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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Spaces, (Non-)Places, and Fluid Identities in Tim Winton’s Fiction

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One of the major issues addressed by postcolonial literature is identity crisis. In Australia, a multicultural country and a former settler colony, where the sense of belonging is particularly troubling, this literary theme has been exploited by writers to address the ambiguity of home and belonging. This article attempts to examine Tim Winton’s fiction and show how the writer explores the concepts of place and space to set his protagonists’ shattered selves in the postcolonial geography. The analysis of his fiction from the perspective of humanistic geography, Edward Relph’s concept of placelessness, and Marc Auge’s idea of non-place reveals that a simple categorization of Winton’s settings into oppressive places and liberating spaces may be insufficient to analyze his characters’ experience of displacement and the uncanny for, as the third category – the postmodern notion of non-place – enters the scene, a stable sense of identity seems unattainable.