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Bill Spence: Tara, thank you for taking the time to be interviewed today. You come from a very rich and mixed background.
How has that influenced your writing?
Tara June Winch: Coming from that background has influenced my work by giving me a foundation to look at
my family and my community and have that influence on my fiction, so drawing inspiration from subject matter.
It's also given me an insight into wider social and political issues in the Aboriginal community.
Bill: When did you realise that you were an author and start to take writing seriously?
Tara: I don't think I realise I'm an author. I do take it seriously though now, just because I've learned in the last couple of years the power
and the opportunity words can have to get messages across and to connect with the reader.
So I'm starting to develop into my career.
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Bill Spence: Can you describe your writing habits?
Tara June Winch: They're varied and sort of loose and undisciplined, but I constantly write.
I'm writing every day and I try to keep a journal if I'm not working on a bigger project.
So, just try and keep constantly working, even if it's small projects.
Bill: How much research goes into your work?
Tara: I think lots of research goes into my writing, just in everyday life, watching a film or reading a book or
going somewhere different, going for a big drive or a bush walk.
I think I'm always kind of looking and listening like a thief.
In my life I consider everything that I do research.
Bill: How do you start your work? Do you begin with the story-line or do you start with characters?
Tara: Sometimes I begin with a character, an idea, a story-line or a setting, but at the moment I'm jotting
down three or four things that are in my head and putting them onto a page so I'll go to the first point
and if I can't maybe work with a character then I'll move on to a setting or something like that, just so I've got
something at least to fall back on, to work on.
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Bill Spence: How do you go about developing a character?
Tara June Winch: A character can come from someone that I might have met in real life or an anecdote or
a small story about a person or a newspaper clipping.
I don't know, I think, it just comes from life and you just hear something special, you see something special and
you realise that they could be the person or the impetus to bring a story to a reader.
Bill: How do write through the minds of male and female characters?
Tara: The female character's ok, the young female character I've been working on, mainly.
Male characters I tend to just hang around my brothers and get their boyishness to rub off on my shoulders.
I think men, it depends what the character is like.
I think male characters can be quite sensitive, can be quite feminine, and female characters can be quite boyish and brash.
So, you know, and also reading and, yeah, just trying to balance between the two.
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Bill Spence: What techniques do you use to engage the reader?
Tara June Winch: I think I just try to be honest about the subject and hope that that comes through in my
writing and not trying to trick a reader or convince them that this is a certain style, a certain genre that needs to
be taken this way, so just trying to be relaxed with the words and be honest with the subject and have fun with it.
Hopefully that engages the reader.
Bill: You mentioned reading. Do you like reading, and how do you see that influences your work?
Tara: I enjoy reading a lot. I read everything from newspapers to magazines to novels to nonfiction.
And it does influence my writing, just picking up little bits of life or a clipping or just to inspire words in you and ideas.
I think reading is a really important task, even if I'm not writing I make sure I'm reading something, exercising my mind.
Bill: What tips would you give to students who aspire to be writers?
Tara: Just to keep reading and keep writing if that's what they want to do and do it for the right reasons
I suppose, and, yeah, just be true to yourself and your story and enjoy it along the way.
Bill: Tara thank you for speaking with me and for sharing your insights into writing.
Tara: Thank you.
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Tara June Winch: This is called 'Cloud busting' from 'Swallow the Air'.
We go cloud busting, Billy and me, down at the beach, belly up to the big sky.
We make rainbows that pour out from our heads, squinting our eyes into the gathering.
Fairy flossed pincushion clouds explode.
We hold each other's hand; squeeze really hard to build up the biggest, brightest rainbow, and Bang!
Shoot it up to the sky, bursting cloud suds that scatter, escaping into the air alive.
We toss our bodies off the eelgrass-covered dunes and race down to the shore where seaweed beads trace the waterline.
Little bronze teardrops - we bust them too. Bubble-wrapped pennies.
We collect pipis, squirming our heels into the shallow water, digging deeper under the sandy foam.
Reaching down for our prize, we find lantern shells, cockles and sometimes periwinkles, bleached white.
We snatch them up, filling our pockets.
We find shark egg capsules like dried out leather corkscrews and cuttlebones and sand snail skeletons, and branches, petrified to stone.
We find sherbet-coloured coral clumps, sponge tentacles and sea mats, and blue bottles - we bust them with a stick.
We find weed ringlet doll wigs and strings of brown pearls.
I wear them as bracelets.
We get drunk on the salt air and laughter.
We dance, wiggling our bottoms from the dunes' height.
We crash into the surf, we swim, we dive and we tumble.
We empty our lungs and weigh ourselves cross-legged to the seabed.
There we have tea parties underwater. Quickly, before we come up for mouthfuls of air.
I'm not scared of the ocean.
That doesn't come until later.
When we're kids we have no fear,
it gets sucked out in the rips.
We swim with the current, like breeding turtles and hidden jelly fish, as we drift out onto the shore.
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