatre named after me, but it’s the truth.

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