But coming back to it the second time has been an extraordinary journey. I thought I'd read a great Australian novel. PETER GARRETT: Look, it stacks up fantastically, Jennifer, and when you asked me which book I wanted to recommend, I recommended this one because when I first read it, I loved it. Peter, how does it stack up, do you reckon? Over 20 years, their lives become entwined and the shared family experiences, birth and death, marriage and adultery, joy and loss, bind them together in ways they could not have anticipated. There, they find themselves sharing a huge ramshackle house in Cloudstreet - a big, sad two-storey affair in a garden full of fruit trees. VOICEOVER: Cloudstreet is Tim Winton's classic story of two rural families, the Lambs and the Pickles, whose fates and fortunes collide after disaster strikes and they both move to Perth. She stopped under the trees and looked back out over Champion Bay. Well, she wondered, I bet he's squirmin out there now, out on the islands, feelin this dark luck comin on. Rose had never felt a shadow like this before, but she'd heard the old boy go on about it often enough. In one year they'd lost the house, the old man had been through two jobs and all the savings, and now they were living in Uncle Joel's pub. She didn't know if she could bear any more bad luck. Not the war, not school, but something to do with her.

She wasn't in the mood for it this evening. They'd be all swilling for closing time and there'd be a great roar of talk, and she'd try to slip upstairs without getting caught up. Probably in a minute or two, when she got home, someone'd tell her again, someone in the public bar or the Ladies' Lounge. She wasn't vain, but it stuck in her guts, having someone telling you that every day of your life. She was a pretty kid, but not as pretty as her mother. Rose was a slender, brown girl, with dark straight hair, cut hard across her forehead. Ted, who was a year older than her, pretended not to hear, and he came up the ladder dripping, pigeontoed, and dived off again, holding one knee, hitting the water so that he made an artillery report - ker-thump - and a great gout of water rose up at her feet. Back under the Norfolk pines gulls bickered on the grass and fought for the scraps of uneaten lunches that schoolkids had thrown there. Fishing boats were coming in along the breakwater for the night, their diesels throbbing like blood. She itched in her awful woollen bathing suit and watched her brothers and a whole mob of other kids chucking bombies off the end of the jetty in the bronze evening light. Rose Pickles knew something bad was going to happen.

Author of cloudstreet