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Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet is a book about finding one’s place in the world and the search for meaning in life. From separate catastrophes, two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives again from scratch. For 20 years they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

Tim Winton’s funny, sprawling saga is an epic novel of love and acceptance. Winner of the Miles Franklin and NBC Awards in Australia, Cloudstreet is a celebration of people, places and rhythms which has fuelled imaginations world-wide.

The book follows the two families from the time they leave their rural homes and move into Cloudstreet, a big, old house in Perth. Both moves are precipitated by disaster. For the Lambs, this misfortune takes the form of the near-drowning of the family favourite, Samson, better known as Fish. For the Pickles, it occurs in the loss of father Sam’s fingers in a fishing accident.

These mishaps mean that both ‘Sams’ – like the biblical Samson – lose some of their strengths, but they also gain new opportunities and insights. Sam Pickles’ move to the city brings him a home of his own and a job at the Mint – a stroke of poetic justice for a man addicted to gambling. Although Fish loses his mental faculties as a result of his accident, and is unable to communicate with the outside world, his near-drowning and subsequent bond with water also lead him to a new life as a visionary, and it is this ‘other’ Fish who is the omniscient narrator of the novel.

The two families are a study in contrasts, ‘squared off at one another like opposing platoons’. The Lambs are righteous, God-fearing, hard working and parsimonious while the Pickles are licentious wastrels. The Lambs find meaning in industry and in God’s grace; the Pickles, in luck. The Lambs’ God is a maker of miracles; the Pickles’ God is the ‘Shifty Shadow’ of fate. Both families are often betrayed by their faith.

Cloudstreet belongs to an Australian cultural tradition of family sagas and yarns – as well as to that universal tradition of telling stories in order to find meaning in the chaos of existence. Each of its characters carries with them a small history which, in turn, becomes part of a complicated, rambling series of stories. Seen together, these strands convey the idea that we are all, in our hearts, inextricably linked to each other via the networks we are part of: family, suburb, city, nation.

Rose Pickles decides to return to Cloudstreet with Quick because, ‘It’s like getting another childhood, another go at things...It’s like a village'. Like every character in the book, Rose’s personal narrative is underpinned by a search for love and the certainties of the past. The search for meaning in life can thus be summarised in one word, love – although Tim Winton might call it grace.

This state of love or grace is described in the opening scenes of the book: ‘The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living.’

Cloudstreet is dramatised for radio by D.J. Britton.

CAST:
Oriel Lamb - Kerry Fox
Lester Lamb - Jonathan Hyde
Sam Pickles - Richard Dillane
Dolly Pickles – Felicity Ward
Rose Pickles - Kate Winter
Quick Lamb - James Frecheville
Fish Lamb - Tom Glenister
Beryl – Jane Slavin
Nyoongah man – Wayne Blair

Other parts played by members of the cast.

Directed by Eoin O’Callaghan.
A Big Fish Radio production for Â鶹Éç Radio 4

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