Tim Winton Talks Rinehart, Rage and Cloudstreet’s Close Call

"The book is me reflecting on my own anguish and my own rage," Winton said. He warned of where anger can lead. "The danger is that you just become so furious that you can't think and you can't hear anything … we can't converse with one another. We can't make any progress."

He blamed big tech and the algorithms that seize on people's anger. "People are profiting from our rage," he said. "This is essentially a business model to make us angry, to make us scream at each other."

Winton also criticized the Australian government's stance toward technology bosses. He said it risked adopting "a very supine attitude to those tech bros", and added: "I just think we need to be more assertive."

On Gina Rinehart

Tech executives are not the only targets. Winton writes of Rinehart: "She does not value or understand: the natural world, tenderness, mercy, fellow feeling."

Asked whether writing about someone so powerful made him nervous, he said caution is common. "I think everybody's nervous and careful in speaking about that person for those reasons, because there's just so much form," he said.

Winton went on to say it was hard to explain to people outside Western Australia the influence Rinehart and her father, Lang Hancock, had had on society and politics.

The Cloudstreet near miss

Cloudstreet follows two families, the Lambs and the Pickles, over two decades in mid-20th-century Perth. It has been adapted for radio, theatre, opera and television. In the 35 years since its release it has never been out of print.

It almost never existed. In the late 1980s Winton was in Europe with his wife and young son, carrying all their belongings. After the family got off an airport bus in Rome, an Italian man began tugging at his sleeve.

The man was pointing back at the bus. A grey sports bag sat inside, holding every manuscript, typescript, carbon copy and note for the novel to that point.

"If it hadn't been for just the decency of that guy … I could have kissed him because, in a way, he saved our lives because that was the book that saved our lives," Winton said.

Readers still approach him almost daily. The most common theme, he said, is the decency they see in the book: "a kind of a yearning for solidarity and neighbourliness."