Tim Winton’s Rising Lunch

Vegan calls your attention to this. I’m sure Jaidyn-Jaxxon and Justin Langer will be there. Is it just me, or does the blurb go out of its way to make sure you understand, that you totally understand that the play is the biggest piece of crap ever to be staged? When Kate Cherry says that she laughed one moment and cried the next, does she really mean, “Fuuuuuck, this is shite. You have totally been warned.” If not, what does it mean to print what every person reading will assume is a sodden tissue of lies? Kate you are really saying with a straight face that you oscillated between laughing and weeping, only pausing to count the minutes before the clichéd textures of Fremantle’s fishing boat harbour could be brought to life? Kate, every single reader will know that your real thoughts would have been “How do we cast this turkey without letting Geoff fucking Kelso… – Oh, err, Hi Geoff, how did you get past security?”On the other hand, no one could play a piece of “jetsam dragged up by the sea” like Geoff, (apart from Don Smith obviously). I’m assuming Geoff plays Col, the sexually promiscuous old dugong, caught suddenly in the mill-race of the Leeuwin Current, swept out of the blood warm waters of Shark Bay, and tossed up barely half alive in the oily waters of a Fremantle Marina, brought back to life by a mouth to mouth session administered by the local priest half maggoted on altar wine, who afterwards vomits one of those overcheesed Little Creatures pizzas through his nose, while boatloads of tight crotched Italians shake their fists – their fleet sadly and forever unblessed?

Oh my god there’s larrikin humour as well. And it’s Australia Day too. And it’s $64. Well at least there’s coarse language, as Dee, the slutty but drunk English backpacker reels off a string of obscenities, as her attempts at larrikin humour and cracks about convict heritage fall flat and the motley collection of larrikins, fringe dwellers, larrikins and expensive boat owners are forced by the staccato bark of her relentless “Wake up Aussie cunts! You want to hole up? Hole THIS up!”to reconsider what brought them to this terrible and tragic existence of living on boats in a marina, jerking like marionettes -like Aussie cunt larrikin marionettes to the tune of some aquatic Don’s Party. Or should that be Don’s Party 2?

About AHC McDonald

Comedian, artist, photographer and critic. From 2007 to 2017 ran the culture and satire site The Worst of Perth
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173 Responses to Tim Winton’s Rising Lunch

  1. The Bartender's Skills with a Manhatten says:

    Perhaps she was weeping with laughter at how bad it was?

    I’ve done that.

    Like

  2. skink says:

    Rising Bile:

    I take it that is a different John Howard, although I can already imagine The Rodent standing centre stage and doing improvised freestyle Wintoning, ending with ‘stop the boats’

    is it not enough that Cloudstreet is on the telly this month without this as well?

    Like

  3. langhorne says:

    That’s another benefit of being in Queensland…we are far from Tim Winton and his flotsam.

    Like

  4. skink says:

    Western Australia: where too much Winton is barely enough

    Like

  5. The Legend 101 says:

    I love Tim Winton his best film is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ive seen it 15times.

    Like

  6. Bento says:

    You’re well fucked, mate. I understand Rai Fazio plays Larrikin #87.

    Like

    • The Legend 101 says:

      For the final time just accept that you and Rolly and the annoying ones and also dont swear this a place for dicussion and thoughts not Abusive Swearing.

      Like

      • JaneZ says:

        Listen on the off chance that you really are just some sad little dude from Dianella, I suggest you ask your dad to implement parental controls and go play WoW. ok?

        Like

  7. The Bartender's Skills with a Manhatten says:

    “Please note: “Rising Water” contains coarse language.”

    Not a little of it rising from the press section, one might assume.

    Like

  8. skink says:

    is it compulsory now to illustrate Tim Winton with photo of people under water?

