ABC Poll Crowns Cloudstreet, a Story of Colonial Blindness

ABC Radio National placed Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet first in its Top 100 Australian Books after more than 280,000 people voted. The ranking puts one novel at the top; Winton’s story also turns toward a power no poll can settle: the divide between White Australia and the Noongar people whose land and river shape the book.

A ranking, and the lives behind it

Three other Winton novels made the list: Breath ranked 33rd, Dirt Music 41st and Juice 88th. Cloudstreet follows the Lamb and Pickles families across two decades in mid-20th-century Perth. It has never gone out of print, and people have adapted it for radio, theatre, opera and television.

Winton dedicated the novel to his grandparents, drawing on stories he heard as a child beneath the family lunch table. In an essay called That Book, he wrote: “All that tale-spinning around the table ... embedded itself in my memory.” He said he wanted the book to revive an oral storytelling tradition that was fading in white working-class culture in the 60s and 70s.

The families in the novel reflect two branches of Winton’s own. The Wintons, like the Lambs, worked hard and followed a Protestant work ethic; his mother’s family, the Mifflins, were “more carefree, more feckless, not religious at all,” he said. In the book, the families live side by side, though Winton’s two family branches never shared a roof. He called their juxtaposition a picture of a neighbourhood: people with different impulses “trying to get along, trying to make peace with their differences and trying to find each other interesting.”

The river the characters don’t understand

Much of Cloudstreet unfolds around Derbal Yerrigan, the name its Noongar custodians use for the Swan River. Noongar people have gathered on its banks for millennia. Winton said decades of mismanagement under colonisation left the river ailing by the 1980s.

He hoped the river could serve as a metaphor and help drive reconciliation. But the novel doesn’t give its white working-class characters knowledge they didn’t have. “The sad thing is that the people in Cloudstreet don't always understand what's right in front of them,” Winton said. “They could see the river, but they didn't really understand what the river was, how sacred and how ancient it is.” He said they also couldn’t grasp the land’s sacred and ancient nature.

What gets preserved, and what gets pushed aside

Winton wrote much of the novel abroad, where homesickness sharpened his view of Perth. At the time, people were demolishing older buildings to make way for modern buildings and freeways. In That Book, he described Perth as having “a provincial shame about old houses and buildings, and a misplaced pride in the shiny stuff it could erect in their stead.”

His grandmother’s life also runs beneath the novel’s account of ordinary people. Olive Winton lived in a tent beneath a backyard mulberry bush for 30 years. Born into a poor family in Albany at the turn of the century, she left school to care for her siblings, then worked as a scullery maid for a wealthy family in Subiaco. She loved poetry despite her limited education. “Language was precious to her,” Winton said.

Cloudstreet was due to go to print in 1991, during a recession. Winton told ABC Radio National’s The Book Show: “Interest rates were at 17.5 per cent. The economy was just really struggling. People were doing it hard. We were broke ourselves. By the time the book came out, we had no money.” Publishers Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble chose an affordable paperback rather than a pricier hardcover. “Within a week, it was just doing mad things,” Winton said. “That was the book that saved us.”