Tim Winton writes his way to honour

Tim Winton toils quietly on his novels and makes a lot of noise about environmental destruction.

Author Tim Winton at Nigaloo Reef, WA. He has received the Order of Australia. Picture: Violeta J. Brosig/Blue Media Exmouth

In a recent interview with The Australian, writer Tim Winton ­reflected on a life spent “in a room on my own, with people who don’t exist”.

For 40 years, he has toiled diligently on quietly beautiful stories about the Australian landscape, and its inhabitants. He does not exactly shun, but also doesn’t love, the limelight. He could do without the prizes, although they have always come, and keep coming.

He didn’t want to do interviews about receiving the Order of Australia, but released a statement, saying: “I’m pleased to accept this honour because I know how hard it is for a writer to have an impact on a culture still geared to venerate sports folk and tycoons.

“In accepting it, I’m mindful of all the artists who labour in relative obscurity to make Australian life more beautiful, conscious, fair and sustainable. We don’t do it for gongs. We do it out of love and fury, in the hope that someone is listening, someone is watching, and someone remembers.”

Winton received the honour for “distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, to conservation, and to environmental advocacy.”

Winton, 63, emerged as a writer of astonishing talent when he won The Australian/Vogel’s Award for his debut novel, An Open Swimmer, in 1981. He was just 21 years old. He has been a “sole trader, a solo operator” ever since, producing 29 books for adults and children. He has won the Miles Franklin Award for Literature four times, for Breath (2009), Dirt Music (2001), Cloudstreet (1991) and Shallows (1984); the Christina Stead Prize for The Turning (2005); the Australian Society of Authors Medal (2002) and the Centenary Medal (2001).

Cover An Open Swimmer by Tim Winton.

As important to him has been noisy and determined advocacy on behalf of the environment, as patron of the Protect Ningaloo campaign, since 2018; advocate for the Environmental Defender‘s Office; patron of the Native Australian Animals Trust; advocate of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy; patron of the Murujuga World Heritage Summit and the Stop the Toad Foundation; and advocate for Save Ningaloo Reef, Protect Ningaloo, and Save Moreton Bay.

He has spent the best part of the past two years writing and filming a three-part documentary, Ningaloo/Nyinggulu, for the ABC.

Director of Project Ningaloo Paul Gamblin (left) and author Tim Winton (second from left) with locals opposed to a proposed deep water port in Exmouth, Western Australia, in 2021. Picture: Frances Andrijich/The Australian

He told The Australian he had fallen in love with the reef’s whale sharks – the world’s biggest fish – after being stripped to his undies and tossed off the side of a boat.

There was a whale shark beneath him. He described it as being the size of a bus, with a mouth like a bathroom. He would do anything to learn more about it and to save its habitat.

“I did it despite my discomfort and you know, obvious incompetence,” he said of making the documentary.

He is not pompous about his beautiful books. In his experience, he said, novels tend to appear to their authors “as a litany of failures, and if you had nothing else to do, I suppose you could go back and tidy them all up, but I’m sure there are many people who want to go back and tidy up their adolescence, or tidy up their childhood, or tidy up parts of their lives, and it’s just not possible. You have to keep going forward.”