There’s nothing romantic about poverty and most of the time for those 10 years I was just in survival instinct There has to be an element of hope and keeping your wits about you.’’ You have to function for a little person. It never got so dark that I would lose hope. ‘‘There’s nothing romantic about poverty and most of the time for those 10 years I was just in survival instinct to pay the rent and feed my child. She has since searched online to see if she can buy a secondhand one, but the price tag remains prohibitive (‘‘It's a dream in 40 years’’). It was sad, Winch says, before swiftly correcting herself.
One Christmas, she was broke and sold the Rolex so she could afford presents for Lila. But afraid to keep the extravagant watch in her New York apartment that could easily be burgled, Winch wore it, pulling her sleeve down on the subway, the luxury watch in glittering juxtaposition to her op-shop clothes.
Her dream was to pass it on to Lila in the future, when perhaps her daughter graduated university. And there was the pressure of poverty.Īs part of the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, which saw her paired with Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka in 2008, Winch was awarded a Rolex watch, a rare design with white gold and diamonds. The pressure of a promising story that won't let go of you – a deeply felt story about the history, language and culture of your people. There was the pressure of being told you have all that potential. She was also named a recipient of the elite international Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, designed to ‘‘assist extraordinary, rising artists to achieve their full potential by pairing them with great masters’’.īut the decade that followed the publication of her debut has also been one of hardship and heartbreak for Winch. Her novel was endorsed for the NSW HSC reading list and she was voted onto the board of the Australia Council for the Arts.
Winch – who is of Wiradjuri heritage, grew up in public housing in Wollongong, south of Sydney, and started to write after she dropped out of high school at 17 – was in the spotlight.
Critics deemed Winch a ‘‘young writer with an original story to tell’’ who wrote with ‘‘the elan of those much more accomplished’’. The poetic novel, about a 15-year-old girl exploring her Indigenous heritage, was met with a waterfall of acclaim and success – it won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous writing, the NSW Premier's Literary Award for a first novel and the Nita May Dobbie Award. Tara June Winch was a 22-year-old university student and a single mother to a 5-month old daughter when her debut novel, Swallow the Air, was published in 2006.
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