    I’m looking at the synopsis and can’t help thinking of the similarities with Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’

    Like

  9. Bill O'Slatter says:

    Guaranteed no cliché left unflogged. with John and Geoff in the roles of fat and skinny, Never before have we seen such an exploration of the darkness at the heart of the Australian soul , well apart from ” Summer of the Seventeenth Seal” or perhaps something from that David WIlliamson shit. e.g. “The Removalists”. They laughed , they cried. The play will be declared so bad it’s good , and at the Heath Ledger. Heath’s spirt will be blowing the wind in the sails of this little ship.Yes JJTS will be in the audience , simultaneously and maniacally laughing and crying .

    Like

  10. Pete says:

    What? No place for Johnny Young as the voiceover/narrator.

    I am never again accepting a lift from someone who listens to 6pr.

    Like

  11. Rolly says:

    Haven’t seen it; prolly won’t.
    Can’t think of anything amusing to say about Winton, neither his work nor his sycophants.
    It’s all too pathetic.
    I did endure “Cloudstreet” in order to try to understand, but the sheer schmaltz of it made me wonder just how many third class little known girly novels he’d managed to paraphrase in the process.
    I know that he’s popular; but so were the Mills and Boon outpourings.

    Like

  12. skink says:

    what, no Royal Wedding Worsts?

    I heard on the radio that one pub has installed twin big screens, and will show the wedding on one and the footy on the other

    Like

  13. Shazzanator says:

    Over cheesed pizza?
    I say Good Day to you sir.

    Like

  14. Pete says:

    Less gaps in your pizza TLA?

    Like

  15. Heh, already on the front page of google for
    tim winton’s rising water

    ‘He’s shown an exquisite feel for the language, the smell, the very pulse of Australia’ – Andrew Denton

    Like

  16. Rolly says:

    “….his unmistakably (West) Australian voice.”
    Indeed!
    Sir Charles will be positively spinning in his grave.
    Western Australian. Please.
    Ignorant.

    Like

  17. poor lsia says:

    LA devoured his 4th rich and textured mojito, weeping. Suddenly the oily waters of his roiling oesophagus rippled involuntarily with burbling laughter, the waves of mirth jostling each other like fishing boats crammed into fishing boat harbour.

    Old Rolly watched from the boardwalk at Scabs and smiled ruefully, his pebbly eyes crinkling at the corners. He remembered when…. Can’t go there, he thought. He turned, his crook hip slowing him down, but steady like one of the steady rocks at elephant rocks, and made his way away from the rippling dunes.
    The young Legend, also watching from the boardwalk, pertly perched like a slippery young seal unaware of the wordless circling great whites below the depths, said something incongruously offtopic. Peals of laughter rose from the crowd of observers and the salty air carried the poignant, yet saltily evocative, sound, like so many shitting gulls circling over the beer garden at little creatures.

    Like

    • “and made his way away from the rippling dunes” – to the Baravan that hadn’t been rocking for…well since the time one of the old man emu shockies had let go…

      “Pebbly eyes.” Gold.

      Like

    • Rolly says:

      What’s with this “boardwalk” crap p l ??
      Straight concrete and limestone at Scabs, dearie.

      No shockers on the Baravan, either, LA; just a couple of them inside.

      Like

      • “…since the time one of the old man emu shockies had let go – on the old ute he and his brother had bodged up from scraps and the chassis of an old FX. God, talk about a rough ride! The crash gearbox with no reverse they stole from Col’s (or was it Les’?) shed, dragging that Baravan back from Lancelin where the cops had…”

        Like

        • poor lisa says:

          But it was no use dwelling on the past. He and outrage were through – it couldn’t be mended unlike his Ripcurl steamer that mum’d sat up late to put stitches in after a rough session on the pitted old Cordingly.
          The rift with fucking outrage had left him spent, like a German backpacker after smuggling some YWAM girls into the rainbow lodge; like Legend after a 6am non sequitur. LA dulled the hurt with a 7th mojito. Think of something else you bastard. DOn’t go back to beechboro, you can’t heal that hurt. He grinned hazily as he managed to think of something else.

