CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
With a new book about a young man’s ‘coming of age’ in coastal Western Australian town, it looks like prominent young adult fiction author Tim Winton is back.
That’s according to every single journalist at the ABC and Fairfax who are blown away every five years by his raw, honest and touching portrayals of life in working class, rural and coastal Australia.
“Just when I thought he couldn’t top the other books about a sleepy coastal puberty. He’s done it” says ABC radio national producer, Val Mayne.
“I just can’t believe how unassuming Tim Winton is in real life. Like you wouldn’t expect someone who writes books like this to be so… normal”
Titled We Them Boys, the book tells the story of a teenage boy named Angus, the only son of a Broome pearl diver, who is torn between a life making roughly $90k a year on the boat with his dad – or going to University in Perth and smoking cones for a couple years in his mum’s granny flat before getting a job working doing FIFO formwork in Karratha.
This all takes place between the character’s arguably creepy habit of peaking on his mate Bozza’s hot mum while she attempts to squeeze her symmetrical and supple breasts into a wet suit.
His end-of-high school decisions are then complicated after he falls in love with a half-Japanese girl who’s family also work on the boats, and ends up getting into a fight in the BI-LO car park with some kids that don’t have as many career prospects as he does.
The breathtaking portrayal of love lost and found in the sleepy bit sinister Northern outpost ultimately climaxes when his other childhood mate Jimmy, a middle class Aboriginal Australian of the same age, finds a dead body in a nearby creek.
It was reported earlier today that arts writers from Sydney and Melbourne have been taking this new book for shifts in office bathrooms across the country, as the raw and rugged Australiana depicted in We Them Boys brings them to climax.
However, aside from the haunting and poignant subtext that details the toxic masculinity of goofy kids in ice-riddled small Australian towns, media commentators say the most amazing thing about this modern Australian masterpiece is just how unassuming and attractive Tim Winton is in real life.
“Oh my God he just wears a t-shirt to interviews” says Spectrum editor, Charl Donèt.
“And jeans”
