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y separately published work icon Island Home : A Landscape Memoir single work   autobiography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2015... 2015 Island Home : A Landscape Memoir
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

''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 how this unique landscape 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 – rockpools, seacaves, scrub and swamp – was as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets of the south-east, walking in the high rocky desert fringe, diving at Ningaloo Reef, bobbing in the sea between 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.

'Island Home is the story of how that relationship with the Australian landscape came to be, and how it has determined his ideas, his writing and his life. It is also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet. Much more powerfully than a political idea, or an economy, Australia is a physical entity. Where we are defines who we are, in ways we too often forget to our detriment, and the country's.

'Wise, rhapsodic, exalted – Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country makes us who we are.' (Publication summary)

Notes

  • Dedication: for Hannah Rachel Bell
  • Epigraph:

    Turn home, the sun goes down; swimmer, turn home.

    –Judith Wright 'The Surfer'


    My island home is waiting for me

    –Neil Murray,

    'My Island Home'

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin , 2015 .
      image of person or book cover 8440924082631401017.jpg
      Cover image courtesy of publisher.
      Extent: 256p.
      Note/s:
      • Published: 23/09/2015
      ISBN: 9781926428741
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Picador ,
      2016 .
      image of person or book cover 432975670209345199.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 197p.p.
      Reprinted: 2017
      Note/s:
      • Published May 5, 2016
      ISBN: 9781509816910, 1509816917
    • Minneapolis, Minnesota,
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Milkweed Editions ,
      2017 .
      image of person or book cover 3279772983955173531.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 253p.
      Note/s:
      • Published March 20, 2017
      ISBN: 9781571319586 (ebook), 9781571311245 (paperback)
Alternative title: Inselleben : Mein Australien
Language: German
    • Munich,
      c
      Germany,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Luchterhand ,
      2017 .
      image of person or book cover 8725948624865718670.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 222p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published July 24 2017
      ISBN: 9783630875477, 3630875475

Other Formats

Works about this Work

From Landscape to Country : Writing Settler Belonging in Post-Mabo Australia Martina Horáková , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 19 no. 2 2021; (p. 295-314)

'One of the debates which Australia continues to witness with various degrees of intensity involves the complex ways of articulating settler (un)belonging in the postcolonising settler nation. While one of the most significant moments which re-defined settler-Indigenous relationship took place around the turn of the twenty-first century, the critical scholarship examining settler anxieties regarding the sense of (un)belonging is flourishing in the post-Mabo period, as is the production of cultural and literary narratives engaging with this topic. This article explores two recent memoirs of settler belonging in Australia and contextualises them in a broader tradition of settler memoirs in the first decade of this century. By comparing and contrasting Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015. London: Picador) and Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful (2016. Melbourne: Scribe), the article demonstrates a visible shift from earlier forms of writing settler (un)belonging, which often thematised settler anxiety and desire to belong through various acts of appropriating Indigenous ways of belonging. Winton’s and Mahood’s memoirs, however, offer a different vision of settler belonging: one that is deeply embedded in local, bioregional and environmental histories, recognition of Indigenous knowledges as significant agents shaping post-Mabo aesthetics and politics, and a commitment to transformation of settler relationship with the land from territory to Country.' (Publication abstract)

Tim Winton’s Palimpsestuous Australianness in Island Home : A Landscape Memoir Barbara Arizti Martin , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia , vol. 9 no. 2 2018;

'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. 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. 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. 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. 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.'

Source: Abstract.

Eco-Memoir : Protecting, Restoring, and Repairing Memory and Environment Jessica White , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Mediating Memory : Tracing the Limits of Memoir 2017; (p. 141-156)

'Jessica White examines eco-memoir in two examples: Tim Winton's Island Home (2015) and Kim Scott's and Hazel Brown's Kayang and Me (2005). She explores how memory can describe the loss of an environ-ment but also promote its recovery, and the implications for each writer's identity. Her chapter argues that, alongside science, literary expressions of memory have an important role to play in raising awareness of the sustainable use and protection of our environment.'

Source: Introduction (p.6).

I Pity the Poor Immigrant Melissa Lucashenko , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 1 2017;

'Many years ago I read a now forgotten novel by a now forgotten author, which had a truly wonderful preface. It read, simply, this bloody book nearly killed me. I therefore dedicate it, dear Reader, to myself. There is a delicate irony at play, I think, in my long remembering this dedication while the book itself is erased completely from my memory. I’ll touch on the interplay of knowledge and memory in due course. What I want to start by saying, though, is that in my case, as in the case of that forgotten preface’s author, while writing can be a horrifically stressful business - and while writing this paper did indeed feel like it was going to kill me - the Author is emphatically Not Dead.' (Introduction)

The Fiction of Tim Winton : Relational Ecology in an Unsettled Land Lyn McCredden , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , November vol. 17 no. 2017; (p. 63-71)
Complicating the processes of belonging in place, for non-Indigenous Australians, is the growing realization that they live in a huge, diverse land, a place in which they are not native. The fiction of popular Anglo-Saxon Australian novelist Tim Winton echoes the understanding of poet Judith Wright, for whom “two strands – the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion – have become part of me. It is a haunted country” (Wright 1991: 30). This essay will explore Winton’s novels in which there is a pervasive sense of unease and loss experienced by the central characters, in relation to place and land. Winton’s characters – Queenie Cookson and her traumatic witnessing of the barbaric capture and flaying of whales; Fish Lamb’s near-drowning in the sea, and Lu Fox’s quest for refuge in the wilderness, prophet-like, after the tragedy of his family’s death – are all written with a haunting sense of white unsettlement and displacement, where such natural forces – the sea and its creatures, the land’s distances and risks – confront and re-form the would-be dominators.
Winton Salutes Our Island Home William Yeoman , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The West Australian , 22 September 2015; (p. 7)

— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir Tim Winton , 2015 single work autobiography
Tim Winton's Island Home Isn't Memoir, It's a Cultural Call to Arms Jamie Hanson , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 13 October 2015;

— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir Tim Winton , 2015 single work autobiography
When a Writer Keeps Watch on the Beat of His Heartland Delia Falconer , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 24-25 October 2015; (p. 29) The Saturday Age , 24-25 October 2015; (p. 29)

— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir Tim Winton , 2015 single work autobiography
Putting a Value on What Lies Beneath Rebecca Giggs , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 31 October - 1 November 2015; (p. 20)

— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir Tim Winton , 2015 single work autobiography
Bigger Fish to Fry Blanche Clark , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 31 October 2015; (p. 20)

— Review of Island Home : A Landscape Memoir Tim Winton , 2015 single work autobiography
Tim Winton Island under a Cloud Rick Feneley (interviewer), 2015 single work interview
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 19-20 September 2015; (p. 4-5) The Sunday Age , 20 September 2015; (p. 10)
Winton Will Always Call Australia His Island Home Amanda Ellis , 2015 single work column
— Appears in: The West Australian , 3 October 2015; (p. 91)
Best Reads – End of Story Deborah Bogle , 2015 single work column
— Appears in: The Sunday Mail , 20 December 2015; (p. 24)
Another Country : The Bush Is a Person, Wrapped in a Landscape Gabrielle Chan , 2016 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2016; Meanjin , Autumn vol. 75 no. 1 2016; (p. 46-55)
A New Colonial Era of Publishing Lies Ahead Tim Winton , 2016 single work essay
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 21-22 May 2016; (p. 36)
Last amended 23 Sep 2020 12:47:53
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