          Jamie. Jamie and her mudflaps. Christ, he’d never had a mudflapping like it. He took another slurp of the rich and textured drink, and cried, then laughed. She was coming round tonight. He didn’t know when, she couldn’t call as her mobile phone didn’t work to good. But she’d be there in her country ute. Christ, I hope she brings her mudflaps.

          Like

          • I realy thought you were going to go with “..her almost prehensile mudflaps…”

            Like

            • poor lisa says:

              Poor Lisa finished flapping out the last ben sherman and pinned it to the hills hoist in the back yard of the gentrified semi in the shadow of the YWAM compound. Her forearms ached from a good morning’s wintoning. She knew she had to stop the wintoning and get on with it, but a listnessness washed over her like aoli over the chunky chips at little creatures.
              Should she get down to studying like a slappable mature age student, or clean the house? Or should she meet Shazzanator and the book club for a yarn at the Bookcaffe. She grinned and remembered when she’d first heard about it from old Rolly. “It’s a bookshop – and a cafe! It’s fair dinkum for your book club.” He’d never quite got with the changing times had rolly. He still belonged to the old Perth when you could get a pony down the Coronado for under a dollar. But he was worth his weight in gold. Him and his baravan….. but don’t go there, she told herself.

              She sighed and decided to go to the book club meeting. “I hope they’ve chosen the Liz Byrski and not that fucking Isabelle Allende.”
              Time and fortune had made her a xanax-munching doctor’s wife, but she still cursed like a British backpacker who’s been locked out of the mad cat after curfew.

              Like

            • poor lisa says:

              On reflection I should have gone with “almost prehensile”, and I don’t know how I didn’t go with “… she and her country ute would be there.”

              Like

        • poor lisa says:

          It was Baxter’s.

          Like

      • poor lisa says:

        Sorry rolly was springsteening there for a moment.

        Like

    • rottobloggo says:

      Rolled gold.

      Like

  18. pete says:

    I’ve got nothing against Tim Winton, or Justin Langer, or a star struck Kate Cherry but I find announcing the duration of a play to be quite uncivilised.

    Like

  19. No Mojitos unfortunately. Unless it’s under “other”. Would a fucking daquiri kill them?

    Click to access CEvents_Interval_Drinks_form_Web_no_venues_V_5_March_2010.pdf

    Like

  20. Jaidyn-Jaxxon says:

    Phwoar, he breathed, i’m exhausted. Gunna rest a bit. Keep em occupied eh? She nodded, earrings flickering, little darting whitebait in the shallows of her sunkissed shoulders. Go on love. Have a sleep if you want to. It’s late, they’ll understand. A peck on the lips, a morsel snatched from the greasy newspaper of human affections. Nourishment. He smiled, cracking through his mudcrab weariness, glittering entrails of joy. Gnight angel. Love ya.

    Downstairs, that drunken hubbub seemed wholly different, not just muted but somehow rolled away, as if carried off in the big blue on one of them surging swells. Drowned out, he smirked. Yeah. He locked the door, cracked another Coopers and dragged out a crate, dusting off the splinters and flakes with a tough old paw. Phwoar, he muttered to himself. A living treasure, they said. But that was ages back. These days – well, they had to get creative, now, didn’t they. What was it – a nose for Australia? Pretty weak, couldn’t blame ’em but. Still, the less they really nose, the better eh? Eh? Don’t yas reckon? He turned to face the tarp, where it hung across the cellar. They never responded. It was lonely, in a way, down here. But safe.

    Another long draught, guzzled down his grateful gullet; things began to dissipate just that little bit more, the effervescent ale leaching through him like it would on powder sand, pearlescing things a bit, letting him relax. He sagged against the wall, then sprang to his feet, limbs splayed out, tracing the memories through his coursing form, the vigour of youth, the earnestness he’d felt, back in the day. It never goes away. He swallowed the words, lest the silence be broken, the stillness lost. It stays with you always. In the mind, and in the blood. What you do, who you were – it’s the same. The same thing. Phwoar, he mused to himself, there i go again. I’ve still got it.

