The Boy Behind the Curtain

by Tim Winton

  Why are sharks so vulnerable to overfishing? Mostly because they have very modern reproductive habits: they mature late and breed infrequently. When you decimate a population of sharks, the recovery period is perilously long. They simply don’t bounce back.

  Our nation was at the forefront of the global change in attitudes toward the slaughter of whales and dolphins. This all began in Albany when I was a teenager in the seventies; it unfolded in front of me, and it’s had a real impact on my life and work. Cetaceans are charismatic; they have lungs and voices. Sharks, too, are social, but being silent they need others to speak for them. They are now more vulnerable than dolphins and may become more threatened than whales. Their survival is bound up with our own, for a world without sharks will eventually become a world without people. We need to expand our common knowledge and reform our attitude to these beautiful and misunderstood creatures while there’s still time.

  III

  Passing Strangers

  At dawn, as the big winter storm looms beyond the horizon, I consult the internet once more and see the readings from the swell buoys spiking. There’ll be no work today. I time my run up the coast for low tide. I lock the hubs on the ute and throw the boards in the back. The dog leaps in uninvited.

  The track north is narrow and rough. Rain peppers the windscreen. After the best part of an hour I wind my way clear of the capstone and the dunes, through the squatters’ huts and out onto the point where a right-hander is reeling down the beach, groomed by the howling nor’wester. I don’t hesitate. I get out into the rain squall and suit up. The dog slinks over to the whale carcass like an aunt to a buffet. I know she’ll spend the next two hours rolling in it. I have a bottle of detergent to deal with the after-effects. She loves that whale.

  I grab my board and step around the mess of bones and blubber. It’s only once I’m downwind the stink catches me. Pretty rugged, but better than a few months ago.

  At the shore the water’s still got an oily sheen to it. I know what that means, but the surf is great and I’ll take my chances.

  I join the small pack of locals on the peak. We sit about 300 metres out along the edge of an island and take waves in turn, bullshitting and sledging the morning away. The Shaw brothers say the bronzies are back, the same three sharks that have been lurking since the blue whale washed in. It’s a heads-up. Good to know. I’ve seen them once or twice, two smaller specimens and one the size of a fullback. They haven’t given us any trouble. But the sight of them twitching and circling out beyond the break certainly gets the adrenaline going.

  A set trundles in, makes its slow angling turn toward us, and I paddle out to meet it. I let the first wave go and spin around for the second. It picks me up and I wind down its long, curving wall, mugging at friends as they paddle by. I kick out near the beach where the reek of the whale is worst. My kelpie leaves off blubber-surfing and races down in the mistaken assumption that I’m done. As I paddle out, her high, piercing bark chases after me.

  Before I get far, a big set rolls in and I’m caught on the shallow bar in a welter of whitewater. I stand and wait a while, buffeted by every new wall of foam, and when things settle I push back out and start to paddle.

  That’s when something bumps me. In all this fizzing spume. Something rough. Something as big as I am. It nudges my arm, like a passer-by brushing past in a corridor. It stops, as if confounded, and there’s a moment of fraught intimacy, skin to skin. I can’t see a thing. Then I feel the sandpapery grind of it as it turns in panic and flees.

  The whole encounter lasts maybe two seconds. But in its wake my entire body is lit up with awe and terror. As I pass one of the local deckies I tell him what just happened. He gives me a sideways look and heads to shore without delay. But I stay. I don’t know if this close shave has left me feeling lucky or if it’s just the rare beauty of the waves rolling in, but I can’t call it quits yet.

  Bizarrely, the sun comes out. The cold front bores in from the north-west with a sunny escort. And the sea feels friendlier. For one thing, it’s easier to see what’s moving under the surface, at least in the unbroken water behind the break.

  On the beach, the dog barks. She’s faint in the distance.

  I catch a few more waves and then sit out the back swapping stories with my mate Lifestyle Pete. And then a really hefty set rolls in and we dig hard to reach it before it mows us down. I make it past the first two waves but by the third I’m really scratching. It looms up above me and I feel like a beetle scuttling up the front of a speeding semi. At the peak it’s hissing, seething. And somehow I make it before the lip lurches out and heaves me backward onto the sandbar.

  I rise to the crest, caught for a moment like a kid on a fence, and I teeter there, grabbing my board, bracing myself for the fall back to the surface below. As I plummet I see the shark, and at the last moment the bronzie sees me. I’m hurtling at him helplessly with only the board as a shield. He’s sleek and big-shouldered. In half a second I’m about to land on him. He turns and bolts. I splash down in the tight comma of turbulence he leaves in his wake.

  He’s chasing mullet, I tell myself. And I’m probably right. Now I’m definitely too buzzed to go in. I surf until my back threatens to go into spasm. I ride a last wave in to the reeking shore and the dog is there to greet me.

