Get Your Free Audiobook
-
Island Home
- A Landscape Memoir
- Narrated by: David Tredinnick
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs
Non-member price: $43.70
People who bought this also bought...
-
The Boy Behind the Curtain
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Tim Winton
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The remarkable true stories in The Boy Behind the Curtain reveal an intimate and rare view of Tim Winton's imagination at work and play. In Tim Winton's fiction, chaos waits in the wings, and ordinary people are ambushed by events and emotions beyond their control. Winton's own life has also been shaped by havoc.
-
-
and
- By Eugene Paul Wickins on 24-01-2018
-
With My Little Eye
- By: Sandra Hogan
- Narrated by: Jessica Douglas-Henry
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Growing up in the 1950s, the three Doherty children were trained by their parents to memorise car number plates, to spot unusual behaviour on the street and most important of all, to avoid drawing attention to themselves. The children became unwitting foot soldiers in Australia's battle against Soviet infiltration in the Cold War. They attended political rallies, stood watch on houses owned by communist sympathisers and infiltrated the UFO Society.
-
-
interesting read
- By Anonymous User on 04-02-2021
-
Shallows
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Tracey Callander
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whales have always been the life-force of Angelus, a small town on the south coast of Western Australia. Their annual passing defines the rhythms of a life where little changes, and the town depends on their carcasses. So when the battle begins on the beaches outside the town, and when Queenie Cookson, a local girl, joins the Greenies to make amends for the crimes of her whaling ancestors, it can only throw everything into chaos.
-
-
Pretty miserable story all round without relief.
- By HappyChick on 16-08-2020
-
The Riders
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Stanley McGeagh
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fred Scully waits at the arrival gate of an international airport, anxious to see his wife and seven-year-old daughter. After two years in Europe they are finally settling down. He sees a new life before them, a stable outlook, a cottage in the Irish countryside that he's renovated by hand. He's waited, sweated on this reunion. He does not like to be alone - he's that kind of man. The flight lands, the glass doors hiss open, and Scully's life begins to go down in flames.
-
-
A heart in the mouth tale
- By Aaron on 01-07-2017
-
The Shepherd's Hut
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Kate Mulvany
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jaxie dreads going home. His mum’s dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he wishes he was an orphan. And then, in one terrible moment, his life is stripped to little more than what he can carry and how he can keep himself alive. There’s just one person left in the world who understands him and what he still dares to hope for. But to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands on a trek that only a dreamer or a fugitive would attempt.
-
-
Bloody ripper!
- By Jan on 02-04-2018
-
Breath
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Troy Planet
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and now a major film. When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than his colleague, better than the kid's parents, what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him. A relentlessly gripping and deeply moving novel about the damage you do to yourself when you're young and think you're immortal.
-
-
Incredible story
- By Anonymous User on 11-05-2018
-
The Boy Behind the Curtain
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Tim Winton
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The remarkable true stories in The Boy Behind the Curtain reveal an intimate and rare view of Tim Winton's imagination at work and play. In Tim Winton's fiction, chaos waits in the wings, and ordinary people are ambushed by events and emotions beyond their control. Winton's own life has also been shaped by havoc.
-
-
and
- By Eugene Paul Wickins on 24-01-2018
-
With My Little Eye
- By: Sandra Hogan
- Narrated by: Jessica Douglas-Henry
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Growing up in the 1950s, the three Doherty children were trained by their parents to memorise car number plates, to spot unusual behaviour on the street and most important of all, to avoid drawing attention to themselves. The children became unwitting foot soldiers in Australia's battle against Soviet infiltration in the Cold War. They attended political rallies, stood watch on houses owned by communist sympathisers and infiltrated the UFO Society.
-
-
interesting read
- By Anonymous User on 04-02-2021
-
Shallows
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Tracey Callander
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whales have always been the life-force of Angelus, a small town on the south coast of Western Australia. Their annual passing defines the rhythms of a life where little changes, and the town depends on their carcasses. So when the battle begins on the beaches outside the town, and when Queenie Cookson, a local girl, joins the Greenies to make amends for the crimes of her whaling ancestors, it can only throw everything into chaos.
-
-
Pretty miserable story all round without relief.
- By HappyChick on 16-08-2020
-
The Riders
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Stanley McGeagh
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fred Scully waits at the arrival gate of an international airport, anxious to see his wife and seven-year-old daughter. After two years in Europe they are finally settling down. He sees a new life before them, a stable outlook, a cottage in the Irish countryside that he's renovated by hand. He's waited, sweated on this reunion. He does not like to be alone - he's that kind of man. The flight lands, the glass doors hiss open, and Scully's life begins to go down in flames.
