'Then it just bubbles; silence and a corona of bubbles that billows blue about my head. I gaze about dreamily until I understand. I am underneath the upturned boat with thirty kilo line floating around my legs and I am drowning.'
Despite our outback mythology, Australians are coastal people and it's hard to think of a more thoroughly coastal writer than Tim Winton. In his novels for adults and children the sea is always luminously present. The beach is Winton territory.
This is Tim Winton's record of his obsession with the margin between the desert and the sea, a memoir of a coastal boyhood and a celebration of the last wild places we still cherish.
