Tim Winton and the ethics of the neighbour here and now

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ethical concept of the neighbour, an idea central to the fiction of Tim Winton. The first part focuses on how the ghosts in Cloudstreet symbolize an Australian culture haunted by the injustices of colonization, especially the dispossession of the Indigenous people. The second part looks at the paradox of being commanded to love one’s neighbour, comparing an early story, “Neighbours”, to Winton’s recent novel Eyrie. The third part looks at Winton’s ethics of neighbourliness in light of recent critical reworkings of this concept by Slavoj Žižek and Kenneth Reinhard. Central to this section is the importance of time and place to the ethics of the neighbour, in particular the repeated insistence by both Winton and his critics that, rather than focusing on the past, we should acknowledge the neighbour who stands before us in the here and now.

KEYWORDS:

• Tim Winton
• Australian literature
• Indigenous
• ethics
• neighbour
• haunting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter D. Mathews

Peter D. Mathews is professor of English Literature at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea. A specialist in contemporary British and Australian literature, he has published on such writers as A.S. Byatt (Critique; Contemporary Women’s Literature), Kazuo Ishiguro (Interactions; Caesura), Ian McEwan (English Studies in Canada; Critique; Atlantis), Will Self (English), Tim Winton (Westerly; Australian Literary Studies), Peter Carey (Australian Literary Studies) and Christos Tsiolkas (Westerly), as well as many others. He is currently working on a monograph reassessing the legacy of Jacques Lacan.