"I was essentially a suburban boy, but we lived on the edge," says Winton on the phone. "Literally, there was an unnatural line in the sand and 'civilisation' started and finished on that line. It meant I could be immersed in nature and it did mean that that life experience of observing began by watching the diminuition of the natural world as we pressed further and further out into it."
These days, the kids hang out at the Karrinyup Mall, a shrine to retail that is the size of an airport, and Perth's suburbs, car lots and freeways have swept out over the Swan coastal plain, replacing bush with a seemingly endless landscape of red roof tiles. But Perth's development has taken a terrible toll.
"All these dwellings and suburbs are erected in a largely dry region with a shrinking rainfall pattern," writes Winton. "But home owners still want lush lawns and European gardens ... so the waterways and aquifiers absorb a steady trickle of phosphates and pesticides ... the Swan River is slowly dying."
"The closest I can think of in terms of another city is Los Angeles, with its huge sprawl, their addiction to the car and the same kind of landscape because LA used to have water and now it doesn't," explains Winton.
"About 20 years ago, Jared Diamond [the Pulitzer Prize-winning American science writer and author of the book Collapse] predicted that within a decade a city like Perth would be completely untenable and he was right. We've been drinking seawater for the last 10 years; Perth has two desalination plants. It's like Israel or Saudi Arabia - if we weren't turning seawater into fresh water it would be a failed state."
Winton, 55, has been based in Perth for most of his life but "ran away from home" with his wife a few years ago to the northwest coast. When I spoke to him he was in Brisbane, taking part in an event at the Brisbane Festival to mark the 50th anniversary of the Australian Marine Conservation Society, of which he is patron.
"The Conservation Society began in 1965 when the Queensland Government thought the best use for the Great Barrier Reef was to be a limestone quarry," says Winton, who was named a Living Treasure in 2014 by Australia's National Trust. "The people who fought that had great tenacity. As I say in the book, in Queensland, back in those days, if someone talked about nature having intrinsic value you were either a communist or a poofter - or both. So in a way, it's a nice time to be writing the book as well as [attending]the festival event. They are both a celebration of how the culture has changed in 50 years, in my own lifetime. A visitor from 1965 would find it a strange world, indeed."
Winton was looking forward to the celebration for more than one reason. "The Attorney-General George Brandis will be there. After we challenged the Environment Minister in the High Court over a coal mine and got the decision overturned, he called us legal vigilantes," he laughs.
Island Home is a powerful and poetic read, an expression of his intense love of the land and the sea, and for Australia's unique flora and fauna. He also laments the vandalism the Australian environment has endured since colonisation right up to the present day. Politicians, industries such as mining and fishing, as well as urban developers do not get an easy ride. At one point he makes an eloquent plea: "In exchange for what we surrender we surely have the right to expect something worthwhile, something good - developments that are mindful of their footprint ... if our cities are any indication of the fruits of their [business leaders'] labours, they seem content to bulldoze beauty and replace it with crap."
While noting that he is not, by nature, an optimist, Winton says the process of writing the book - which he describes as a "bit of a meander" - has made him re-assess himself.
"I made the mistake of thinking that optimism had to be an emotion but optimism is more a conscious outlook, so now I adopt it as a discipline," he says. "I think that's partly why I wrote the book, as a kind of accounting, holding my grumpy pessimism to account. And I do think we have changed, I think we are quite different in the way we feel about our country. Even my grandparents would be puzzled by the way we feel and make policy decisions about our organic estate. It's a sad thing that governments and some parts of business still have 19th century conceptions in the 21st century."
In 1973, when Winton was aged 12, the family moved to the township of Albany, south of Perth. This was a few years after a devastating accident, in which his father, a motorcycle traffic cop, was nearly killed, an incident Winton details in an essay called Havoc, recently published on themonthly.com.au website.
Albany's economy was based on an unholy trinity of whaling, a fish cannery and an abbatoir, a place of "primal savagery", he writes, where he saw the sperm whales' "heads hacked off with chainsaws. The sharks shot and clubbed. The beef carcasses sliding by like dry-cleaned coats on endless racks."
The sick thing was, he recalls, that the locals, himself included, thought it great sport to take visitors down to the waterfront and give them a big surprise.
"It wasn't elegant back in the day when you could take people out as entertainment and watch them puke," he says.
"We'd laugh and roar and carry on as if it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen, people blowing chunks of vomit into their handkerchiefs, some people would cry. We were country oafs."
