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. As the Pickles family move into the big, trembling house at number one Cloud Street,

It's just them in this vast indoors . . . there's a war on and people are coming home with bits of them removed . . . women are walking buggered and beatenlooking with infants in the parks . . . [the Pickles] have no money and this great continent of a house doesn't belong to them. They're lost. (Winton p. 51)

The novel is, of course, only one person's re-imagining of place and time, and for some critics there are omissions, blindnesses and flaws in this vision. However, the fact remains that Cloudstreet is a phenomenon; an astoundingly popular novel, made into a television mini-series, adapted to stage, and in 2012 voted the most popular Australian novel by viewers of the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club. For Australian playwright Nick Enright, co-author of the stageplay of Cloudstreet, 'People get that look in their eye, that Cloudstreet look'. For him, the novel has 'leapt the fence in Australia, it's in the bloodstream of the nation' (Morrison p. 133).

Cloudstreet is a marvelous, affecting amalgam. It combines the recognisable and everyday with dream-like, uncanny aspects. The boisterous, haunted house on Cloud Street, which gradually, painstakingly becomes home to the novel's two families (the satirically-named Pickles and Lambs) is a believable, earthed, suburban setting. It is rendered