The Turning Study Guide

Tim Winton was born in Subiaco, a suburb of Perth, in 1960. He continued to live in the Perth metro area, in the suburb of Karrinyup, until he was 12 years old. His family then relocated to Albany, a regional city on the southwestern coast. As a student at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, Winton won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for the manuscript that became his first novel, An Open Swimmer. He has continued to publish award-winning work since, and has lived in France, Greece, Ireland, and Italy. Winton is heavily involved in environmental advocacy, donating money and raising awareness for campaigns to protect Australian flora and fauna. He and his wife live on the coast north of Perth.

The stories in The Turning take place over a period spanning from the 1960s through the early 2000s, depicting characters of various ages at different points of their lives, and following several from childhood into adult life. Following this diverse cast of characters, The Turning depicts and reflects on the immense social, political, and economic upheaval that Australia, like much of the developed world, experienced during the latter half of the 20th century. Deindustrialization devastated regional cities and towns of Western Australia, as fishing, factories, and other industries—whaling in particular, which Australia banned in 1978—dwindled or disappeared, eroding the economic base of life in places like Albany, the real-life inspiration for Angelus. Changing social norms, especially regarding drugs and sex, also made their mark. While physically distant, foreign wars loomed large in the Australian public’s eye, first in Vietnam and much later, in 2003, in Iraq, as The Turning references. Australia’s participation in these conflicts had major consequences at home too, prompting Australians to reconsider their relationship to the wider world.

Frequently referred to as Australia’s greatest living author, Tim Winton looms large amongst his generation of Australian writers, who largely form a younger and newer cohort than their counterparts elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Many of Winton’s contemporaries share his concern with history and place, exploring the web of connections between Australia’s natural landscapes, history of colonization, and modern society. Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to The Deep North, the story of an Australian doctor traumatized by his experience as a prisoner of war in Burma (now Myanmar), shares Winton’s concern with history, memory, and their effects on individual people across space and time. Conversely, Melina Marchetta, an Italian immigrant to Australia, explores the perspective of newcomers to 20th-century Australia much like Winton’s earlier works, the award-winning Cloudstreet in particular. Another comparable author, albeit one from an earlier generation of Australian authors, is Helen Garner, whose renowned novel Monkey Grip captured both the exploding counterculture of the 1970s and the increasingly worrisome crisis of drug addiction, themes that feature centrally in Winton’s writing, too.