Dirt Music is one of those books that gets under your skin. Comes into your bed with you; changes your dreams; travels with you throughout the mundane details of everyday life. Winton’s descriptive prose works both externally in its depiction of the natural land – the sea and desert of Western Australia which makes up its setting, and internally, in the way it goes deep inside the pain and anxieties of its characters, as they struggle to free themselves from tremendous damage, and paralysis. Like the landscape it takes its shape from, Dirt Music is big. As a novel, it is ambitious in scope, and at 465 pages, large in size, but it reads as quickly as an airport novel with its strong narrative, and compelling romance. The main character is Georgie, a 40 year old woman stuck in a rut, a refugee from her previous career as a nurse, and living as a “fishwife”; the partner of tragic widower and father Jim Buckridge. Jim is the town’s well respected fisherman in White Point, a fancy “lobster money” suburb north of Perth on the WA coast. When one of Jim’s boys calls Georgie “stepmum” in a fit of pique, her world begins to unravel, and she begins a downward spiral of drink, drugs, and aimless Internet addiction as she tries to numb the pain of disengagement. During her sleepless night wanderings, Georgie discovers a "shamateur", or fisherman who works without a professional licence, and begins to watch him. Her complicity with his illegal activities begins an unravelling of her shammed life. Lu Fox is the shamateur, a man clinging to his home town, but living in a submerged, living death after a tragedy from which he could not recover. His journey, and Georgie’s as they work through their demons, travelling the West, and moving towards some form of engaged life.
The scenic description of the Western Australian landscape is rich enough to form a significant part of the plot – even a kind of living character, like the ranges which look to Lu “like some dormant creature whose stillness is only momentary, as though the sunblasted, dusty hide of the place might shudder and shake itself off, rise to its bowed and saurian feet and stalk away at any moment.” There is the world of the sea in White Point; its briny smells, the breezes, the feel of the warm plankton filled water, and the way its liquidity contrasts with the dry earth of the land just a few miles inland. As Lu Fox hitchhikes his way up the Great Northern Highway, initially towards Wittenoom, in a kind of pilgrimage to the mine where his father worked and contracted the mesothelioma which killed him, his vision of the land is exquisite, wrought, and precise, as he watches the “floodplain country” change to rich soil, and then to dust or grit. As they move further inland and away from the Sea, the towns become sparcer, and Lu’s visualisation turns further inward as he “Thinks of the north the old man spoke of with pride and fear in his voice, the rugged stone ranges, the withering heat, the ceaseless blasting and digging, the epic drinking that made the boozy south seem temperate, the cattle herds pounding red dust skyward and the seasons discounted to plain Wet or Dry.” One imagines Winton following the highway he puts Lu Fox on, taking notes about the landscape, and the reader is there, along with him on his seemingly aimless journey past the Pilbara where “everything looks big and Technicolor, to Port Headland, Broome, and finally off to Coronation Island, where Lu shipwrecks himself.
The copyright of the article A Review of Tim Winton's Dirt Music in Australian Literature is owned by . Permission to republish A Review of Tim Winton's Dirt Music in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
