Indeed, these Critical Essays do form a rich resource and will certainly act to redress that imbalance. However, the ‘relative dearth’ the editors claim could be seen as part of a much larger, long-term problem; the lack of opportunities for publishing books of criticism on Australian writing. An earlier and much more modest critical collection, Reading Tim Winton (1993), was one of a short-lived series on newer Australian writers initiated by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and published by Angus & Robertson, precisely to address that lack. More recently, Sydney University Press has established a series of a more extended kind with the first books – essays on Alex Miller and Shirley Hazzard – due out in August and October of this year. Latterly, too, Cambria Press has been publishing a series of monographs on contemporary Australian writing, with Susan Lever as general editor: those books, however, are priced for library collections. In a problematic climate for the publication of extended critical work on Australian writers, then, this collection is particularly welcome.

Tim Winton 2013 (photograph by Hank Kordas)

It is also a pleasure to read, with essays that not only address topics and issues familiar to readers of Winton’s work, but explore them in often surprising ways, both extending and deepening appreciation of that work while at the same time opening it up to truly critical examination. Morrison examines the ways Winton uses an Australian vernacular tradition with very particular effects, linking it to aspects of James Joyce’s and William Faulkner’s practice, although, as she says, ‘Winton’s literary ambitions are less elevated than Joyce’s and less tragic than Faulkner’s’, being closer to ‘American nineteenth-century traditions of vernacular realism associated with humour and the rural or regional scene’. Another essay asks the question ‘What haunts Cloudstreet?’ and concludes by exploring the contradiction at the heart of this novel, that what is ‘perhaps, the novel’s greatest success – addressing Indigenous presence as constitutive of settler-colonial habitation – is also the source of its most profound failure’. Nathanael O’Reilly’s essay investigates the significance of fatherhood and father–son relationships in Winton’s work, and concludes that Winton ‘challenges cultural norms, highlights dysfunction, celebrates intimacy and encourages new ways of being for both fathers and sons’.              

Children figure largely in Winton’s oeuvre, both in his books for young readers and in his extensive writing about childhood. In her essay on this topic, Tanya Dalziell recognises Winton’s ability to negotiate the complicated problem of adult writers ‘narrating childhood’, one that ‘runs the risk of enforcing the very power structures it seeks to critique’. Winton’s story cycle The Turning (2005), recently adapted for the ambitious film of the same name, is read by Bridget Grogan as an extended depiction of ‘melancholic masculinity’. ‘[E]ach story “turns”,’ she writes, ‘on the experience of disappointment and/or loss.’ The epigraph of The Turning is a short section from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Ash Wednesday’, one line of which is the equivocal ‘Because I do not hope to turn again / …’ Grogan draws out, fascinatingly, the implications of the connection between poem and stories. Such connections, she argues, contribute to the elegiac quality of the stories.

‘It is ... a pleasure to read, with essays that not only address topics and issues familiar to readers of Winton’s work, but explore them in often surprising ways, both extending and deepening appreciation of that work while at the same time opening it up to truly critical examination’

It is impossible to refer to all the work in this collection in a short review. But I do want to mention the essays that open and close the volume. Bill Ashcroft’s ‘Water’ is first. It recognises the omnipresence of water in Winton’s writing, where it figures in both literal and symbolic ways. Beyond this, he contends, water functions ‘as a passage to a different state of being’; it is a ‘transforming’ element. For Ashcroft, those meanings extend from Winton’s own identification with the sea coast of Western Australia, and while it can be misleading to make direct links between the issues that preoccupy Winton and their presence in the fiction, such identifications can amplify the writing. Winton has characteristically shied away from public appearances of all kinds, but has nevertheless become a very public spokesperson on environmental issues when the coast of Western Australia is threatened by development. Alluding to such life/work connections, Ashcroft refers to Winton’s non-fiction book Land’s Edge: A Coastal Memoir (2010), where he writes: ‘At first glimpse of the Indian Ocean I stop running and feel the relief unwinding in my chest, in my neck and shoulders. … Two days off the plane, I am finally home’, and at ‘the beach looking west … I have my bearings.’

While Ashcroft’s essay celebrates the positive, redemptive, lyrical elements of Winton’s fiction, Lyn McCredden’s one on Eyrie (2013), his latest work, ends the volume on a much darker note. She begins:

[I]t may seem perverse to many readers to examine Tim Winton in terms of dejection – Winton, iconic Australian author of boyhood, surf, beach, family sublimity and comic possibility … There are, however, many representations of human failure and grief in Winton’s oeuvre: … [and] a growing and deepening concern … is what theorist and novelist Julia Kristeva calls the weight of ‘intolerable significance’, a state aligned with dejection.

Many of the essays in the volume do, of course, recognise that Winton’s fiction does not offer an unadulterated comic vision. But Eyrie is rare in that it develops a consistently ironic, even satiric perspective on many aspects of the life of the central character, Tom Keely, described by McCredden as ‘defeated and ineffectual, a pill-popping former idealist’; aspects that have been valued in earlier work. This difference marks perhaps a change in Winton’s writing. Yet for me Eyrie also exhibits what has been a tendency in several of the later novels to unravel towards the end, seemingly unable to resolve multiple elements of plot and character. This tendency is particularly pronounced in Eyrie. While she acknowledges it, McCredden argues finally that the novel ‘cannot conclude’ – that ending in resolution would deny its ‘central significance’. I would argue rather that the problem is less easily soluble; indeed less critically defensible. And it is precisely this kind of debate that the work in this very fine volume invites.