Cloudstreet

Set in Perth, Australia between 1943 and 1963, Australian writer Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet (1991) examines the working class struggles of two families, the Pickles and the Lambs. In 1992, the book received the Miles Franklin Award, a literary honor bestowed annually in Australia.

In 1943, the Pickle family and the Lamb family share a large rundown house in the city of Perth, located in Western Australia. The address is One Cloud Street. In the first two chapters, the author introduces the two families. The Pickles are led by father, Sam, and mother, Dolly. They have three children: Ted, Rose, and Chub. The Lambs, meanwhile, are led by father, Lester, and mother, Oriel. They have six children: Hattie, Elaine, Mason, Samson (nicknamed “Fish”), Red (nicknamed “Quick”), and Lon. Their family has fled their coastal home in Margaret River, located to the south of Perth.

Though the Pickles own the house, they rent half of the building to the Lambs. On the ground floor, the Lambs open a grocery store that becomes something of a neighborhood institution. From these proceeds, the Lambs are able to pay the Pickles the rent. The two families are quite different in disposition. The Lambs are loud yet pious and play as hard as they work. The Pickles are quieter and there is much less closeness between the family members. Despite the fact that Sam and Dolly are sexually attracted to one another, the alcoholic Dolly cheats on Sam with a pilot. Sam resents that he lost his hand in an accident and often squanders the Lambs’ rent on gambling. As for Lester and Oriel, they have a close and productive working relationship but do not seem to be sexually attracted to one another anymore. Not long into the book, Oriel moves into a tent in the backyard rather than sleep with her husband.



The reader also learns more about the children of the families. Rose Pickle is bright, sensible, and painfully aware of her parents’ faults. She is instrumental in helping to hold the family unit together. The book also focuses on the close but fraught relationship between two of the Lamb brothers, Fish and Quick. Though Fish begins the book as the liveliest member of the Lamb family, he dies after drowning before being brought back to life by Oriel in an event the Lambs all consider a miracle. From that point on, Fish suffers brain damage and can only muster the intelligence and personality of a much younger child. Quick, meanwhile, feels responsible for Fish’s condition, having been present at the incident. Even though Quick saves his brother’s life, he suffers a significant amount of guilt and depression throughout the narrative.

A rival grocery store emerges in town, operated by Gerry Clay. As the competition between his outfit and the Lambs’ heats up, the perpetually unfaithful Dolly engages in an affair with Clay. Clay’s wife discovers the affair and reveals the truth of it to Sam. Sam falls into a pit of depression and seriously contemplates suicide until Rose stops him. Meanwhile, Clay falls behind in the grocery store rivalry against the Lambs and faces financial ruin. He takes out his frustration on Dolly, beating her.

As the years pass, Rose gets her own job as a switchboard operator at Baird's department store. Quick, meanwhile, gets a job hunting kangaroos in the “Wheatbelt” wilderness surrounding Perth. Quick carries on an affair with Lucy Wentworth, a woman who nurses him back to health after an accident on the job. Later, Quick and Rose make love, forcing the “ghosts” that haunt the house back into the walls. The source of the ghosts, the tenants say, is the house’s library, the center of evil in the domicile. Quick and Rose marry one another and, after a miscarriage, have a baby. The product of their love, the birth drives the spirits into oblivion, allowing the house to “settle.”



As more time passes, Sam debates whether he should sell the house. After a visit from an aborigine mystic, Sam decides to keep the house at One Cloud Street. The families celebrate with a picnic, during which Fish drowns again, dying for good this time. Through the families’ collective, decades-long struggles, they grow closer to one another, removing the makeshift walls that once divided the home.

According to Australian author Mem Fox, “If you have not read Cloudstreet, your life is diminished, it's diminished. If you have not met these characters, this generous community, these tragedies, the humor. It is so funny. Every so often, there's a sentence where you just burst out laughing. And it could be in the middle of a tragic paragraph and you just howl, you just literally laugh aloud. It is so wonderful."