Author Tim Winton transports readers to Australia’s remote coastline

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The west coasts of Australia and the United States have much in common, says Tim Winton. In fact, that’s an international phenomenon that includes left coasts from Africa to Ireland.

“Everyone on the east coasts look at the westerners as a bit more wild, a bit more gauche,” explains the Perth-based writer, over tea in San Francisco. “Sometimes, it’s more romantic, much more of a frontier.”

And, as in the U.S., more politically progressive?

“And that’s where the analogy falls down,” he says with a laugh. “In the Australian sense, the West can be more like the American South.”

It’s an interesting point, considering that Winton, the author of 20 books, is often compared to John Steinbeck, Wallace Stegner and William Faulkner, writers lauded for capturing a sense of place in those two distinct regions.

Transporting readers to Australia’s remote southwestern coastline - an isolated region of rugged, sensuous beauty - has served him well. The 47-year-old author has won numerous awards for both his environmentalism and his writing, including being twice short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. At home, his stories have been adapted for stage, TV, movies and radio. His best-known novel, the epic “Cloudstreet,” (1991) is taught in high schools and universities, while the gritty “Dirt Music” (2003) is being made into a movie starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz.

What’s brought him to America’s West Coast is his new novel, “Breath,” which has topped the best-seller list in Australia since it came out in late May. His publisher is convinced its storyline - extreme surfing - might create a new fan base for Winton here.

Set in the ‘70s, in a fictional small town called Sawyer, “Breath” is a literary coming-of-age story about a young man nicknamed Pikelet with loving but exceedingly conformist parents. When he and best friend Loonie teach themselves to surf, their bravura attracts the attention of Sando, a mysterious, world-traveling surfer who pushes the young teenagers to test themselves against a series of ever-more-dangerous, Maverick-like waves. The title is referenced in a number of nuanced ways, including the struggle to get air when you’re being pummeled by crashing water, as well as a dark subplot about asphyxiation.

Australia’s sparse west coast population stays perched close to the shoreline, so it’s no surprise that fishing, swimming, surfing are natural storylines for Winton. Still, the idea of writing “a literary novel about something most people don’t know how to do is a bit of a risk,” he said. “For all the ideas people have from outside, that (Australians) are all surfers or Paul Hogan butchering a crocodile,” surfing is not a national pastime. Winton’s challenge was to convey the sensations, emotions and “soul” of it to a reader who’s never surfed, while also satisfying surfers, those men and women who, in the words of Pikelet, “do something beautiful, something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.”

Winton, who grew up in suburban Perth and spent his teen years in Albany, has surfed ever since he was 6 and his girl cousins “put me on this big old tank of a board, turned me around and shot me to shore.”

The father of three published his first novel, “An Open Swimmer,” while still in college and has managed to live completely off his writing. - “I have no Plan B, like teaching” - ever since. Though he’s occasionally lived abroad, he always returned home and still marvels at the privilege of having been able to work in an environment so far removed from London, New York and Sydney.

“Perth is the most isolated city in the world,” he said. “You’re surrounded by desert. And we all live on the edge. It’s like we own a huge house, and we’re all living on the veranda. Australians do labor under the tyranny of distance. Especially in Western Australia. And I’m kind of an anomaly, so that’s fun.”

Perth is geographically closer to India than Sydney, and more tightly economically tied with industrializing China, thanks to Australia’s tremendous reserves of iron ore, which is why Australia’s roaring economic engine will likely remain unaffected by America’s recession.

Winton notes that America is “quite important in Australia’s imagination, emotionally,” because of World War II when the country was essentially abandoned by the British. When the United States entered the war, “it made a material difference to our survival. ...That’s when we turned away from England. I think it was quite important to us.”

Whether or not his books catch on in the United States, Winton feels fortunate to be a writer in Australia where a “reading culture endures.” He points out that the Brits are often surprised to learn that Australians buy more books per capita - “and that’s exponentially” - than the English.

“I’m not by nature an optimist, but I think that’s interesting,” he says. “It might be a matter of a younger culture that’s coming into its own, not unlike the Americans in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, when that sort of confidence was on the rise. It’s the vigor of youth, I suppose.”