  * The bronze whalers at the point stayed around for a couple of seasons without incident. A few years later, though, about a kilometre south, a surfer was taken by a great white. Not long afterwards, the West Australian government began a shark cull targeting this endangered species. In its first season the program destroyed 170 tiger sharks, whalers and bullsharks, none of which were implicated in the spate of attacks that provoked it. No great whites were caught, and there was no evidence to suggest the killing program rendered swimmers any safer. In the public outcry that ensued, opponents of the program were vilified as misanthropes. Even so, the cull was discontinued and resources were directed toward non-lethal barriers, aerial surveillance and early-warning systems.

  In 2013 two people died as a result of shark attack in this country. The next year the number was unchanged. In 2015 one person died this way. During this same period over three thousand people died violently on our roads. Many thousands more succumbed to heart disease.

  Using the C-word

  During an interview in 2013, a journalist pulled me up for using the C-word.

  ‘Class? ’ she asked with lifted eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’

  I found myself chewing the air a moment. Had I said something foul, something embarrassing to both of us? Discussing two of my fictional characters in terms of the social distinctions that separated them, it seemed I’d broached a topic that wasn’t merely awkward, it was provocative. There was a little charge in the atmosphere. I tried not to put it down to the fact that I was talking to an employee of News Corp. The reporter in question is a person of independent mind whose work I admire, but she was, after all, in the employ of Rupert Murdoch, whose editors and columnists maintain a palace watch on what they like to call ‘the politics of envy’. A blur of competing thoughts went through my mind. Was she being ironic, or did she really expect me to defend a casual reference to class relations? Was I being paranoid or was this the kind of clarification necessary in the new cultural dispensation? Did the nation’s drift to the right mean that we all needed to be a lot more careful about our public language, lest we expose ourselves to charges of insufficient revolutionary zeal?

  After a mortifying beat or two, I made a clumsy attempt to explain myself and soon saw that whatever the journalist’s own thoughts were on matters of class, the fact she’d challenged me on my use of the word meant she’d somehow done her duty. To whom she’d fulfilled this implicit obligation wasn’t immediately clear. Beyond my initial twinge of anxiety I didn’t seriously think she had a proprietor or even an editor in mind when she baulked at the offending word. Afterwards I came to the conclusion that a Fairfax journalist or Radio National presenter might well hav
e posed the same question. In itself it was, of course, no big thing; it just caught me unawares. All the same, it was a signal of the way in which something fundamental has changed in our culture. In calling me out over my use of the C-word, the interviewer was merely reflecting the zeitgeist. I should have anticipated it. I’ve been making assumptions about our common outlook that are plainly outdated.

  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that in contemporary Australia, citizens are now implicitly divided into those who bother and those who don’t. It seems poverty and wealth can no longer be attributed – even in part – to social origins; they are manifestations of character. In the space of two decades, during which the gap between rich and poor grew wider than at any time since the Second World War, Australians have been trained to remain uncharacteristically silent about the origins of social disparity. This inequity is regularly measured and often reported.

  In October 2013 the OECD’s former director for employment, labour and social affairs cited figures that estimated 22 percent of the growth in Australia’s household income between 1980 and 2008 went to the richest one percent of the population. The nation’s new prosperity was unevenly spread in those years. To borrow former Morgan Stanley global equity analyst Gerard Minack’s phrasing about an even worse situation in the United States, ‘The rising tide did not lift all the boats; it floated a few yachts.’ And yet there is a curious reluctance to examine the systemic causes of this inequity. The Australian political economist Frank Stilwell has puzzled over what he calls contemporary ‘beliefs’ around social inequality. Australians’ views range from outright denial of it to Darwinian acceptance. Many now believe ‘people get what they deserve’, and to my mind such a response is startling and alien. Structural factors have become too awkward to discuss.

  As the nation’s former treasurer Wayne Swan learnt in 2012 when he published an essay about the disproportionate influence of the nation’s super-rich, anybody reckless enough to declare class a live issue is likely to be met with howls of derision. According to the new mores, any mention of structural social inequality is tantamount to a declaration of class warfare. Concerns about the distribution of wealth and access to education and health are difficult to raise in a public forum without needing to beat off the ghost of Stalin. The only form of political correctness that the right will tolerate is the careful elision of class from public discourse, and this troubling discretion has become mainstream. Which constitutes an ideological triumph for conservatives that even they must marvel at. Having uttered the C-word in polite company I felt, for a moment, as if I’d shat in the municipal pool.

  Australia’s long tradition of egalitarianism was something people my age learnt about at school. I recall teachers who were dowdy folk of indeterminate politics who spoke of ‘the fair go’ with the same reverence they had for Bradman or the myth of Anzac. Australia’s fairness was a source of pride, an article of faith. Which is not to say the nation of my childhood was classless. Social distinctions were palpable and the subject of constant discussion. In the raw State Housing suburbs of Perth there were definite boundaries and behaviours, many imposed and some internalized. All the people I knew identified as working class. Proud and resentful, we were alert to difference, amazed whenever we came upon it. Difference was both provocative and exotic and one generally cancelled out the negative power of the other. We expressed the casual racism of our time. We played sport with blackfellas but didn’t really socialize with them. We laughed at the ten-pound Poms with their Coronation Street accents but felt slightly cowed by their stories of great cities and imperial grandeur. The street was full of migrants who’d fled war-ravaged Eastern Europe. Like most of the locals, they worked in factories and on road gangs. They told us kids we were free and lucky and we thought they were telling us something we already knew. As a boy I believed that Jack was as good as his master. But I understood that Jacks like me always had masters.