It was a dislocating time for the young teen. "As a copper's son," he writes, "I sniffed the reeking desperation of the lockup, saw the squalor of the native reserve ... for the best part of a year I saw only dark, unknowable nature and brutal humanity and I felt lost."
At the age of 14, Winton had an epiphany one day when he was thinking about Albany's whaling industry. "Yeah. I started reading the stats and thought, hang on," he says. "Every day the plane goes out and the ships go out with the guns and the whale chaser brings back three or four sperm whales or a humpback or two. They'd be winched up and chopped up - the men were like thieves opening up a mattress to look for where the money was hidden, keep chopping away until, 'oh there's no money.' It was like a scratch 'n' sniff Hieronymous Bosch painting. It stank, it was horrific, that part was a vision of hell."
And so Winton started walking away from the town, up the coast, along the beaches and into the sea, surfing. "In time it was the long and lonely coast that lifted my spirits," he writes. "The white southern beaches won me over ... Perhaps it was because I was now seeing them from the water where I spent every hour of freedom I could beg, borrow or burgle."
"Yeah, I think the natural world saved me," he says. "I have said before that surfing saved me as a young man. Lots of other kids I knew were, and I'm sure the same goes for New Zealand, in cars, with lots of weapons, lots of drugs. My life could have turned out very differently had I not got wet. The sea was like a poultice, it sucked all the poison out of me."
Winton still surfs as much as he can, saying he'd been four times so far that week - "I need to have the water over the gills every day". Surfing comes with challenges, though. A New York magazine editor once rejected one of his stories on the grounds that "the shark attack came out of nowhere".
Winton laughs. "Yeah, the shark was going to leave a printed card on the doorstep to say, 'I'll be by at 10.15am.' But as a surfer, it's not something that's at the forefront of my mind. I see sharks - occasionally a big tiger wanders through the area where I surf and there are plenty of black tips.
But most of the time I am happy to see a shark - it's a sign that the ocean is still alive."
Winton is a brave man in more ways than one. In the chapter, Paying Respect, he takes aim at what he calls "the Gallipoli myth", saying Anzac Day in Australia "has been coarsened by the politics of nostalgic regression. It's close to becoming the sort of nationalist death cult we revile when it appears in other places or under a different flag".
He proceeds to lay out an impressive argument but agrees, "It's probably not going to win me any favours. It's hard to write about, given how central that experience is to loads of people in my family," he says. "My grandfather was at Gallipoli, my grandmother's brother was there and died in Palestine. But it's distressing to see this kind of cult develop. It was very self-consciously orchestrated by the Howard Government. There's no surprise that our rise in foreign engagements after a long time of us minding our own business and using our army for good - peace-keeping in the Solomons and Timor and elsewhere. For them to go off on these overseas adventures again and the rise of militarism and jingo-ism from government rhetoric - it's sad really.
"Even in terms of defending your own place, at Gallipoli, we weren't defending Australia. We were fighting for Britain. But for those Australians and New Zealanders who fought in Bougainville, New Guinea, Singapore and Malaya, and who ended up on the railway in Thailand, they were fighting to save their countries from the Japanese. But that somehow is completely overshadowed by this cack-handed adventure in 1915 as though the boys whose lives were wasted in the Dardanelles are more valuable than the boys who gave their lives to actually defend the country that produced them. It's astounding and also, just the fact that it seems to be a distraction from the real problems at hand. There's a kind of insincerity to it."
As we have seen over the past fortnight, Australian politics can be brutal. "Our politics are more chaotic than in New Zealand," he says. "The Greens are the only progressive party. Labor and the Liberals are different versions of Toryism. But you have to think there is hope - what else are you going to tell the kids? You are always going to tell the kids that it's all right and then you are going to do everything in your power to make sure it bloody well is all right. That's my position as a grandfather - that's probably how I got caught up in this accidental part-time activism."
After the Brisbane gig, Winton was heading back to Perth to present the annual Tim Winton Award for Young Writers, which has been running for 25 years, and spending the night with his grandchildren, before going home.
"There's just the two, mate - one is 4, and one is 2. They used to live around the corner [until we moved], but now we talk to them on Skype, which is chaotic. It seems like you are seeing footage from a war correspondent, looking up someone's snotty nose in mid-winter. I'll get to stay in the spare room and wake up at 6am with a pair of infants and at least one of them will have a poop-crapped nappy and they'll climb in and greet me before dawn. It's special."
And Tim Winton, the pessimist trying to be an optimist, sounds really happy.
Island Home (Penguin $45) is out now.
