Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows part of a discussion on adapting the novel That Eye, the Sky for film and stage. It is conducted by arts journalist and television presenter Andrea Stretton with screenwriter John Ruane and playwright and author Justin Monjo, and the novel’s author Tim Winton by satellite link from Perth. Stretton and the studio guests occupy a rather confined space, sitting around a table in front of a stark set. Winton appears on a screen between them. A copy of the cover of the novel is shown as Winton is talking about it.

Educational value points

• Tim Winton (1960–) describes his highly successful Australian novel That Eye, the Sky, a story about a 12-year-old boy trying to cope with the effects on his father of a car accident that has left the father badly damaged, as both ‘quirky’ and ‘offbeat’. While his laughter at this description acknowledges the over-use at the time of the word ‘quirky’ he goes on to describe the very real ambiguity of his central character, Ort, who is ‘either … damaged or … a mystic’.

• The interview reveals the reasons why the screenwriter and the playwright chose Winton’s novel for adaptation. Screenwriter John Ruane (1952–) liked the character of the evangelist charlatan Henry, and the boy Ort who never gave up. Justin Monjo (1963–) was attracted to the physicality of the novel, its magic and spirituality, as well as the fact that it was Australian and therefore suitable for the first production of a new Australian theatre company.

• Winton touches on the collaborative nature of adapting creative works, describing the process as one of translation. While a work of fiction is generally created by a sole author and is an exchange between the writer and the reader, plays and films are interpreted by a range of people, including writers, actors, directors, cinematographers and film editors, and become, as Winton describes them, ‘translations of translations’.

• Both adaptations of the novel won praise for being true to its storyline and its subject matter, which blurs distinctions between the real and the supernatural. In the play’s first production, which opened in 1995, the set designer incorporated dreamlike elements, and characters take flight suspended above the stage by long threads. The film, released in 1994, was praised for the way its poetic cinematography incorporated elements of the supernatural into the narrative.

• Tim Winton is shown in the clip at a time when his reputation as one of Australia’s foremost writers was already assured. Still only 35, he had written eight novels for adults and children, three collections of short stories and a travel book. His first novel, An Open Swimmer (1982), written when he was 19, won the Vogel Award. He has won the Miles Franklin Award twice, for Shallows and Cloudstreet, and in 1995 Riders was nominated for the Booker Prize.

• Andrea Stretton (1952–2007) shows her skill as an interviewer, acquired over many years in television broadcasting, through the knowledge of the artist’s work that her questions reveal and her warm yet respectful manner. Her questions could be challenging but her manner, which indicates a genuine desire for enlightenment, reassured her interviewees. She was producer and presenter of television arts programs on SBS and the ABC from 1987 to 2001.