Tim Winton probes the roots of toxic masculinity

IN his new novel Tim Winton probes the roots of toxic masculinity, built by generations of ignorant men who doom their sons to live in an intolerant past.

Tim Winton out in the salt lake country of the WA wheatbelt where The Shepherd's Hut is set. Picture: Lynn Webb

THE voice of Jaxie Clackton, the damaged boy who takes readers of The Shepherd’s Hut on a terrible journey through the blasted salt country of Western Australia’s northern wheat belt, came to Tim Winton unbidden. Once heard, Jaxie could not be forgotten, and Winton was forced to abandon the novel he was working on, and follow in Jaxie’s wake.

To mark the publication of the novel that’s been hailed as Winton at his finest, and on the eve of a national tour of lectures about toxic masculinity, he speaks to SAWeekend about lost boys, errant priests, love, God and salvation.

Deborah Bogle: Where did Jaxie come from?

Tim Winton: I’m not really sure I can say where he came from. I was in the middle of another novel and that ghastly scene in the shed just… arrived in my head. That scene where the ute has fallen off the jack and there’s blood running across the floor… it was so hot and horrible, so intimate, that it felt like a memory. It was so strong it stopped me in my tracks and I had to find a pad to catch it while it was hot. And as I was writing the details down Jaxie’s voice, that mind, that perspective, just moved into position.

I didn’t write that sequence then, but I had it whole from the first moment and
(for reasons I can’t explain) I knew how it would be written. Of course, I set those notes aside and went back to what I was working on, but after about a fortnight I realised I’d been derailed.

DB: Like you, I grew up in regional Australia, I knew boys like him, I recognised that voice. And i guess you did, too, didn’t you?

TW: I didn’t know who he was for quite a while, but I always knew what he was. I just followed that voice. I found out who he was as I went along. And, to be honest, he frightened me a little. I knew boys like him at school. I’ve lived in fishing towns a lot
of my life and watched boys like Jaxie growing up. By and large they grow up to become men like Raelene’s husband in The Turning. It’s an awful thing to watch, the predictability of that, the way boys are groomed (or doomed) to be savages and thugs. Kids like Jaxie – the regional hard-boy, in particular – it’s not just that feminism hasn’t reached them – most of modernity hasn’t reached them either. They’re on social media and the most up-to-date music and so on, but when you hear them speak half their vocab is strangely anachronistic. You can hear the language and cadences of their uncles and grandfathers. And, of course, their attitudes to women and migrants, and gays and indigenous people reflect an earlier era.

DB: When I first met Jaxie, I had a sinking feeling, and wondered whether I wanted to stay with him. Did you worry about that?

TW: Yeah, I guess there’s a dread recognition and a fear. And that was the risk I knew I was taking. I wrote the first draft, got a little way in and I thought, they’re not going to come at this. Because as a writer you know that most of the readership is female, middle-class, middle-aged and even on a good day they’re not going to be in the mood for someone like this, so I hedged my bets and I wrote it from three or four different characters’ point of view, in that creative writing sort of way, and I realised it was a failure of nerve. I knew I was just trying to shield myself and the reader from the unloveliness of this boy, his voice and his thoughts and his impurity. Especially these days when we’re trying to keep ourselves nice. Blame free.

DB: Jaxie’s on foot, wounded, hobbling and almost out of water when he comes upon the priest Fintan McGillis’s camp at the edge of the Salt Lake. The voices of Jaxie and Fintan are so vivid, so wonderfully counter-posed. How important was it that Fintan be an Irish priest?Was it for linguistic contrast? For the fact that he was so geographically adrift?

