Summary Of The Turning By Tim Winton

“The stories in ‘The Turning’ focus on moments of change for the characters, sometimes as the result of a significant event, deliberate decision, a chance meeting or a seemingly trivial act.”

The stories ‘Big world’ and ‘Aquifer’ are two short stories from the book ‘The turning’ by Tim Winton. They are both perfect examples of short stories with characters that change due to significant events in their lives, most often their childhoods. Significant events that occur during childhood are very likely to follow and affect how the person changes and stick as vivid memories even as an adult.
The short story ‘Big world’ provides many moments of significant change for the narrator. “Crappy Saturday job,” through the Australian colloquial language the narrator informs us of his dislike for his job. He also mentions feeling “Stuck forever”. From this we understand that all the narrator wants to do is leave the place, he lives in the small town of Angelus. Angelus is commonly known as the prayer said daily at the same time. The reference to angelus in symbolic of

The society around the narrator was changing. At the start of the story we saw that the young Aboriginal children were playing and were pretty much treated like the rest of the kids, but as the story continues to progress it is evident that the Aboriginal people are slowly being pushed to lower class people. Within the story there is a scene where an Aboriginal lady is angry at a European man of authority who is evicting her from her house. “Aboriginal woman raised her fist at a man with a clipboard and phone.” Not only is the society out casting Aboriginals but they were also expanding the small town and the narrator sees this when he comes back and finds that the suburbs reach further into the bush. The writer Tim Winton writes of this using negative imagery to express his distaste of the ruining of the