Tim Winton’s novel ‘Breath’ ends with this:
“I will always remember my first wave this morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing to air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears.
I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light.
I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonies's smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated. And though I've lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.”
Winton’s writing is quintessentially Australian. In The Swimming Chair, he tells the story of taking his mother, a former swim teacher, for what might be her last swim.
1️⃣ The Swimming Chair, Tim Winton (2018)
“As Mum began to relax, and then, finally, to luxuriate, I saw a little more clearly what her situation is. What it cost her to entrust herself to the power of another like this. And how powerful the reward of that surrender was. And, okay, maybe this wasn't strictly swimming. She was no longer in command. She was neither mobile nor independent. But from the rapture on her face I could see she was aloft. Enveloped. Connected. As if this simple pleasure carried more power and more meaning than even I gave it credit for. It was a reminder that creaturely delight is our first and final expression of reverence for life.”
Go Betweens - Streets of your Town
In ‘Everywhere I Look’, Helen Garner dedicates an entire essay to her friendship with Winton:
“When my third husband and I went to stay with Tim and Denise at their fibro shack up the coast from Perth, they served meals of such oceanic munificence that we could not cope. What they thought of as a first course would have kept us going, in our etiolated Sydney existence, for days. Our stomachs were not big enough for their generosity. They looked at us, puzzled, over the mounds of fishy splendour in the centre of the table. They had the strong physical energy of a country life: three kids, a dog, a guitar, a fishing boat. We lived in our heads: self-starved, over-disciplined. And it showed.”
This New Yorker profile describes Garner perfectly describing herself :
“As a writer of nonfiction, Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life’s secular apocalypses—“a small grim figure with a notebook and a cold,” as she memorably describes herself.”
Garner wrote about this this ‘sharpness’ recently:
2️⃣ Is a woman my age allowed to be happy when the world is going to hell in a handbasket? (Helen Garner, 2020)
“That’s how a writer pays attention: you spot details you can’t imagine having any possible use for, and you make a note of them. And when time catches up, and a little gap opens in what you’re writing, out they pop from the dark, all fresh and shiny, and you grab them, and polish them, and slot them in.”
Throw Your Arms Around Me - Eddie Vedder & Mark Seymour
My favourite Garner essay is Dreams of Her Real Self, a reflection on her relationship with her mother, which is locked away inside ‘Everywhere I Look’:
“Time and again Elizabeth Jolley has observed that ‘the strong feeling of love which goes from the parent to the child does not seem part of the child which can be given back to the parent’. But last spring, at a big and brilliant community show to celebrate the reopening of Melbourne’s concert hall, a clever conductor divided the audience and taught us to sing in parts. A thousand euphoric strangers sang, in time and in tune, a slowly modulating melody. In the row in front of me sat an old woman and her daughter. Too absorbed in singing even to glance at each other, they reached, they gripped hands, they did not let go until the song was done.”
Since I can’t find it online anywhere, I’ll recommend another remarkable Garner piece: The darkness in every one of us.
3️⃣ The darkness in every one of us, Helen Garner (2015)
“I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life’s unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.”
Powderfinger - These Days
Lech Blaine is an emerging Australian writer whose work has echoes of Garner and Winton’s homespun lucidity. Here, he recounts the car crash that took the lives of his friends but spared him.
4️⃣ The Bystander, Lech Blaine (2017)
“My first instinct was exhilaration. It looked like we were driving into farmland. Nothing serious enough to scream about. But my geometry was bad. Blame it on velocity. At ninety-five kilometres per hour, the car moved twenty-five metres every second. It took us approximately three seconds to travel from the gravel of the hard shoulder to the trees on the median strip.”
The Triffids - Wide Open Road
The Bystander evokes many of the same emotions found in Tim Winton’s Havoc, in which he tells of the trauma that shaped his own childhood.
5️⃣ Havoc, Tim Winton (2015)
“Perhaps it’s morbid to view your life through the prism of violent events, to feel yourself shaped by accidents. Safety is a great gift. Maybe it’s disrespectful to feel the interruptions to it more vividly than the long and peaceful interludes in between. But to be afraid is to be awake. And to exist at all in this universe is to be caught up at the scene of an accident, perhaps the happiest accident of all. By now we know how that scene goes. We’re just not sure how it ends.”
Paul Kelly - Meet Me In The Middle Of The Air (Live)
6️⃣ Why She Broke, Helen Garner ( 2017)
“A faint clink of cuffs at the door from the cells, and in she came. In the shots taken at her children’s memorial – her head bound in black cloth, her skin gleaming in candlelight, her eyes distant and dull, her mouth half open as if to gasp or groan – she had been a figure from ancient myth, massive and block-like. Now, ushered past us to the dock for her plea hearing, she was a prisoner in a modern story: bare-headed, her hair cropped, in charcoal top and jeans too short for her long legs. Her skin had lost its lustre: it was matte, reflecting no light. Between the interpreter and the glaring-blond, gum-chewing security guard, Guode took her seat and was swallowed up in the court’s dark timber.”
Flame Trees - Sarah Blasko
7️⃣ Japanese Maple, Clive James (2014)
“Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.”