Continuing with my project to read all of Tim Winton’s novels this year, I have just finished Shallows, first published in 1984. As usual for his works, the location and geography feature strongly and I was happily thrown into an immediate sense of place along the south coast of Western Australia. In the small town of Angelus, everyone knows everyone and the inhabitants have been there for generations. It’s the late 1970s and when some Greenies have arrived to protest whaling, the historic economic driver […]

Recently I set a goal for myself to read all of Tim Winton’s novels this year; and so I began January with An Open Swimmer, his debut novel, first published in 1982. Jerra is a young man on the cusp of stepping out and beginning his own life, but he has some inner demons to deal with first. It seems like he will keep self sabotaging until he succeeds. In the beginning of the story, he is on a camping trip with his boyhood best […]