TW: He needed to be from somewhere else entirely. Not just geographically, but culturally and mentally. He’s not exactly a shining model of manhood, the old Fintan, but he does bring a different version of what a man is. He’s nothing like the men Jaxie’s known. He’s not all glowering silence and barely suppressed violence. And once I got to know him I saw how useful it is that he’s a stranger in this land, not just on this particular country. The musicality of him, the talkiness of him… well, that was fun to write. And it was fun to have that dynamic of mutual incomprehension between him and the sullen, frightened (and frightening) boy, too. The chatterbox and the smouldering, silent boy. And, to be honest, Fintan was a kind of a relief from Jaxie. Having Fintan be a priest, well, that meant he had some kind of education. And he’s had a cultural licence to think in abstract terms. This is so different to what Jaxie knows. And there’s a communal tradition there, too. And some aesthetic sense, though that’s not something you generally associate with the Irish church. Of course, too, there’s the long, hideous shadow of child rape that will forever stain the church. That’s one thing Jaxie will know something about.

To write from the boy’s perspective was really hard work. Because he’s reaching for
all these ideas and ideals, he’s trying to articulate big things and I’m trying to let him blossom a little, but I’m reduced to such a narrow vocabulary. It’s like having most of the crayons taken off you. You’re left with brown, black and purple, say, and you’re supposed to be portraying sunlight. It nearly did my head in!

On top of that, I’m trying to make it beautiful, and I guess that’s the challenge.
It takes a bit of nerve to try that. I suppose it helps that I love all kinds of vernacular language; I’ve always celebrated demotic speech and I’ve had some practice at trying
to let it be musical and beautiful.

So, it was nice, now and then, to wheel Fintan on and give him a blast of high language (or just high volume).

Fintan is an outcast, essentially without hope of being drawn back into the tribe. It takes Jaxie a little while to see the old man is more lost than he is. In existential terms, Fintan is in a kind of irretrievable position and he’s doing what he can to come to terms with that. Jaxie can’t even imagine what it’s like to have no avenue out. He’s young; he thinks he can fight his way out or dream his way out of the hell he’s in. His idea of hope is quite literal.

Fintan, as I suspect you understand, has no hope until Jaxie comes along. And when hope stirs in him it’s not personal. By which I mean it’s not hope for himself. The hope that lights up in him is hope in – or probably more accurate to say, hope for Jaxie. The boy becomes Fintan’s bit of skin in the game. His life has meaning because he wants the boy to live and grow and prosper. And he’ll do anything to keep that hope alive. Before that his life has begun to subside into the madness that comes from utter irrelevance. By the end of the book he’s not just relevant; for Jaxie’s prospects he’s pivotal. And even if Jaxie doesn’t really understand what the old man has done for him, he’s witnessed a man exceeding himself. He senses the old man has given him life and has suffered gladly and horribly to make it happen.

Jaxie wants to be more than a savage and a thug. He yearns to be ‘decent’. And the irony is, he’s forced to see something horrible and to do something shocking, in order to reach for that kind of decency. Weird, the way he finally experiences a man’s love.

DB: Your publishers talk about this being a book about masculinity and power, forgiveness and acts of love, but isn’t it also about an idea of God? Fintan tells Jaxie that when he does right, he’s an instrument of God. Does it say something about your own explorations of questions of faith?

TW: Well, I think you could safely say it has all those things in it, yeah. Jaxie’s not the way he is by accident. He’s distorted and damaged by misogyny, by male violence. He’s a product of the terror and claustrophobia of domestic violence. And he’s also a product of a culture enormously resistant to reflection, intimacy, beauty and so on. He lives in the northern wheatbelt, a completely denatured place, a field of mass extinctions, of vast, wounded silences. And his broader culture is stripped of rites of passage, of paths of spiritual inquiry. So, in a geographical sense as well as a cultural sense, Jaxie has inherited a scorched earth. His life is hard and narrow and without music or beauty or any licence for introspection or curiosity. I guess – and you’re right – I was interested in his emotional and spiritual poverty. And in some senses you could say modern Australians are among the poorest people who’ve ever lived.

Of course, most of what Fintan says about God is all garbled in Jaxie’s mind. He catches a bit of it and gets it all arse-about. Especially his notion that in killing bad people he’s some kind of agent of the divine. But the priest does leave him with a simple, profound gift, I think, and that’s a sense of human agency. That goodness is possible, that when it’s nurtured it increases, that love and decency and kindness are forces in the world. That striving for them, protecting them, honouring them can give life meaning.

