Working-Class Lives Put Cloudstreet at No. 1

More than 280,000 votes put Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet first in ABC Radio National’s Top 100 Australian Books. The novel follows two working-class families and their hardships in mid-20th-century Perth. Three other Winton novels also made the list: Breath ranked 33rd, Dirt Music 41st and Juice 88th.

A book made in recession

Cloudstreet was due to go to print in 1991, during a recession. Winton told ABC Radio National’s The Book Show that interest rates stood at 17.5 per cent, people were struggling, and his family had no money by the time the book came out. “We were publishing it into a hideous recession,” he said. “People were doing it hard. We were broke ourselves.”

Publishers Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble chose a more affordable paperback over a pricier hardcover. Within a week, the book began selling strongly, Winton said. “That was the book that saved us.” The article reports no sales total or publisher earnings.

Winton wrote the novel’s last 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.

Cloudstreet has never gone out of print. It has also reached radio, theatre, opera and television as an adaptation. Winton said it had been translated into many languages, and he still gets mail about it.

Work, poverty and family memory

The novel follows the Lamb and Pickles families across two decades. Winton said the Lambs drew on his hardworking Winton relatives and their Protestant work ethic, while the Pickles reflected his mother’s family, the Mifflins, whom he described as “more carefree, more feckless, not religious at all.” Their close quarters came to represent a neighbourhood of people with different impulses trying to live together, he said.

The industrious Oriel Lamb drew on Winton’s paternal grandmother, Olive. Born into a poor family in Albany at the turn of the century, Olive left school to care for her siblings, then worked as a scullery maid for a wealthy family in Subiaco. For 30 years, she lived in a tent beneath a backyard mulberry bush. Winton said she had “a really tough life” and loved poetry despite her limited education.

Winton dedicated Cloudstreet to his grandparents. As a child, he listened to their stories while hiding under the table during family lunches. In an essay, he described the oral storytelling tradition he sought to revive as one “fading in white working-class culture in the 60s and 70s.”

Land, memory and colonisation

As Winton wrote, Perth’s older buildings gave way to modern buildings and freeways. The setting also records a conflict over whose history and relationship to place people recognize. In his essay, he described a “provincial shame about old houses and buildings” and pride in “the shiny stuff it could erect in their stead.”

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

Winton said he wanted to honour the lives and hardships of the novel’s white working-class characters without giving them attitudes they didn’t hold. They could see the river but didn’t understand its sacredness or antiquity, he said, just as they failed to appreciate the land’s history. The novel’s enduring place on the list comes from a story rooted in working people, family memory and a landscape marked by colonisation.