Tim Winton's Island Home isn't memoir, it's a cultural call to arms

Australian minds have been colonised in the same way as our landscape, Winton argues in his latest book, but country is calling us home

Tim Winton's new book, Island Home, is a meditation on the places that have breathed life into his fiction over the past decades. Take this description of a plane ride over Northam, 100km inland from Perth:

Spread below us, the land is flat and golden, all its undulations etched into shadow. Wheat stubble is sectioned into orderly rectangles. Sheep pads spider away from dams and troughs. From above, the windmills are barely visible. Rare clumps of trees stand in vivid contrast to the bleached summer pastures. When sheep move, as hot milk split across a tawny cloth, dust rises like steam in their wake.