Cloudstreet Vote Elevates Perth's Working-Class Memory

Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet took first place in ABC Radio National’s Top 100 Australian Books, a poll that counted more than 280,000 votes. The novel follows the Lamb and Pickles families over two decades in mid-20th-century Perth, drawing on Winton’s family stories and the oral traditions he heard as a child.

A working-class inheritance

Winton dedicated the novel to his grandparents. As a child, he listened to family stories while hiding under the table during lunches. In an essay, he later wrote that “all that tale-spinning around the table ... embedded itself in my memory.” He said the novel aimed to honour a world he remembered and revive “that oral storytelling tradition which was fading in white working-class culture in the 60s and 70s.”

The book’s two families reflect different branches of Winton’s own family. He described the Wintons as hardworking and guided by a Protestant work ethic, while his mother’s family, the Mifflins, were “more carefree, more feckless, not religious at all.” The Lambs and Pickles live side by side in the novel. Winton called their juxtaposition a metaphor for a village or neighbourhood, where people with different impulses try to get along and make peace with their differences.

Oriel Lamb, the novel’s industrious matriarch, was modelled on Olive, Winton’s paternal grandmother. For 30 years, she lived in a tent beneath a backyard mulberry bush. Born into a poor family in Albany, Olive left school to care for her siblings, then worked as a scullery maid for a wealthy family in Subiaco. She loved poetry. Winton recalled her reciting lines by Longfellow and Browning. “Language was precious to her,” he said.

The river and the land

Much of Cloudstreet unfolds around Derbal Yerrigan, the name Noongar custodians use for the Swan River. Noongar people have gathered on its banks for millennia. Winton called the river “the abiding metaphor of the book” and hoped it could help drive reconciliation. He also said decades of mismanagement under colonisation had left it ailing by the 1980s.

Winton said the novel’s white working-class characters don’t always understand the river or the land’s significance to traditional owners. “They could see the river, but they didn’t really understand what the river was, how sacred and how ancient it is,” he said. He wanted to honour the characters’ lives, hardships and aspirations without giving them attitudes they didn’t hold.

A home seen from abroad

Winton wrote much of the manuscript during a European residency, though the story is rooted in Perth. Homesickness affected him physically, he said, but distance clarified his thinking about home. At the time, people were demolishing older Perth buildings to make way for modern buildings and freeways. Winton wrote that the city had “a provincial shame about old houses and buildings” and “a misplaced pride in the shiny stuff it could erect in their stead.”

His experience of European places that preserved their past sharpened the contrast. Winton lived in Ireland near a medieval castle, while his son attended kindergarten in Paris across the road from where Balzac had lived. The Victorian-era house at the centre of Cloudstreet became a character in its own right. Winton wrote, “The house in my book was alive.”

The novel was due to go to print in 1991, during a recession. Publishers Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble chose a paperback instead of a more expensive hardcover. “Within a week, it was just doing mad things,” Winton said. Cloudstreet has never gone out of print and has been adapted for radio, theatre, opera and television. Three other Winton novels also placed in the poll: Breath ranked 33rd, Dirt Music 41st and Juice 88th.