English · Chapter 6
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Tim Winton, born in 1960 in Perth, Western Australia, is one of Australia's most admired living writers. He is best known for the novels Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath, and he has won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's leading literary prize, four times. "Neighbours" is a very short story from his early collection Scission (1985). Written in plain, spare prose and with no named characters, it follows a newly married couple who move into a street of European migrants and slowly discover what it means to belong to a neighbourhood. Its attention to ordinary suburban life, cultural difference and quiet moments of grace is typical of Winton's fiction.
When a newly married young couple move into a small house in a street full of European migrants, they feel like sojourners in a foreign land. On one side lives a Macedonian family; on the other, a widower from Poland. The couple have come from the expansive outer suburbs, where good neighbours were seldom seen and never heard, so the everyday sounds of spitting, washing and day-long shouting come as a shock. The Macedonian family seem to shout, rant and scream from morning to night, and it takes the newcomers six months to understand that their neighbours are not murdering one another but simply talking. The old Polish man spends most of his day hammering nails into wood only to pull them out again, and his industry is a complete mystery to the young couple.
The young man is a postgraduate student writing a thesis on the development of the twentieth century novel, so he stays at home while his wife goes out to work. A husband at home during the day puzzles the neighbours, who watch him with frank curiosity, and the young man begins to suspect that he has come to the wrong place. The couple are also disturbed by habits they find crude, such as the killing of poultry in the yard next door.
In autumn the couple clear their overgrown backyard, turn and manure the soil and plant vegetables. The Macedonian family watch over the fence and soon come across to help, pushing the young man's hands aside to show him how the seeds should be planted. By summer the garden is producing, and the neighbours press jars of pickled vegetables and other home-made food on them. When the young man sets out to build a hen house, the Polish widower, who has watched his clumsy efforts, comes over and takes charge with his hammer, and a solid hen house goes up. The couple buy hens, and the whole street seems pleased. Greetings are shouted across the fences, and the couple notice that they too have begun to shout, and that the noise no longer bothers them.
Then the young woman becomes pregnant. The news spreads along the street and the neighbours treat it as a shared event, offering food, advice and open delight. The couple, who had once viewed everything around them with suspicion, now feel themselves part of the neighbourhood.
The birth takes place at home after a long and difficult labour. The young man, who has read every book on the subject, finds that none of them is any use before the real thing. When the baby is finally born, he looks up and sees the Macedonian family and the Polish widower gathered outside, watching and rejoicing with them. Overcome, the young man weeps, and it occurs to him that the twentieth century novel had not prepared him for this.