Analysis
- McCredden, L. (2015). Dreams of belonging: Tim Winton Cloudstreet. Retrieved from http://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/cloudstreet/Reading Tim Winton’s rollicking, heartbreaking, hopeful saga, Cloudstreet, you are immersed in Australia: its histories, its peoples, its changing values, and its multiple longings. It is Australia imagined large and sprawling, but also in ordinary, intimate detail from a particular dot on the map: working class Perth, Western Australia, from the 1940s to the 1960s. Humorously, lyrically and poignantly, the novel probes questions of where and how to belong. Always already transient and haunted, belonging is a precious but fragile dream, in the midst of family, friends and neighbours.
- McGirr, M. (1997). Go home said the Fish: A study of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet. Meanjin, 56(1), pp. 56-66.Tim Winton is an avid reader with a strong sense of the literary culture to which he now belongs.
He is familiar with the work of his peers, supportive of some and dismissive of anything that smacks of preciousness. He still has a tendency, developed in his teenage years, of idolizing certain writers. His criterion for assessing work is simple and exacting: if he can't sleep, he will find himself in the middle of the night with a book in his hand.
Oriel and Lester Lamb and Sam and Dolly Pickles
Reviews
- Anthony, M. (1992). Marilyn Anthony: Review of Cloudstreet. Retrieved from https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/6524885/marilyn-anthony-review-of-cloudstreet-austlitCloudstreet is a powerful exploration of the miraculous and divine in ordinary people's lives. It is about life as a gift and about the goodness of life. It is rich in humour, though it accurately charts grief, loneliness and pain. The characters are exceptionally well drawn. They speak with voices that are real and the story unfolds in settings so familiar to Westem Australian readers, and so vividly realised for readers elsewhere, that the vast content of the book holds together with an extraordinary sense of truth.
Tim Winton, Cloudstreet and the Field of Literature
- Dixon, R. (2005). Robert Dixon: Tim Winton, Cloudstreet and the field of Australian Literature. Westerly, 2005(50), pp. 245-260.Let me begin by saying what I'm not going to do in this paper: I'm not going to do what used to be called a “close reading” of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet. I'm not going to wheel out a theoretical approach through which to interpret the text, as if the reading I could produce by that means were somehow more authoritative than any other. Instead, what I will do is situate Winton's career and this particular novel in what can be called the field of Australian literature.
Overview
- The First Book Club. (2010, March 2). Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/s2795575.htmCloudstreet traces the fortunes and misfortunes of two rural families who move to Perth and struggle to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster.
Chronic gambler Sam Pickles, who lost a hand in a boating accident, inherits a large house called Cloudstreet, with a covenant that it cannot be sold for twenty years. Needing money, he and his family rent out half the house to the Lambs, also hit with tragedy after the youngest son nearly drowned, splitting it down the middle.
The Lambs are an industrious and teetotal family. Determined to survive, they open a grocery on the ground floor. The Pickles are mostly lazy with an alcoholic mother. But from 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the families, from drunkenness, adultery, death, marriage and birth, bond them together in ways they could not have anticipated. - Klassen, C. (2004). Cloudstreet. Retrieved from http://neboliterature.mrkdevelopment.com.au/novel/cloudstreet/cloudstreet.htmWinton lovingly depicts a simpler, less affected yet a richer mosaic of eccentric Australians of our past who suffer from a “whispering in their hearts” over their unearned possession of indigenous lands (house). Though spanning the years from 1943 – 1964, the novel’s background takes in times as early as the 1890s, Lester’s early childhood. Emerging Australian identities are forged through floods, fires, war and hard times. The resilience of the aussie battler is revealed through the travails of the main characters, especially Sam Pickles’ family.
Themes
- Crouch, D. (2007). The architecture of Australian ghost stories. Retrieved from https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9642/0Winton’s Cloudstreet is also animated by horrors from the past, it is “a living breathing house” (132); its respiring presence is like a looming outcrop of wooden landscape, with an architecture deeply sensitised to the experiences of those inside. The living house has somehow soaked up the pain into its structure. Here Winton taps a theme from the tradition of the gothic ghost story; this haunted dwelling is clearly reminiscent of the sentient structure in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1845). In Cloudstreet the most powerful ghostly presence is that which the house itself pours like a caustic upon the psyche of those living within.
- Morrison, F. (1999). Figures of the many and the one: Genre and narrative method in Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. Retrieved from http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/SSE/article/view/546/513For Christmas 1998, Penguin Australia produced Cloudstreet in a hardcover edition under the Viking imprint. As well as author's name and title, the cover includes the phrase: ‘the modern Australian classic.’ The authoritative use of the definite article is matched by the design of classic navy blue and gold spine supporting a sepia photograph of a boat, with its reflection visible on the water. The profitable production of Cloudstreet as a hardcover ‘modern classic’ seven years after its first publication suggests a canny market response to the Australian readership's discernible desire for ‘quality’ historical fiction about modern Australian identity, using recognisably Australian idiom.
- Martin, B.A. (2013). New possibilities of neighbouring: Tim Winton's Cloudstreet. Coolabah, 2013(10), pp. 1-12.I intend to revisit Winton’s popular family saga in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity and Kenneth Reinhard’s political theology, both built upon the Christian principle of loving thy neighbour. The story of two families, the Pickles and the Lambs, sharing house in post-World War II Perth, proves fertile ground for the analysis of the encounter with the Face of the Other, the founding principle of Levinasian philosophy.
In his political theology of the neighbour, which aims at breaking the traditional dichotomy friend/enemy, Reinhard draws on Badiou’s conception of love as a truth procedure, capable of creating universality in a particular place. Thus, the vicissitudes of the two families in coming to terms with each other in their “great continent of a house” invite a metaphorical reading and echo Winton’s interest in promoting a sense of community in Australia.