Themes and Issues
Religion and Spirituality
Winton says he is interested in “faith, without religiosity, that pompousness that comes with the Church….. I ‘m interested in the kind of people who want to understand the meaning of their lives.”
Christianity:
Lester and Oriel start out as charismatic believers but lose their faith when Fish’s miraculous recovery is rejected by their church in Margaret River.
“Lester and Oriel Lamb are God-fearing people. If you didn’t know them you could see it in the way they set up a light in the darkness”
Superstition:
Besides the miracle of Fish’s resuscitation, Cloudstreet explores the supernatural through luck, apparitions, Quick glows like 60 watt light bulbs, Quick sees himself in the country, pigs speak in tongues, people share dreams, a fish is caught with mint coins, ghosts haunt the house and a black apparition appears regularly as well as other divine manifestations.
The Pickles rely on the ‘shifty shadow’ to foretell their destiny while the Lamb’s use the ‘spinning knife’ to make their incidental decisions.
Aboriginal spirituality:
The spirit of indigenous people haunt the land as well as the house. The spectres of the black man appear from time to time and act as a reminder of our invasion but also as a counsellor and protector.
Aboriginal and White reconciliation.
Winton gives full credit to our Aboriginal forbears by acknowledging their prior possession and their integral connection to the land. This recognition is an attempt for mutual respect and reconciliation.
Australia – Comes of age
The war brings Australia to the world and suddenly we become part of it.
Lester barreled into the kids room. No school today! V.E. day!.
The war. Is over. The Krauts are out.
What about the Japs? Said Quick from the hallway.
The Japs are still in.
We'll get em, said Quick.
Anyway. Hitler is dead.
Hitler didn't bomb the Darwin. Said Quick.
Tokyo will go. Said Red.
The integrations of an actual event, the terror of the Nedlands serial rapist gives realism to the novel and shows Australia coming of age.
Many other factors help to make Australia grow up and become independent of the mother country and develop its autonomy.
The Family
As a Saga, Cloudstreet delves into the generational backgrounds and origins of Winton’s grandparents. We are given insights into the influences that conditioned Sam, his father’s weakness for gambling, Dolly’s incestuous heritage, Oriel’s traumatic youth and Lester’s desperate upbringing.
Tim Winton weaves the threads of lifetimes, of twenty years of shouting and fighting, laughing and grafting, into a story about acceptance and belonging.
Despite the bickering and unbridled hatred, genuine love eventually wins through and the ill-fated families are united in a celebratory picnic at the end.
Quick: Jesus I hate this family stuff. It makes me sick! I don’t need all this.
Oriel: It’s (family) all we have. …. Each other
Nostalgia
Just as Winton reflects on an Australia that once was, all the characters seem to be haunted by the past, especially the house.
Winton hankers for an Australia that has been lost to greed, modernity, conformity – progress? As Mark Twain put it; “I don’t mind progress; it’s change I can’t stand”. By the time Cloudstreet is written, much of the character of Perth has been irrevocably changed by rampant development and high rise buildings by entrepreneurs such as Alan Bond and Robert Holmes a Court. Bairds, the Ambassador Cinema and the Perth Mint have vanished.
Tim Winton weaves the threads of lifetimes, of twenty years of shouting and fighting, laughing and grafting, into a story about acceptance and belonging.
As Oriel says: “I want my country back.”
Men and women – Gender issues
In a male dominated society, women carry most of the burdens but receive very little of the credit. Oriel feels she runs the household while Lester fails to carry his weight. Sam Pickles is not a good model and Dolly even worse and it is left to Rose to keep the family together.
Dolly is only valued by men for her sexual attraction until it fades:
“Men looked at her the way they looked at horses”
Oriel On Men:
There was something wrong with men. They lacked some basic thing and she didn’t know what it was. She loved Lester, but a lot of loving him was making up for him, compensating. He was never quite up to anything. She knew he was a fool, but it wasn’t the same thing. Her father had been the same. He was a kindly man, big and thin and soft looking, but without enough flint in him to make his kindliness into kindness. As a child she could tell that he thought well of people, but he never had the resolve to make his feelings substantial. He never did anything for anybody but himself. Like when he remarried. Oriel’s mother and Sisters died in a bushfire that razed the farm and the house. Her father was so broken by the event, that after she was ragged alive from the half—collapsed cellar almost mad with ear and shock and guilt, and after he’d killed his last pig to i her burns, it was she who nursed him. She always had the feeling he would have just faded away, had she not mothered him as they moved from property to property on neighbour’s charity until she’d earned enough from kitchen work dairymuckjng to buy them a moth-eaten old tent to take back to their place and start again.
…Oriel knew she couldn’t help being strong when she had such weak men to live with. Oriel continued loving her father, but she knew that loving a man was a very silly activity; it was giving to the weak and greedy and making trouble for yourself.
