IN her teens, Tara June Winch flirted with drugs as an escape from
everything that felt wrong with her life. She quit when she saw
a girl who had overdosed in a drug squat being dumped on a train
and left to fend for herself.

A prize-winning novel is the latest triumph in an action-packed life for this 22-year-old.
TARA JUNE WINCH is chatting about child-rearing like an old midwife. "When babies get tired, they kick their legs and wave their arms around," she says matter-of-factly. In her arms, her four-month-old daughter, Lila, demonstrates. "All babies do it."

Working hard, playing hard - young Australian writers Tara June Winch and
Alice Pung reminisce about very different summers.
There is a place we used to go. it was a time captured in the photographs I took that summer when we still used 35mm and everything was still slow. There's one shot of the fellas prising an abalone off the rocks with screwdrivers, a few of the empty rock shelf, a wave peeling across the centre of the print, and another looking back from the cunjevoi reef across the bleached sand of Summercloud Bay.

In awe of her daughter's first steps, Tara June Winch recalls her own deeply enriching journeys.
THEY SAY THE WALK IS important. Not the place, but rather how you get there. The walk mum says that she most remembers is the one where you're walking and you don't even realise it, and then you realise that you're walking along and you think, oh, this is good.

TARA JUNE WINCH reveals the books that tested her emotions.made me laugh
A friend lent me Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins and I still pick it up every now and then for a giggle. It's weird in the right places; sporadic jolts of the absurd mixed with philosophically hilarious one-liners similar to Vonnegut. Sissy Hankshaw is a digitally impaired six-foot beauty who, born with oversized thumbs, falls into the world of hitchhiking. Her thumbs take her across America, her continuous moving funded by short stints as a perfume model. When Sissy is given an assignment at a beauty ranch that's been boycotted by lesbian cowgirls she takes the landscape and its adventure under her wings, or thumbs. The ranch has fantastic characters such as peyote queen Delores Del Ruby who capture Sissy's free-wheeling to make this book a classic comedy and a love story - the girl's version of Brokeback Mountain.

It's difficult to believe it has been 10 years since Tara June Winch's astonishing debut, Swallow the Air. Winch's startling voice and ability to punctuate her world with arresting images resulted in a deluge of accolades. Notably, she received the Rolex Protege and Artist Mentorship, pairing her with Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate in literature. Since then, Winch has been at work on a novel, with her next instalment eagerly anticipated. But first she has delivered this short story collection.

The following article is set out as a practical worksheet for AOS teachers to structure their teaching of Tara June Winch’s novel Swallow the Air around two of the text’s more obvious themes. The teaching is aimed at Standard students struggling to enter the deeper waters of a conceptual approach to discovery. The article is structured in such a way as to remind students of the practical and viable links between their studies in Year 10 and the conceptual approach required in the HSC.It is also written so that students might perceive how the themes and concepts overlap each other in the analysis of the text and rubric. A further aim of the article is to demonstrate how students might organise their analysis throughout the various stages of drafting: identifying themes, concepts, textual citations, techniques and explicit references to the AOS rubric

This novel by Tara June Winch is a narrative of a broken family, of running from unbearable pain, and of the quest to belong. It would be easy, especially for non-Aboriginal readers, to assume that Winch’s protagonist is searching most for her racial identity. But when May Gibson’s mother dies unexpectedly beneath the jacaranda tree in the backyard, and her small family disintegrates around her, May’s search is not for her Aboriginality. It is, rather, for somewhere to belong as she used to belong in her mother’s presence. For somewhere she can feel safe and whole, and simply be loved: probably the most universal of human quests.

I didn’t come across Swallow The Air, the début novel of indigenous author Tara June Winch, by accident. In 2010, my family and I left our Melbourne home to spend a year in Broome in the far northwest of Australia

Tara June Winch’s Swallow the air is another book that has been languishing too long on my TBR pile, though not as long as Sara Dowse’s Schemetime. For Swallow the air, it was a case of third time lucky, because this was the third year I planned to read it for ANZLitLovers Indigenous Literature Week. Like the proverbial boomerang, it kept coming back, saying “pick me!” Finally, I did.

Swallow the Air by indigenous Australian author Tara June Winch has been on Year 12 reading lists almost from its first release in 2006, and I think it’s a very good choice of text to introduce young people to indigenous writing. It’s confronting, because Winch writes with disconcerting frankness about indigenous issues and lifestyles, but it’s also beautiful, uplifting, and often rather funny. In other words, it resists attempts to stereotype indigenous people head on, and I like that.

First-time writing can be so flat and drab it scarcely draws breath, or so purple and greasy it makes a reader's jaw grind. But the prose style of author Tara June Winch is so unapologetically poetic and vivid that at times it makes the reader draw breath, without the cringe factor.

Tara Winch is a young Australian writer of Wiradjuri, Afghan and English heritage. This is her first novel, published in 2006, when she was twenty-three years old. It is ‘for all of us attempting to make sense of the world’.