    In the mind, and in the blood. He liked the thought, its simplicity, its ring of mystique. A good paradox – bloody hard to find – and had he found one, here in the quiet of the cellar, among the Granges and millipedes and God only knew how many surfboards? He couldn’t tell. Lucidity – now there was a rare enough thing. And searching for it, scanning for it in that darkened space, groping under the surface for that looming reef of knowledge on which to cling and clamber, upwards to the light or even – he knew about the shimmering depths. Another beverage; he pulled back the tarp.

    Yes, he knew about the depths. Depths of the mind, depths in the blood, and of course, that unacknowledged, unifying element – so bloody obvious you could ignore it without even realising, like Cicerello’s he supposed, but then it was that very humbleness that proved it so ubiquitous, so powerful. Depths of water. Water, the stuff of life – the transformative, baptismal broth in which we bathe. Water changes us, he mused; it can’t help but change us. Like with Fish – everyone’d bloody loved that eh. Good story, that one. Water changed Fish Lamb, and that moved people – moved ‘em like seagrass in the ebb, sucked ‘em over to me, and that changed me, didn’t it. I changed Fish with water, and that changed me. Now I’m fishing for change. Fishing with water. Phwoar.

    Gazing at the tank, in its dark corner behind the dusty tarp. He could just barely make out his own reflection on the glass, peering back at him with hooded osprey eyes. And behind that grey-black mask, there they were, bobbing, turning, floating, so slowly, so gently suspended in the grey-green water, like motes of dust, or Sargasso kelp, or pickled onions, like the ones Dad used to get back when we’d all run amok round Elephant Rocks, whooping and screaming with salt-n-vinegar tears of laughter pouring down our long-forgotten faces, before we’d discovered the depths, before that strange sadness. It’s still there, though. It’ll always be there. He took a step back, peered in from the side, admired their twisting beauty, their swollen lips, their billowing garments, their slick hair streaming to surface, bubble-ensnared. Their empty, staring eyes – their changed eyes – their Fish eyes. Float, my pretties. Float for me, my pretty fish.

    Like

  21. They should have called the dugong hugh, so we could refer to the hugh-manatee.

    Like

  22. don smith says:

    You’ll have jetsam spewing out of every orifice the next time I catch up with you, TLA! I’ve just gotta figure out how to get out of this dusty shit hole called Panawonica or Wanapanica. Actually they’re letting me go tomorrow. I’ll be in town so watch out! Re Winton, when I was in hospital and had just had open heart surgery, I was vague, not at all lucid, in and out of consciousness, and the only things I could concentrate on were The West and Cloudstreet.

    Like

  23. The Bartender's skills with a Manhatten says:

    I have to say “Don’s Party” was a fascinating film (never saw it on stage), although as an outsider I could see where it may be an over-simplification of the cultural landscape of its period.

    The one distinctly jarring element for me was the painter and her husband, who appeared to have wandered into the party from another movie entirely and possibly another planet.

    Curly is an asshole but I assume that was the point.

    Like

  24. The Bartender's skills with a Manhatten says:

    Jeez, I feel obliged to have a go in the local Hudson River Valley version.

    Vilifica Van Backstab sighed as she gazed upon her immaculately buffed fingernail. It had been three days since the mailman died and still there was nothing to eat but quail eggs. She watched Winton clomp out of their hideously tasteful bedroom carrying six potted orchards and her Bach albums and realized that her marriage was over. She sighed again, more sexily this time, and turned her gaze out the window, where Autumn was making a brilliant show – the trees having turned to yellows and the local wine club to reds.
    “I hear Halcyon Hall is on the verge of collapse,” she said.
    “That and Western Civilization,” Winton said, sitting beside her and resting a gloved hand on her marbled thigh.
    “Why!” screamed Vilifica (sexily) “Must you always destroy my peace of mind? Oh, I hate the rain (she paused). Sometimes I see us dead in it.”