Motherhood
Oriel asks Quick whether she has been a good mother
Rose condemns her mother and asserts that she will love her children. It is only when she discovers Dolly’s past heritage that she understands and they become reconciled.
Study Guide
Teacher resources: Tim Winton’s manuscript for Cloudstreet
- Development and writing
- Spirituality and symbolism
- Place and home
Symbols and Motifs
Symbols and Motifs in Cloudstreet
Throughout this novel, Tim Winton relies on both symbols and motifs to convey meaning.
Water, the river, war, fate and faith, the mystical, miracles, ghosts, and visions, dance, meals, the knife, the tent, the Nedlands Monster, home, belonging, separation/alienation, place, light and dark, grief and suffering, love and celebration, nostalgia.
So what is a motif and how is it different from a symbol?
A symbol is an object, picture, written word or sound that is used to represent something.
A motif is an image, spoken or written word, sound or act or another visual or structural device that is used to develop a theme.
A symbol can be repeated once or twice, while a motif is constantly repeated
A symbol can help in the understanding of an idea or a thing while a motif can held indicate what the literary work or piece is all about.
No 1 Cloudstreet/The House - Character in its own right – personification, “a living breathing” thing, representation of the nation, ghosts living in it, Fish takes on the emotions of the house, house changes its moods depending on the dynamics, divided split down the middle and a fence dividing the back yard – like a stroke victim – reflects the families themselves, lopsided, opposites, initially represents division but comes to represent integration, unity and harmony. Walls and fences removed
Home – Belonging, peace, harmony, completion, community, love, unity, wholeness, integration of mind body and spirit
Belonging – Connectedness to place and people, necessary for human happiness and positive relationships,
Place – Important for a sense of belonging, connection between place, identity and sense of belonging, integration of the earthly (material) and spiritual (supernatural)
Water - Purity, rebirth, source of all life, cleansing, new life,
The River - Source of life, life and death, fertitility, journey, currents of life, eternity, heaven
The Blackfella - wisdom, guide, conscience, allusion to aboriginality
Fish and fishing - Symbol of christ, fertility, fisher of men,
War - WW1, WW2, Korea, Cold War, man’s inhumanity to man, human suffering and cruelty, conflict, evil, hate,
Fate and Faith - Choice and controlling one’s destiny v fate, leaving everything up to chance. Faith helps people to overcome and transcend despair and suffering.
The knife – chance, random nature of life.
Hard work – self-determination, controlling one’s lifeb and luck.
Nation – Loyalty to country.
Anzacs – Connected to Australian Identity; defined by mateship, brotherly love, bravery, courage , strength.
Big Country – mind country, what you believe in your own mind (Oriel)
The Mystical (Numinous) - Spiritual realm, supernatural, mysterious, limitations of reason and logic, there may not be neat answers to the mysteries of life. Integration into the real and everyday “we all come back to the same thing”
Miracles – ordinary (babies, life) and extraordinary (pigs that can talk, angels, walking on water.
Ghosts – connections to the cruel past that is the Indigenous experience – unfinished business – connection to our history of stolen generation and white dispossession of Indigenous.
Visions – provide guidance – help people to understand – Quick running, Fish flying, Fish in fruit box rowing across the sky.
Black fella – angel, guide, guardian – looks over the house, Christlike figure, remind Quick, Sam and Lester of the importance of family and home
Dance and Song – Celebration, community, harmony, joy,
Meals/picnics – Celebration, unity, community, harmony, joy, community
The Tent – Alienation from community and self, separation, isolation,
The Nedlands Monster – Loss of innocence, murder and cruelty, hate, evil, also a father of 7 children, a man, a husband, a human being who has suffered and struggled, randomness of life events, inability of man to control life.
Time – Temporal (Earthly/material)and Eternal (Infinite)
Grief and Suffering – Part of human life therefore the choices we make about how to deal with grief and suffering will have a bearing on how we view life and the sense we make of those things that seem senseless.
Love and Celebration – Important for a sense of unity, community, belonging, wholeness, compassion, forgiveness, grace, joy, empathy, acceptance, etc.
Nostalgia – for times past, for values that were important, for a pre-war Perth when family values were more important than they are today
Light and Dark –Lambs connected with light, Darkness of the library, light associated with knowledge, understanding, goodness. Darkness connected with ignorance, evil, etc.
Library/No Man’s Land – dark, evil, smells, putrid, inexplicable noises, inhabited by ghosts of the past – woman and girl.
Podcast
Australian Literature 101: Tim Winton: Cloudstreet
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all? If there is, Hilary McPhee would be unmistakable as one of its modern ambassadors. The founding director of McPhee Gribble Publishers speaks of one of the imprint’s big successes, and a great exploration of our national voice - Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet - and its sensitive, pensive author. In discussion with Ramona Koval.