Cloudstreet Almost Never Reached Print: Tim Winton on Rage, Algorithms and a Lost Manuscript

Just before the glass doors of a Rome airport terminal, a stranger began tugging at Tim Winton's sleeve. It was the late 1980s, and Winton was travelling through Europe with his wife and young son, carrying everything they owned. They had just stepped off the bus to the airport. The man was insistent, and Winton eventually stopped. The man was pointing back at the bus, where one small grey sports bag sat on a seat.

Inside were all of Winton's manuscripts, typescripts, carbon copies and notes: his entire novel to that point. It had been about to ride off into Rome with nobody looking after it. Winton says he could have kissed the man, and that the stranger's decency saved their lives, because it was the book that saved them.

The novel was Cloudstreet, which follows two families, the Lambs and the Pickles, through two decades of mid-20th-century Perth. It has since been adapted for radio, theatre, opera and television. In the 35 years since its release it has never gone out of print, and it was recently voted Australia's favourite book in an ABC poll. Winton, who has been publishing for more than 40 years, says he cannot get his head around the life the book has had. People approach him about it almost every day. The most consistent thing they say, he told 7.30, concerns the decency in it, a yearning for solidarity and neighbourliness, and many say it reminds them of a gentler, kinder country.

His new book, Songs from the Firefront, is a collection of personal essays about how people find meaning, community and hope in an era of climate change, rage and social upheaval. Winton describes it as a reflection on his own anguish and rage. He calls it not quite a proper memoir but a set of thoughts in the mode of one, a way of giving an account of himself to himself. He says he has reached a point in life where there is more time behind him than ahead, which prompts him to consider what is most precious: his children and their kids.

He is pointed about the forces he believes feed public anger. Big tech and its algorithms, he argues, seize on rage, and people are profiting from it. He calls it a business model designed to make people scream at each other and want to destroy each other in public. He says he is deeply concerned that the Australian government is threatening to adopt a supine attitude toward what he calls tech bros, "bro-ligarchs" or, in a phrase he attributes to someone else, the "Nerd Reich". Those in charge, he says, must be held accountable, and Australia needs to be more assertive.

The book also turns to mining magnate Gina Rinehart, of whom Winton writes that she does not value or understand the natural world, tenderness, mercy or fellow feeling. Asked whether that made him nervous, he said everyone is careful when speaking about her because there is so much form. He said it is hard to explain to people outside Western Australia the influence she and her father, Lang Hancock, have had on politics, media and communications, and the fear and awe they generate. He voiced concern about her growing political influence. In June, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson told the ABC she consulted Rinehart on policy and considered her a friend. In July it emerged that Rinehart had paid for Hanson's flights from London to Sicily this year and arranged for her to attend high-end fashion shows.

7.30 sought a response through Rinehart's company. A Hancock Prospecting spokesperson disagreed with Winton and suggested he was promoting socialism, saying the causes he espouses are the opposite of caring. The spokesperson said investment and innovation enable better outcomes, and that Rinehart and her companies had paid $25 billion in tax over the past decade, funding nurses, hospitals, police, veterans, the elderly, emergency services and defence. The statement added that she and Winton would likely always disagree on government's most important responsibility, which it said is defending the country and its citizens.

On climate, Winton's 2024 novel Juice imagines an Australia mostly uninhabitable because of extreme weather. He says the world had a generation to take swift, decisive action and did not. What remains, he says, is adapting and mitigating what can be, while accepting the loss of ecosystems and species and more hardship for many people than necessary. In a prosperous country like Australia, he says, that is not a tragedy but an outrage.