AustLit

'In discussing the creative processes that underpin his novels, Tim Winton himself identifies the importance of place: "The place comes first' If the place isn't interesting to me then I can't feel it. I can't feel any people in it. I can't feel what the people are on about or likely to get up to" (Steger). For this reason, Winton has often been perceived as a writer who champions belonging. Some critics even argue that his narratives reinforce conservative, settler-colonial attitudes to place. Jennifer Rutherford, for instance, analyzes The Riders as a narrative of belonging that seeks "to reaffirm the legitimacy of white Australian narratives of nation and to reinforce nationalist narcissism" (153). If isolated elements of a particular novel may lead to this conclusion, an analysis of Winton's oeuvre shows that, as he revisits the bush, the ocean, the littoral, the outback, the city, and the suburb, the author does not validate traditional or conservative conceptions of place. Winton may be a popular writer, but he does not allow his readers to be complacent and accept the legacy of the colonial past. For the past three decades, Winton's fiction has kept probing the contested issue of settler legitimacy. The Rider (1994), Dirt Music (2001), Breath (2008), and Eyrie (2013) explore how non-Indigenous Australians attempt to renegotiate spatial relationships in this context of social, cultural, political, and spatial instability. In a recent analysis of Winton's oeuvre, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earth and Sacred (2016), Lyn McCredden argues that his recent novels question the "supposed stabilities of place" (11) and that "Tim Winton is the poet of non-belonging" (109). ' (Introduction)