Cloudstreet Tops Australia's Favourite Books List

More than 280,000 votes later, Australians have chosen Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet as the winner of ABC Radio National’s Top 100 Australian Books. The novel follows two struggling working-class families sharing a crumbling house, and a very large slice of the reading public put it first.

Winton didn’t stop at the top spot. Three more of his novels made the list: Breath (2008) ranked 33rd, Dirt Music (2001) 41st and Juice (2024) 88th.

The story behind the book’s success is a story about money, or the lack of it. Winton wrote Cloudstreet’s final lines on the Greek island of Hydra, near the end of a European residency that took him and his growing family to Paris and rural Ireland. In 1988, when his wife, Denise, became pregnant with their second child, they returned to Western Australia. Winton grew vegetables, fished and edited the manuscript.

A Book Born Into Hard Times

The timing was brutal. The book was due to go to print in 1991, during a recession. “We were publishing it into a hideous 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 made a call that mattered. They chose a more affordable paperback over a pricier hardcover. It worked. “Within a week, it was just doing mad things,” Winton said. “That was the book that saved us.”

Cloudstreet has never been out of print. It has inspired adaptations for radio, theatre, opera and television. “It’s been translated into so many languages,” Winton said. “I still get mail. It’s an odd phenomenon that I just can’t account for.”

Honouring a Working-Class World

The novel follows the Lamb and Pickles families over two decades in mid-20th-century Perth. It won Winton his second Miles Franklin; he has won the award four times, with Dirt Music taking it in 2002 and Breath in 2009. He first broke through at 21, winning the 1981 Australian/Vogel Literary Award for his debut, An Open Swimmer. Shallows followed three years later and brought his first Miles Franklin.

The book is dedicated to his grandparents and draws on stories he heard as a child while hiding under the table during family lunches. “They sounded like they were from a different world,” he said. “I was a child of the space age, and my grandparents were people from the horse and cart era.” He described the book as “hitching a ride on that oral storytelling tradition which was fading in white working-class culture in the 60s and 70s, and which I clung to and tried to reinvigorate in the 80s.”

Oriel Lamb, the industrious matriarch, is modelled on his paternal grandmother, Olive. Olive lived in a tent beneath the backyard mulberry bush for 30 years. “I just thought it was normal,” Winton said. “I thought everybody’s nana lived in a tent.” Born into a poor family in Albany at the turn of the century, she left school to care for her siblings and later worked as a scullery maid for a wealthy family in Subiaco. She loved poetry anyway. “Language was precious to her,” Winton said. “She’d reel off hundreds and hundreds of lines of Longfellow and Browning.”

The two sides of his family shaped the novel’s two households. The Wintons, like the Lambs, were hardworking and driven by a Protestant work ethic. His mother’s family, the Mifflins, were, like the Pickles, “more carefree, more feckless, not religious at all.” He came to see their forced proximity as a metaphor for society: “People of all sorts and different inspirations and possessed by different impulses trying to get along, trying to make peace with their differences and trying to find each other interesting.”

The River and the Unfinished Reckoning

Much of the novel unfolds around Derbal Yerrigan, the name its Noongar custodians use for the Swan River. Winton called it “the abiding metaphor of the book” and hoped it could help drive reconciliation, an idea gaining momentum at the time. Noongar people have gathered on its banks for millennia. “We played there, hunted there, feasted there, danced and celebrated there,” Winton wrote. By the 1980s, he said, decades of mismanagement under colonisation had left the river ailing.

Winton said the characters embody the disconnect between White Australia and the land’s traditional owners. “The sad thing is that the people in Cloudstreet don’t always understand what’s right in front of them,” he said. “They could see the river, but they didn’t really understand what the river was, how sacred and how ancient it is in the same way that they couldn’t really appreciate how sacred and ancient the land is.”

Perth’s treatment of its past offered another lesson. Developers demolished older buildings for modern buildings and freeways. “Perth had a provincial shame about old houses and buildings,” Winton wrote, “and a misplaced pride in the shiny stuff it could erect in their stead.” In Europe, he found a culture that preserved its built environment. The ramshackle Victorian-era house at the novel’s centre became a character in its own right. “The house in my book was alive,” he wrote.

Why This Matters: A book about people who were doing it hard has won a very large public vote, and it nearly didn’t reach them. Its path to readers ran through a recession, a decision to print a cheaper paperback and two publishers willing to make the book affordable. Access to stories, not just their creation, shapes what a culture reads. The novel also keeps asking questions Australia hasn’t finished answering: who gets remembered, which places get protected, and how a society reckons with the sacred and ancient land beneath its feet. Winton says his characters couldn’t hold contemporary attitudes because they didn’t have them. Readers now do, and the list suggests they’re still reading.