have no money and this great continent of a house doesn’t belong to them. women are walking buggered and beatenlooking with infants in the parks. there’s a war on and people are coming home with bits of them removed. As the Pickles family move into the big, trembling house at number one Cloud Street,
Always already transient and haunted, belonging is a precious but fragile dream, in the midst of family, friends and neighbours. Humorously, lyrically and poignantly, the novel probes questions of where and how to belong. It is Australia imagined large and sprawling, but also in ordinary, intimate detail from a particular dot on the map: working class Perth, Western Australia, from the 1940s to the 1960s. Reading Tim Winton’s rollicking, heartbreaking, hopeful saga, Cloudstreet, you are immersed in Australia: its histories, its peoples, its changing values, and its multiple longings. Read horizontally rather than vertically, Winton's book reveals an interest in what he calls "an emotional deepening" (168), a new sense of relatedness that acknowledges the damage done to the Indigenous population at the same time that it honours the contribution of the rightful inhabitants of Australia to the current national narrative, creating, in this way, possible openings for non-Indigenous belonging.Watch a short video on this text from the Books That Made Us series, available via ABC Education! Essay by Lyn McCredden Complementarily, a palimpsestuous approach to the text evinces the emergence, among the traces of white nationalism, of a new pattern in Winton's latest additions to his palimpsest of a nation in Island Home. A palimpsestic reading of Island Home along the lines of Abraham and Torok's reflections on mourning and loss, more specifically their theory of the psychic crypt, throws light on Winton's "inexpressible mourning" (Abraham and Torok 130) for the loss of an unshaken pre-apology Australianness. Sarah Dillon's distinction between the palimpsestic and the palimpsestuous, which draws on Foucault's own differentiation between the workings of archaeology and genealogy respectively, provides the wider frame.
Taking as a starting point the metaphor of the palimpsest, this essay explores Winton's sense of being Australian in his 2015 landscape memoir Island Home.
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