35 years ago, Tim Winton was broke. Then he published Cloudstreet

When Tim Winton wrote the last lines of Cloudstreet, he had no notion of how successful the book would be.

He was on the Greek island of Hydra, on the tail end of a European residency that had taken him and his growing family to Paris and rural Ireland.

When, in 1988, his wife, Denise, became pregnant with their second child, they decided to return home to Western Australia, where Winton grew veggies, fished and knuckled down to edit his manuscript.

By the time it was due to go to print in 1991, the outlook was not great.

"We were publishing it into a hideous recession," Winton tells 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."

The dire economic circumstances prompted his publishers, Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble, to release the book as a more affordable paperback rather than as a pricier hardcover.

But despite their concerns, it was immediately clear they had a hit on their hands.

"Within a week, it was just doing mad things," Winton says.

"That was the book that saved us."

Thirty-five years on, Cloudstreet has been adapted for radio, theatre, opera and television and has never been out of print.

"It's been translated into so many languages," Winton says.

"I still get mail. It's an odd phenomenon that I just can't account for."

His readers are in no doubt as to the book's appeal, however.

With more than 280,000 votes counted, Cloudstreet has placed first in Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books.

Three other Winton novels made the list, with Breath (2008) coming in at 33, Dirt Music (2001) at 41 and Juice (2024) at 88.

'A bravura performance'

Winton was just 21 when he won the 1981 Australian/Vogel Literary Award for his first novel, An Open Swimmer.

His next novel, Shallows, published three years later, won his first Miles Franklin Literary Award.

He published two more novels, That Eye, the Sky and In the Winter Dark, by the time he started work on Cloudstreet in the late 80s.

"[Cloudstreet] was a book that I was thinking about all of that time," Winton says.

"I needed to build up to it because it was a bravura sort of performance in a way. It took a lot of nerve, and I didn't have that nerve for a long time. I needed to work on my chops during my 20s."

Cloudstreet follows the fortunes of two families — the Lambs and the Pickles — over two decades in mid-20th-century Perth.

It won Winton his second Miles Franklin, an award he has now won four times (Dirt Music took it out in 2002 and Breath in 2009).

Dedicated to his grandparents, Cloudstreet draws on the tall tales Winton heard as a child, hiding under the table during family lunches.

He remembers being transfixed by his grandparents' voices, so different to his own.

"They sounded like they were from a different world," he says.

"I was a child of the space age, and my grandparents were people from the horse and cart era. They sounded like people in a Chips Rafferty movie."

The stories took on a sacred cast with each retelling, bringing long-dead family members back to life.

Growing up in a family of storytellers and larger-than-life characters shaped Winton as a writer.

"All that tale-­spinning around the table … embedded itself in my memory," he writes in That Book, the final essay in his new collection, Songs from the Firefront.

In Cloudstreet, Winton sought to honour that lost world.

"It was 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."

A metaphor for society

Cloudstreet's industrious matriarch, Oriel Lamb, is modelled on Winton's paternal grandmother, Olive.

Like Oriel, Olive Winton lived in a tent under the mulberry bush in the backyard for 30 years.

"I just thought it was normal," Winton says. "I thought everybody's nana lived in a tent."

His grandmother was diminutive but "mighty" in character.

"She was tiny, but a very impressive person," Winton says. "She'd had a really tough life."

Born into a poor family in Albany at the turn of the century, Olive left school to care for her siblings before working as a scullery maid for a wealthy family in Subiaco.

Despite her limited education, she loved poetry.

"Language was precious to her," Winton says.

"She'd reel off hundreds and hundreds of lines of [19th-century poets] Longfellow and Browning … That was a big influence on me as a kid."

The Wintons, like the Lambs, were hardworking, driven by a Protestant work ethic.

In contrast, the Mifflins — Winton's mother's family — were, like the Pickles, reliant on luck: "More carefree, more feckless, not religious at all," Winton says. "[They] lived it up."

While the two branches of Winton's family never resided under one roof, the Lambs and the Pickles live side-by-side in Cloudstreet, the source of much of the novel's tension.

Winton came to see this juxtaposition as a metaphor for society more broadly.

"That's what a culture is, that's what a village is, that's what a neighbourhood is," he says.

"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."

A new appreciation for history

Cloudstreet may be an Australian classic, but Winton wrote much of the manuscript abroad.

He had never travelled overseas before, and the homesickness he felt imbued his writing.

"It's a kind of physical affliction. I felt like my skin had been peeled," he says.

The geographic distance provided Winton with the perspective he needed to see his home anew.

"It clarified my thinking, and it was helpful to me," he says.

At the time, the Perth of Winton's childhood was being demolished in the name of progress, replaced by modern, characterless buildings and freeways.

"Perth had a provincial shame about old houses and buildings, and a misplaced pride in the shiny stuff it could erect in their stead," Winton writes in That Book.

In Europe, Winton encountered a different way of life, one that honoured the past and preserved the built environment.

In Ireland, Winton lived in the shadow of a medieval castle; his son went to kindy in Paris over the road from where Balzac lived more than a century before; while the drama of the Odyssey unfolded across the water from where he lived in Greece.

In white working-class Perth, where connections did not extend "back beyond a generation or two", history was not valued in the same way.

The energy he felt in centuries-old European buildings — "storied places" where "you could feel the joys and woes of long-­dead humans" — found expression in his novel.

Cloudstreet, the ramshackle Victorian-era house that gives the book its title, is a character in its own right, heaving and sighing, growing and shifting.

"The house in my book was alive," Winton writes.

An ancient culture

Much of Cloudstreet unfolds around Derbal Yerrigan, as it is known by its Noongar custodians, or the Swan River.

Winton hoped the river — "the abiding metaphor of the book" — might also serve as a metaphor to help drive reconciliation, an idea that was gaining momentum at the time.

For millennia, Noongar people have gathered on the river's banks.

It was a waterway also valued by Winton and his forebears. "We played there, hunted there, feasted there, danced and celebrated there," he writes.

But by the 80s, the river was ailing after decades of mismanagement under colonisation.

The characters of Cloudstreet, products of the world around them, 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," Winton says.

"I was keen to write about these white working-class people and to honour their lives and their hardships and their aspirations.

"But I couldn't make them any more enlightened than they were … 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.

"I couldn't give them contemporary opinions or attitudes because they didn't have them. They couldn't have them."

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