Island Home

“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 Australia’s unique landscape, and how that singular place 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—rock pools, sea caves, scrub, and swamp—was as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets, walking in high rocky desert, diving in reefs, bobbing in the sea between surfing 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.

In Island Home, Winton brings the Australian landscape—and its influence on the island nation’s identity and art—vividly to life through personal accounts and environmental history. Winton shows readers Australia seen from above, in an airplane; from below, in the belly of a rock in the sea; and from ground level, in car and on foot, in sand and dirt and bog. He illuminates the lingering unease that accompanies living in a place of exile, and examines the never-ending fear of a capricious and untamable landscape—where “the evidence of death is everywhere”—its weather, and its creatures. He emphasizes the sacredness of land and our relationship to it. And he argues, powerfully, for the importance of place-based writing in a homogenizing global culture. “For me,” he writes, “a story proceeded from the logic of an ecosystem.”

Wise, rhapsodic, exalted—in language as unexpected and wild as the landscape it describes—Island Home is a brilliant, moving portrait of Australia from one of its finest writers.