Tim Winton will deliver The Perth Festival Writers Week closing address Feb 2022.
Images from The Sunday Times.

Phwoar! He opened the Sunday Times. And Phwoar! Again! The magazine was chockers with quotes! And photos of him walking on the beach. So imaginative. “Line in The Sand” Brilliant! Imagination was leaking out of this piece like vinegar from a wilting chips cup.

Hold on though. “I was unconscious of the fact that I was having relations with the sea in the sense of being in a relationship with it…” He paused. Had he really said that? Sounded a bit like he was rooting the backswash. Hope there wasn’t a #seatoo movement. That sort of talk might get him cancelled.

He shifted on the jarrah dunny seat and reached for the builder’s pencil balanced on the top of the eco bog roll. Phwoar! Cancel culture. That’s what he’d do for the writer talk. He shuddered as he recalled dipping his toe into the topic of “toxic masculinity”. That had gone down like warm Passiona. No, cancel culture, cancel culture.. What he wouldn’t give to be interesting enough to be cancelled. Writing exclusively about fish, wave and and wind was barely enough to raise a stifled yawn these days – although that time he’d suggested Buffalo Bream were skittish rather than insolent was a… Hmmm… cancelled…what could he write? That’s the trouble being reclusive. All you had were stale memories. Stale like a jumbo packet of plain salt Samboys, left out in a bowl too long rather than kept sensibly in the foiled packet, the inside of which would inevitably be as slick and shimmery as a Dolphinfish after a lure.

He slapped his bare leg. Why couldn’t he get cancelled? Like JK Rowling, who couldn’t write a decent line if she had to save herself from a lurking Bull Shark? “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us…” What the fuck was that? Could the light not be brutal and enervating like 8am on a blistering February, when the Easterly had blown all night and the Doctor was nowhere to be seen? And couldn’t the dark be the black blue flank of a Cobbler, sinewy as the leather strap the old man used to threaten the kids with before he shot through? Dark as the weeds on a moonless night in Fay’s Bay, rugose and leathery? And yet she was the one who could get cancelled. Maybe he would need to open with a solid 45 minutes of the different types of waves at Port Beach, before slipping into teh cancel culture. Just to be safe.

Phwoar, but cancelled eh? Umm, maybe – Writers were being cancelled like the milk and paper when you were off on the holiday to Mandurah, and the old man would pack the esky with the cheapest gristle filled sausages and enough ice to survive the trip in the back of the station wagon, (the very same esky he had taken when he shot through again,) while the kids fartarsed and shyacked on the scorching bench seat, the territory shifting like the map of eastern Europe – Mum! Clacka’s in my space..!

Yeah, nah. His guts churned but failed to move. Christ hadn’t he learnt the lesson of the chillie sauce option on the chips enough times? Jeezus, he’d also double dipped with the aioli as well, hadn’t he? Urrk. Phwoar! Talk about writer’s block… This was going to be harder than he thought…