    Like

  25. Phil from The City says:

    5PM. Saturday afternoon, it was always the same. Coles Northbridge closes its doors to calls of sacre blue from French backpackers failing in their attempt to stock up on Bleu des Causses for the weekend. Old Les sat outside, where the bike stand once was, a wry smile on a sunburnt, wrinkled face. Wiry, with a battle worn frame. French accents normally connected a strange set of dots in the tormented, decepetive, mind of Les. Vietnam. Francophilic cuisine transformed from Baguettes to Ban Mi. After the harrow of 6th Battalion, Lang Phuoc Hai, Les would only look sideways at a simple bowl of rice, let alone sniff a block of Roquefort. It’s all the same to Les – foreign. His McDonalds thick-shake cup, size large, at least a few weeks old by the look of the dirt on the wax papered walls, made a useful vessel for a regular top-up poured shakily from the goon bag that never left his side. Not a heavy smoker, Les carried just a weeks supply of discarded cigarette butts. Once used for fried chicken, the recyclable container with it’s snap lid preserved the little freshness that remained in between the burnt ends and the lipstick smudges . Les removed a butt, snapped the seal back tight, scarred and dented standard issue zippo at the ready. “Bloody wankers!” Les knew real pain. Flashback pain. “You wankers and your cheese and your bloody french sticks!” Baguette is not a word an aussie vietnam vet would willingly release. “Do you know what the time is? It’s bloody five o’clock! It’s a minute past five o’clock you bloody wankers!” Les didn’t fight for three years, didn’t lose half a leg. He didn’t look the enemy in the eye in Hai Phong. He didn’t try and blow his own head off. He didn’t do any of that, only to see the aussie way of life destroyed by French backpackers. Extended trading hours. Bleu des Causses. Ban Mi. McDonalds. All foreign. Les looked deep into the shallow eyes of the Gauls. For one small moment, the aussie spirit that dwelled deep within Les, was going to be known. “Got a buck for a pie mate?”

    Like

  26. RubyRuby says:

    Timbo is being interviewed on 720 right now.

    He just said “cheek by jowl” – DRINK!

    Like

  27. Video from Rising Lunch rehearsals.

    Just realised Ken Kelso would be perfect if there’s ever a “the Wilson Tuckey Story”. Movie

    Like

    • RubyRuby says:

      Watching East Enders to get the accent down? This is starting to sound quite painful… Couldn’t she have gone for a nice provincial accent? Ugh.

      And as for the fact that this video exists – I’m with Howard on this one – less chat more do.

      Like

  28. Terrible video where he mentions dugongs. Lamest. He has the voice of a dumbed down paul murray.

    Like

  29. Pete says:

    There is a certain cooking show on the teevs at the moment. The 3 times I’ve seen it the WA contestant (ex as of tonight) has used ‘vibrant’. Were I in my former employ I’d have time to search through youtube & splice them all together. Might make an interesting xtranormal.

    Like

  30. Bento says:

    Pictorial Wintoning courtesy of Perthnow.

    Nature and sunsets
    Sometimes I use a tripod
    The front page is held

    Like

  31. Who’s at number one google search for
    tim winton rising water perth ?
    Leaving the Australian languishing.
    Heh.

    Like

  32. Pete says:

    I wonder if any of the Wintoning Project will turn up in the next book? Hooray for electronic copies & search function.

    ‘He knew they were laughing at him, behind his back. Like anonymous looser posters on a not funny blog’

    Like

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  34. golden1 says:

    so, did you “experience the Heath Ledger Theatre”?

    Like

  35. skink says:

    Tim Winton’s play is in the Heath Ledger Theatre, and Ledger was due to play the lead in the movie of Winton’s Dirt Music. Who says this is a small town?

    brace yourselves for more Wintoning. The news that Russell Crowe is writing songs for a Winton project is the scariest thing I’ve seen since Shane Warne’s makeover.

    http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/9756522/stars-line-up-to-make-winton-movies/

    Like

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