Stephanie Johnson said she was incredibly nervous when she interviewed Tim Winton on Saturday morning at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and a friend of mine who was sitting at the front said she was shaking like a leaf. But she gave a great impression of being relaxed as she sat with Tim, and he likewise, in his trademark black t-shirt, jeans, Blundstone boots and long brown ponytail.

To start off, Stephanie said they’d decided to just focus on a retrospective of a few of his books as she didn’t want to spread the interview too thin over his twenty-plus oeuvre – she went for The Turning, Cloudstreet, and The Riders. Tim bridled a little over the word ‘retrospective’ as he felt it was a term that should only be used for dead writers, but ‘as he hadn’t brought a shovel’, he supposed it could work.

Tim Winton was the only child in his big extended family who went to University. As a kid however, he helped to clean houses with his mother, who was once wrongly accused of stealing some earrings from a house she cleaned. He hated the cleaning, and was bitter on behalf of his mother. He spoke of the dignity of people who know they can’t win and said that pulling hair out of other people's plugholes ‘tends to galvanise you to get an education’. His uncle told him to go for it: ‘If you get something between your ears, the bosses can’t take it away.’ He isn’t so sure of that – times have changed now and there are ‘people like Rupert Murdoch’ who can and will take away what’s between your ears if you let them.

They spoke first of The Turning, a book of short stories that are linked by people and place. The stories were not written in the order they’re published; some even, in fact were written years ago, and some had characters that started out with different names. When he looked at them though he realised that they were characters he ‘knew’ from other places and times, and that their places were in this book.

He read from the story which names the book, that starts with the sentence on all the Festival posters: ‘Raelene couldn’t stand being in the caravan another bloody minute.’ He said, ‘Every morning when I get up there it is on a postcard on the table in the hotel room … like it’s trying to tell me something.’ Poor battered Raelene. Stephanie asked him if he really thinks some people are irredeemable. He said no – that some simply don’t or can’t redeem themselves. Life can surround you with a ‘mire of suppurating consequences’ (delicious phrase) – simply driving down the road you have hundreds of other drivers who could kill you at any moment. Anyone can be ‘thwarted’ (a word that appeared more than once) and be a victim of others’ choices.

Stephanie asked Tim about the religious imagery that infuses a lot of his work. His parents were fundamentalist converts in the 1960s, oddities in ‘the most secular nation on the planet, which just happens to be founded on the most sacred land on the planet’. They were, he said, just ordinary folk who became ‘less ordinary’. Some of this spirituality did rub off on him, but as a boy who spent nearly all his time ‘in, on or under the water’, the ‘sacramental nature of nature’ ended up having much more of an impact. He revered nature and the miraculous physical world he was surrounded by – and became seen as a pantheist as a result. When you see the physical as sacred he said, ‘blood and water aren’t just symbols, their value is real’.

Next we got on to The Riders, the book that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995. The main thing about this book that came through in the interview for me was that Tim was often surprised that people thought he had written it in an angry frame of mind – especially towards women. He told a funny story about kicking a ball about with his small son on the school grounds when a car stopped, the window rolled down and someone shouted ‘You must have been so angry when you wrote that book!’ At that moment the soccer ball hit Tim in the head.

Winton is quite the comedian, quite keen to laugh at himself, at bullshit of any kind, at his own publicity machine, at the thought of himself as an intellectual. Anyway, he maintained that as a male who comes from two lines of solid matriarchy – and ‘glad of it’, he has no ‘idealogical animus’ for painting women as villains and in fact had a certain sympathy with the ‘creatively thwarted’ wife in The Riders. He had, in fact, in this and in other stories also, been interested by the double standard of how society castigates women who leave their families so much more than men who leave theirs.

And so to Cloudstreet. Ah, Cloudstreet. Cards on the table: I’ve not yet read The Turning, but this book, and Dirt Music, and to a lesser extent, The Riders have, without exaggeration, illuminated my soul. But this one the most. And it’s the one that’s most about his own life. Stephanie mentioned a quote (I missed the source – was it Tim?) which says ‘asking a writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where it buys its thread.’ Tim responded: ‘Yeah – you just pull it out your arse!’

Anyway, turns out that his paternal grandmother did in fact live in a tent in the family’s back garden for thirty years, something which his father and his father’s siblings were so keen not to have out in public that they mounted a family petition to can the book. In another of many autobiographical notes, he has himself nearly drowned many times, and so have his kids, something which he seems fairly philosophical about – ‘it’s just what happens when you live in the water’. But it accounts for one of Cloudstreet’s main characters’ obsession with the beauty of going down, down, into the water.

Cloudstreet was written largely in Europe (Ireland and France) and he thinks this is what gives it its nostalgic feel – he was homesick – although all the buildings and other places of his Perth childhood have long gone, bulldozed and smashed to bits. He attributes this destruction, which has happened all over Australia and NZ, to ‘Antipodean self-hatred’, an interesting phrase if ever there was one.

Winding up, Stephanie asked him about his current roles in environmental groups he’s involved with, something he seemed quite reluctant to talk about – bit of a long story by the sound of it. He ummed and ahhed but in the end said, ‘Nah,’ he’d leave it, adding that we in NZ had enough to deal with on our own back door-step. When I got my books signed later (yes, indeed), I asked why his books often had supernatural things going on in them and, as one who’s had some hair-raising paranormal experiences myself (another story), what he thought of ghosts really. He said ‘Ohhhh… yeah... dunno about supernatural. I think it’s all pretty natural really. That stuff’s goin’ on all around us all the time.’ True enough.

When you see him, it’s kind of hard to think of Tim Winton as a giant of literature even though he’s written some of the books that are at the very top of my list. And I’m sure that’s just the way he likes it. He refuses utterly to give in to any kind of hype and his bullshit monitor is scarily ultra-sensitive. He’s simply a nice, funny bloke, no doubt a great dad and a good neighbour, who just happens to be a literary genius.