He asks his mother can they go out the next day but she says there is school, he asks can they go out after school and fish. They boiled the shells up to clean them so they can sell them in town.

They climb back into the boat and head for home, he has lived at Longboat Bay all his life and “every day is special but it all became much more precious the day he shook hands with old Blueback.”Įven while Abel helped his mother to clean and freeze the abalone he was dreaming of going back to see the huge groper again. She tells him it is a blue groper and they sink back into the water to have a close look at it, his mother feeds it some abalone and then it darts into a dark hole.

He screams to his mother to get in the boat but she laughs and tells him it is okay, she makes him look down and he realises it isn’t a shark but the biggest fish he has ever seen. After several dives, Abel is at the deepest point and nearly out of air when he feels a rush in the water behind him, he turns around to see a huge mouth, eyes like golf balls coming at him, the creature grabs his hand and takes the abalone, the pain is terrible and he screams then shoots to the surface. It is barely dawn when Abel and his mother get into their boat and head around to Robbers Head, drop the anchor and start to dive into the water searching for Abalone which they sell. Until the day he meets Blueback, the fish that changes his life. It’s hard work but Abel has the bush and sky and the bay to himself. Life is tough out at Longboat Bay, Every day the boy helps his mother earn their living from the sea and the land. He can’t remember a time when he couldn’t use a mask and snorkel to glide down into the clear deep. Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives.Abel Jackson loves to dive. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.Ĭhance, hardship and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet. The Lambs are industrious, united and – until God seems to turn his back on their boy Fish – religious. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday.Īfter two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth.

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