Tim Winton on the failure of masculinity

There is a chilling relevance to Tim Winton’s new novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, about how society has failed its boys.

Tim Winton’s first novel in five years, The Shepherd’s Hut, portrays a socially dislocated teenage boy. Picture: Colin Murty.

When Tim Winton took to the stage at the University of Western Australia on Saturday night to spruik his first novel in five years, the author could hardly have welcomed confirmation of the thesis he was about to lay out; but still it had come.

The Shepherd’s Hut is the story of a teen formed by a violent past and faced with a still more violent present. Just 10 days before Winton’s appearance at Perth Writers Week, at the start of a national tour, a young man named Nikolas Cruz took an assault rifle to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and murdered 17 students and teachers.

The shooter’s story was sickeningly familiar. Cruz was a loner, expelled from the school for threatening fellow students. He reportedly abused his girlfriend. He was a gun and knife fanatic who posted pictures on Instagram of himself got up in fatigues and balaclava, or of his cache of ­weapons, or the animals he killed with them. Online, he called himself “The Annihilator”.

But Cruz is only the weaponised, bleeding-edge version of a masculinity which, as Winton ­explains to a large and loving local audience, has failed boys and young men in recent decades.

Where girls have benefited from a root-and-branch renovation of societal expectations thanks to contemporary feminism, he argues that boys have ­remained trapped in an idea of manhood that is toxic. Where girls are outperforming boys at most points of the education spectrum in the rich West, and have stepped into a welcome knowledge of their agency and potential, boys have shut down, turned inward or lashed out, baffled and enraged by the paucity of ways there are of being a man. “We teach boys,” Winton says, “to ­renounce the best of themselves.”

Winton has his own unsettling experience of being a teen with a gun, as he details in his previous book, the essay collection The Boy Behind the Curtain. He writes of the days he spent, aged 13, standing at a window of the family home in Albany, Western Australia, pointing his father’s rifle at people passing by.

“All I had to do,” he told The Australian when the book was published, “was put the bolt in the rifle, put a round in the chamber and I could have killed myself or accidentally killed a neighbour or a friend or a stranger, and my life — and other people’s lives — would have been completely ­different. It’s terrifying to think that now.”

Jaxie Clackton, the young ­anti­hero of The Shepherd’s Hut, is a poster child for a denuded version of masculinity. Regularly beaten by a brutal drunk of a ­father, reviled by the small-town folk he has grown up alongside, punished for having fallen in love with his cousin who lives further up WA’s inland north, he seems destined for the kind of act Cruz committed in Florida. Winton pulls no punches in his depiction of Jaxie. It’s as if he has taken all the wounded young working-class men from his fictional universe and melted them down into one dark ingot. Jaxie not only suffers abuse at the hands of his ­father, he watches as that same abuse is meted out on his mother. Everyone in their small town sees the evidence but no one says a thing. (His father’s drinking companion is the local cop.) The local school only sees the evil that Jaxie does, not that done to him. Family, community, authority figures and institutional structures have failed the boy before he has even had a chance to begin.

The sense of No Exit is dramatised by the landscape that Jaxie, following a shocking turn of events early in the novel, is obliged to escape to, alone, with nothing but a rifle and a few litres of water. It is a region of salt lakes and abandoned mines, the occasional derelict shepherd’s hut or hunter’s weekend retreat — a purgatory, in other words, of harsh and alien beauty, as a series of images, accompanied by music and punctuating Winton’s talk, eloquently insist.

Winton cuts a paradoxical figure these days. He’s now a grandfather, and while the long surfer’s mane is still in evidence, so is a pair of scholarly bifocals. He’s ­relaxed and funny, by turns profane and earnest — “I’ll have to buy you a bigger swear jar,” he apologises to his elderly parents who are in the audience — but there is no mistaking the moral seriousness that runs beneath the imaginative play of his new book. His argument is that misogyny is a malign force in our culture, and not just for women, but for young men, too. It deforms them; it makes them domestic terrorists.

He notes that 88 people died in the Bali bombings. Our rational, expected response was to pass laws, initiate protective policies and procedures, and to pursue and ensure prosecution of the malefactors responsible. And yet, Winton swerves, almost the same number of women were killed by their partners that same year in Australia. The audience appreciates his point: no less urgency should apply to such a terrible phenomenon.

The crowd, old and young, more women than men, responds with anger, sorrow and delight as the author spins out his secular sermon. But Winton is equally ­determined to not be seen as a moralist. He does not wish his new book to be regarded as didactic. “A novel isn’t a tool,” he says, “it’s a toy ... a toy is something you get to know out of curiosity.” And yet, he goes on, “there is great ­embedded energy in a toy” — the kind of power that comes of having no usefulness at all.

“It’s the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they’re what keeps life from being ­meaningless.”

Winton concludes with a stirring call not for outrage but for understanding. “Children are born wild,” he says, “and that’s beautiful.” Irrespective of gender, “they are reservoirs of tenderness and empathy”. But some kids stay savage, and sadly they are mainly boys. Neglect or over­indulgence have created a tribe of young men the rest of us will cross the street to avoid.

Yet we should not look away, Winton pleads: we should engage with those boys. Because it is only by attending to the particular that we can get beyond the automatic, collective responses toxic masculinity occasions, to see the damaged humanity beneath. We have spent decades removing traditional structures, he says, often for the best and noblest of reasons, without providing an alternative path to manhood for young men: a path premised on decency, self-respect, kindness and care. And it is up to fathers as much as anyone else to repair and correct this demographic strip-mining.

It is only as the audience files out of the room that the realisation dawns: to read the “useless” novel Winton has just written may be the most practical way to understand the damage done to, and by, one particular imaginary young man. It is a place to start, at least.

The Shepherd’s Hut, by Tim Winton, is published on March 12 (Hamish Hamilton, 267pp, $39.99 hardback). Winton will discuss the book on a national tour, March 19-26. Details: www.penguin.com.au