  I watched my grandfather work until he was in his seventies. Sometimes I carried his Gladstone bag for him. It seemed to signify his dignified position as an ordinary worker who did a decent day’s work for a decent day’s union-won pay. He’d started on the wharves in Geraldton and spent decades as a labourer at the Perth Mint, and though the meekest of men he reserved a sly defiance for his ‘betters’. He was a union man but his allegiance was more tribal than ideological. The most memorable thing he ever said to me was when I was fourteen or so. Rolling one of his slapdash fags on the verandah of his rented house in sunstruck Belmont, he announced that I should press on with my ‘eddication’, because ‘that’s yours for life, and whatever else the bosses can get offa ya, they can’t take what’s there between yer ears’. This was the same man who’d pulled my mother out of school at fifteen because there seemed no point in her staying on, the bloke whose sons were sent into apprenticeships without a second thought. Twenty years earlier, his world had been narrower, more constrained, and I’m not sure whether he encouraged me out of regret for the curtailment of my mother’s dreams or if he was infected by the sense of promise that was in the air with the rise of Whitlam.

  The summer of that sage moment, all things seemed possible to working people in Australia. It was as if all those Jacks and Jills with masters began to feel new prospects for their children and grandchildren. As an adolescent in this period of flux, it seemed the frontiers between classes were suddenly more provisional. Some will say class boundaries were always notional, but if they had been as permeable before Whitlam, there was certainly no evidence of it in my family, no sign of it in our street. The lines were fixed. Until the 1970s, young people followed closely in their parents’ footsteps. Not just out of solidarity or emulation, but because to a large extent origin was destiny. The children of tradesfolk became tradesfolk and the offspring of doctors tended to find themselves in the professions. The Whitlam government didn’t completely bulldoze the walls between classes, but it did knock a few holes in the parapet, and without those liberating gaps my future would have been very different.

  Compared to most fields of endeavour, sport and entertainment seem relatively porous in social terms. The arts – which often combine elements of both sport and entertainment – are a little like them in this regard, though historically they have been more class-determined than it’s deemed comfortable to admit. Ask any director in a major theatre company in this country how many of their actors were educated in public schools. They’ll have to have a good hard think. Traditionally the world of letters has been similarly class-bound, though it has changed in my decades as a practitioner. In Australia, as elsewhere, it was standard procedure for members of the gentry to impoverish themselves for the sake of literature, or to at least fall a few pegs into raffish bohemia along the way. Tom Keneally stood out in Australian letters for a long time as the most visible exception to the class rule. Hailing from Homebush, a son of working people, Keneally wrote himself, by accident or design, into the bourgeoisie. In his early years he laboured in the shadow of Patrick White. The great laureate was invariably presented to the world as an oddball, but in truth White’s trajectory embodied the rule. Our purse-lipped jeremiah was a scion of the squattocracy. His was a life of inherited mobility. He began adulthood in spats and ended up scowling contentedly in a cardigan and beret, and to that extent he conformed to a pattern very familiar indeed. He was, whether he knew it or not, the norm.

  So as a child of the working class, someone who has prospered to a degree unimaginable by my parents and grandparents, and done so in the arts, of all fields, I am conscious that my own trajectory is atypical. And yet a career like mine is not quite the rarity it would have been a generation ago. Contemporaries like Richard Flanagan, Kim Scott and Christos Tsiolkas will have similar stories to tell. For all our differences as writers and people, we all emerged from what were once termed the lower orders and found ourselves – by reason of income and social recognition – in the middle class. I can’t speak for these other writers of my generation, b
ut I am reconciled to my new station. In middle age I am conscious of my good fortune and happy to acknowledge that it’s more a manifestation of cultural history than personal talent. It’s not that I came into the world empty-handed, I inherited a social tradition. I grew up in a country that codified the dignity of labour, which treasured decency and fairness, where the individual was valued and the collective aspirations of ordinary people were honoured, and I came of age during a social convulsion by which the culture enriched itself in a hectic explosion of hope and innovation. In that sense I consider myself luckier than any lad born to a fortune in a previous generation.

  I was the first of my family to finish school, the first to complete a tertiary education. Like my younger siblings, I surfed the pent-up force of my parents’ thwarted hopes. For us they wanted a life less subject to the whims of others – the bosses my grandfather spoke of – and they knew that access to education was the key. No one in my family spoke about economics; the future was never about money. What my parents dreamt of was simply a larger, more open existence for their children. Their hopes were rarely expressed in ideological terms. They were not political people and certainly not radicals. They were inspired more by Billy Graham than by the distant and slightly poncy Gough. They urged us to use the gifts we were born with and to refuse to accept the status quo.