Cloudstreet's metatextual status, then, implies that the novel figures Australia's modernity even as it relies on a classicism that is spectral: haunting the present in all its modernity.
And insofar as it is formative of the present, a classic is also implicitly, at least in part, of the past. Indeed, this modernity would have to be commensurable with something classic, standard, which is also to say formative. Might this detail of the book' marketing reveal something about the novel's metatextual status? It might be seen to imply that Cloudstreet figures a certain Australian modernity. 'First published in 1991, Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is now presented in one of its several Penguin editions as a 'Modern Australian Classic'. ‘Bursting with Voice and Doubleness’ : Vernacular Presence and Visions of Inclusiveness in Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Fiona Morrison, When it lets you through - whether to escape to a different life, as a rite of passage to adulthood, to see the world in a new way or to discover the holiness of the earth or the wonder of the world, whether it is the baptismal water of redemption to an opening to a world of silence - and it is all these things- you become different.' (Author's introduction 16)
It lets you through because it is the passage to a different state of being, sometimes in dream, sometimes in physical extremity, but always offers itself as the medium of transformation. But water is more than an omnipresent feature of his writing and his life, the oceanscape of his stories. Clearly the sea and the river are vital aspects of the writer's own experience. Water is everywhere in his writing, as people sail on it, dive into it, live on the edge of it. Bird's the nearest thing to an angelic being.' Bird's question suggests the function of water in Winton's novels. 'In Dirt Music, remembering the time before a car crash took the lives of his brother Darkie, Darkie's wife Sal, and their two children, Bird and Bullet, Luther Fox recalls Bird's question : 'Lu, how come water lets you through it?' Bird is the one who saw God, and 'if anyone saw God it would likely be her.
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