Of course Jaxie has no religious education. And Fintan has grown up with a God who’s the angry, absent father who can never be pleased. It’s as if that codified model of the divine has failed him or become irrelevant. He’s sloughed it off like burnt skin. And he doesn’t indulge in much theology by the time we meet him, but he’s been changed by solitude and by the place he’s in. He’s stripped of many illusions and many ideas that have no purchase there at the edge of the salt. Does that reflect my own views? Well, maybe, to some degree. I certainly don’t have the views I grew up with as an evangelical fundamentalist. The angry, gendered God with a peevish personality and a global surveillance outfit – that doesn’t ring any bells for me anymore.

If religion isn’t about liberation then I’m not interested. If it’s not about love and mercy, then it’s not for me. The appetite for authority and security, control and fear – that’s very human. It’s not religious. People seem to gravitate to gangs and bosses, to give their power over to others and be relieved of responsibility. As the poem has it, change is hard and hope is violent. When we move on, things are broken. Things need to be broken in order to make things anew. Freedom is something you struggle for. And there’s a violence in hope, a passion that makes things and breaks them. Ask anyone who’s ever fallen in love.

DB: You’re touring the country with a lecture series called Tender Hearts, Sons of Brutes. What’s that about? Is this a way of avoiding the usual author media tour? Or is it another example of you using your platform – as you do for the Ningaloo campaign – to talk to
issues you feel strongly about?

TW: The Tender Hearts thing is just a talk I’m giving. Reflecting on the book, talking about how it fell in my lap and colonised my life for a couple of years. It’s nothing revolutionary. After the book was finished I thought about Jaxie and his prospects and I guess I got thinking about other boys and men – real people – and some of the talk comes from those inexpert reflections. I guess I’d been mulling some of this over during the years I was writing the essays in the last two books. So, that’s all it is, a talk broken up by some music and images to give people a chance to reflect (and to give my voice a rest).

Once upon a time a writer giving a talk was no big thing. The interview format has just become a convention. And I have nothing against it. It’s certainly easier than writing something to present to 700 people at a time.

I am interested in the way boys are allowed (or trained) by neglect or indulgence to become thugs and savages. And the many ways in which a kind of monoculture of masculinity is kept alive. As if there’s only one version of manhood that’s acceptable. How boys are pressed into service as misogynists. Forsaking all other, better ways of being a man. I’m also interested in the way men seem to absolve themselves of all responsibility in the making and modelling
of boys, as if even that, too, is women’s work. If it’s good enough for a footy player to be a conscious and responsible role model for boys (especially other people’s boys) then why doesn’t the same expectation apply to stockbrokers and carpenters, members of Federal cabinet and clergy?

I guess I’m writing and saying this stuff because it interests me, that’s all. I’m conscious that I’m just a novelist, a glorified tradie. I don’t have any special expertise and I don’t pretend to have any answers. But, yeah, if you’re a bloke with some kind of public presence and you have some hopes for civility and justice, you do feel a sense of responsibility to appeal to people – especially other men – to consider how we do things, how we might help one another change.

As to the public advocacy: Ningaloo and marine conservation are the most non-literary public things I do. But I’m also involved with a bunch of social justice initiatives and literacy things as a patron. You can do everything. And not everything has to be done in public, thank God.

DB: How has the #metoo movement shaped your feelings about this issue?

TW: #mettoo hasn’t had any influence on the book. I certainly wasn’t “writing into a debate’’. The book was written years before these recent events. And I’ve been holding off publication for about 18 months. But of course I realise the book is now being published into a fraught (and necessary) conversation. I think it’s good people are drawing a line in
the sand and refusing to put up with boorish, abusive behaviour. Although most of these people have been rich and famous. It’ll

be interesting to see if that resolve trickles down to ordinary folks.

The Shepherd's Hut by Tim Winton

The Shepherd’s Hut, by Tim Winton, Hamish Hamilton, $39.99