#34: My Father's Axe by Tim Winton

It’s easy to neglect the Australian short fiction that's shone in the past thirty years. Were one to revisit the classics, they'd find writers such as Moorhouse, Jolley, Carey, Goldsworthy, Kennedy, Tuner-Hospital, Hitchcock, and Robert Drewe, all of whom have experimented with the form to great effect. Unless they’ve been living in a commune, they’d also consider Tim Winton and his incredible talent for writing powerful, succinct short fiction.

The Story

A man mourns the loss of his axe. It has been stolen; it is not known by whom. As the story unfolds, the main character remembers his father through axe-related memories: nights chopping wood in the darkness, animals killed with its blunt head, and a child getting to know his silent, practical father. In the present day, the main protagonist fears his father’s death, and the loss of certainty that will come when it occurs. He spends nights in existential angst beside his sleeping wife, his fears overcoming him.

Alone and afraid, he goes out to buy a new axe. And to say anymore would spoil the rest of the story.

Why it Sticks

My Father’s Axe is what these days might be a called a typical Winton Story, but at the time was, with A Blow, A Kiss, one of two groundbreaking stories exploring the father/son bond in Winton's debut short story collection. What’s refreshing is the tenderness of the central relationship in My Father’s Axe, a mutual unspoken understanding. It's touching without ever straying into sentimentality.

Winton’s masculinity is a strangely inclusive one, and forecasts a shift in identity from his father’s generation to his own. What once was the domain of the strong, silent type opens up into the more conversational, sensitive characters ever so tentatively opening up to partners, mothers, or friends from distant lands.

Tim Winton has arguably written tighter, more complete stories, but what’s impressive about My Father’s Axe is its inherent approachability. Any writer who has worked through a writing exercise will recognise the simplicity of Winton's meditation on a single object, and yet also be impressed by such a layered final product. The axe in the story is totem, character and narrative device, and by the story’s end, all aspects have been thoroughly explored in only twelve pages.

Masculinity had never been so sensitively explored as in Tim Winton’s Scission. And I was uniquely touched, on reading (and rereading) My Father's Axe by his balance of beauty and brutality.