The distinctive, evocative writing of Tim Winton is at its best in the 2005 collection of 17 loosely linked short stories that inspired this ambitious project. The tales of lives by turns beleaguered and broken are all set in the coastal small-town Western Australia that is Winton's literary bailiwick, and they are suffused with a sense of longing and melancholy that, miraculously, survives the adaptation process, even though the 17 short films are so strikingly different in style.
In the press notes, Winton compares writing the collection to dragging a bike from "a dark and crowded shed ... I set out with the notion of extracting one set of wheels and handlebars, but I was soon contending with a snarl of greasy machines rattling way back into the shadows, each snagged into the next".
It's an observation that might have seemed daunting to anyone proposing an adaptation but Robert Connolly, the director of Balibo and The Bank, who masterminded the enterprise, was fascinated by what he describes as "an innovative adrenalin rush of a read, a cryptic jigsaw puzzle of a book that continues to reveal its heart-breaking secrets with each read".
His approach was to invite people whose work he admired - in several cases actors take directing duties - to interpret a chapter each. No style choices would be enforced; in particular, it would not matter that the six recurring characters were played by different actors in different chapters; Vic Lang, who appears at various ages in more than half the stories, changes hair colour and even race.
The result is a three-hour package with interval, a glossy programme and a $25 ticket price that can reasonably be described as an event. Connolly says he sought to give the viewer "a similar experience to entering an art gallery, allowing a personal response to the many unique threads and connections without losing the value of experiencing each individual work and the artist behind it."
