‘The Shepherd’s Hut’, Tim Winton
The story is narrated by Jaxie Clackton, a semi-literate 15 year old boy, brought up and brutalised in a violent home. While his atrocious grammar and limited vocabulary come across as being authentic, it took several chapters for me to be comfortable seeing ‘could of’ and similar terms, in writing.
Where Tim Winton has excelled in this book, is in evoking the starkness, space and solitude of Western Australia’s ‘outback’. Significantly, Winton achieves this without resorting to romantic, intellectual or sentimental terminology or disposition – Jaxie would not see it in that light.
Almost all of the book tells the story of Jaxie’s trek north through uninhabited land and salt lakes. This is a walk of self discovery to which we’re made privy thanks to Jaxie’s narrative. This self-examination and Jaxie’s consequent ‘fresh start’ are aided in no small measure by the only person that Jaxie meets and with whom he spends a significant amount of time. Not wishing to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of this book, I will merely say that this occurs even though this person and Jaxie appear to have nothing in common.
This reader’s view of Jaxie moved to and fro between pity, dread, disgust, empathy and admiration. Winton permits Jaxie to fully reveal himself to the reader – eliciting empathy and understanding even from readers who are unlikely to have much in common with a 15 year old violent, anti-social boy.
This is the an exceptional book. Its images, main character and social commentary are likely to long stay with you, and the final twist may surprise you as much as it surprised me.
Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager, Winton illustrated the fine line that many young men tread between one based on gender equality, respect for and cooperation with other members of society, and on the other hand, one that is dominated by a masculinity characterised by an anti social stance and resort to violence. As Williamson suggests, the timeliness of Winton’s book and talk was underlined by the Florida mass killing committed by a young man only 10 days earlier.
Observing that gender roles, and what it means to be a man and a woman, have changed significantly, Winton argued that ‘girls have benefitted from a root-branch renovation of societal expectations thanks to contemporary feminism’, and have ‘stepped into a welcome knowledge of their agency and potential’. The changing role of men, on the other hand, he argued, has not received similar attention, and consequently men have fallen behind their female counterparts. As a result, Winton suggested that, ‘boys have shut down, turned inward or lashed out, baffled and enraged by the paucity of ways there are of being a man’.
This uncertainty or misunderstanding of masculinity, described in Winton’s novel and recollected from his personal juvenile experiences, he proposed, may manifest itself in adolescence with possible tragic consequences (which he narrowly escaped).
One means by which such boys and young men assert their understanding of what it is to be a man is through masculine dominance over females and domestic violence. Noting that while misogyny manifests itself in instances of domestic violence, about which society often remains silent, Winton highlighted our society’s incomplete perception of misogyny, noting that ‘misogyny is a malign force in our culture, and not just for women but for young men, too. It deforms them; it makes them domestic terrorists’.
Related manifestations of misogyny include, anti-intellectualism, resolution of disputes through violence and rejection of social reforms such as recognition of same sex marriage, which they consider at odds with their preferred views of masculinity. However, to view the rejection of our society’s preferred model of masculinity as anti social, in my view, is to ignore the mixed messages our society conveys to young men. When we witness sons and fathers in public we may or are tempted to observe, on the basis of the appearance or more often the behaviour of a father, that ‘there’s little hope’ for the boy. It is indeed a rare child that is able to completely leave behind, the misogyny, anti establishment, violence, and anti intellectualism.
Governmental policies, and consequently laws, on how to respond to the plight of children in such households, appear to favour the retention of ties between parents and children over the lasting effects on children of being brought up in such households. The ‘family values’ slogan, we so often hear, often reinforces the view that ‘family comes first’ and what happens in a family is no one else’s business. In this way, the mythical family living in the white picket fence home often reinforces the ugly side of ‘traditional gender role families’.
The entertainment, social media and online gaming that a young man is likely to be exposed to, almost invariably presents, a view of a male as engaged in anti-social activity, treating females as sex objects to be conquered, and intellectualism as being inferior to strength, power and violence. Policy makers unrealistically expect young men to be persuaded that such presentations of masculinity should be viewed as pure entertainment and rejected yin real life. The glorification of violence in sports further reinforces a certain view of masculinity. In addition, shock jocks and popular press attacks on ‘political correctness’ and ‘elites’, may also be said to reinforce rejection of social norms.
It is unrealistic to expect education alone to counter such conveyed perceptions, especially as many of the young men at risk are likely to minimise their interaction with educational institutions.
While the above outline of the problem appears to present it as confined to the disempowered underclass, Winton suggests that both neglect and overindulgence are responsible for creating this ‘tribe of young men the rest of us will cross the street to avoid’.
In Perth, he argued that rather than avoid such often angry and violent young men, we need to engage them in society by replacing outrage with understanding. I suggest that not only must such disenfranchised and confused males be engaged in society, but society itself must confront the sources or reinforcers of negative messages as to the place and role of males in personal interactions and in society.