-
-
A heart in the mouth tale
- By Aaron on 01-07-2017
-
The Shepherd's Hut
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Kate Mulvany
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jaxie dreads going home. His mum’s dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he wishes he was an orphan. And then, in one terrible moment, his life is stripped to little more than what he can carry and how he can keep himself alive. There’s just one person left in the world who understands him and what he still dares to hope for. But to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands on a trek that only a dreamer or a fugitive would attempt.
-
-
Bloody ripper!
- By Jan on 02-04-2018
-
Breath
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Troy Planet
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and now a major film. When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than his colleague, better than the kid's parents, what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him. A relentlessly gripping and deeply moving novel about the damage you do to yourself when you're young and think you're immortal.
-
-
Incredible story
- By Anonymous User on 11-05-2018
-
Cloudstreet
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Peter Hosking
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives from scratch. For 20 years they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.
-
-
A moment of literary genius!
- By Amazon Customer on 04-05-2018
-
Eyrie
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Michael Veitch
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tom Keely's reputation is in ruins. And that's the upside. Divorced and unemployed, he's lost faith in everything precious to him. Holed up in a grim high-rise, cultivating his newfound isolation, Keely looks down at a society from which he's retired, hurt, and angry. He's done fighting the good fight, and well past caring. But even in his seedy flat, ducking the neighbours, he's not safe from entanglement. All it takes is an awkward encounter in the lobby.
-
-
Riveting.
- By Kathryn on 29-03-2017
-
Blueback
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Stig Wemyss
- Length: 1 hr and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Abel Jackson loves to dive. He's a natural in the water. He can't remember a time when he couldn't use a mask and snorkel to glide down into the clear deep. Life is tough out at Longboat Bay. Every day the boy helps his mother earn their living from the sea and the land. It's hard work, but Abel has the bush and the sky and the bay to himself. Until the day he meets Blueback, the fish that changes his life. Blueback is about people learning from nature.
-
-
Valentine
- By Amazon Customer on 31-07-2020
-
Watsonia
- A Writing Life
- By: Don Watson
- Narrated by: David Tredinnick
- Length: 25 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Watsonia gathers the fruits of a writing life. It covers everything from Australian humour to America gone berserk; from Don Bradman to Oscar Wilde; from birds and horses to history and politics. Wherever Don Watson turns his incisive gaze, the results are as illuminating as they are enjoyable. Watsonia displays the many sides of Don Watson: historian, speechwriter, social critic, humourist, biographer and lover of nature and sports.
-
Dark Emu
- Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?
- By: Bruce Pascoe
- Narrated by: Bruce Pascoe
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the 'hunter-gatherer' tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession. Accomplished author Bruce Pascoe provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that suggests that systems of food production and land management have been understated in modern retellings of Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required.
-
-
Important book, but read critically
- By Anonymous User on 21-08-2019
-
Dirt Music
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Suzi Dougherty
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Georgie Jutland is a mess. At 40, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognizes herself.
-
-
liked it
- By Melissa on 26-09-2016
-
Salt
- Selected Stories and Essays
- By: Bruce Pascoe
- Narrated by: Bruce Pascoe
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bruce Pascoe has been described as a ‘living national treasure’ and his work as ‘revelatory’. This volume of his best and most celebrated stories and essays, collected here for the first time, ranges across his long career and explores his enduring fascination with Australia’s landscape, culture, land management and history.
-
-
Insightfully Delightful
- By Anonymous User on 12-04-2020
-
A Room Made of Leaves
- By: Kate Grenville
- Narrated by: Valerie Bader
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What if Elizabeth Macarthur – wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney – had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. What follows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented. Grenville's Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life-marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart and the search for power in a society that gave her none - with spirit, cunning and sly wit.
-
-
Not what I was expecting
- By Julie Orton on 03-08-2020
-
The Turning
- By: Tim Winton
- Narrated by: Humphrey Bower, Caroline Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they have made for themselves. Beautifully crafted, and as tender as they are confronting, these elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.
-
-
A real feast from Winton
- By Joseph Di Stefano on 06-12-2015
-
The Rain Heron
- By: Robbie Arnott
- Narrated by: Jessica Douglas-Henry, Zoe Carides
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading - and forgetting. But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her impossible mission. As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt - as myths merge with reality - both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love and what they fear.
-
-
Brilliantly beautiful
- By Debbie George on 20-06-2020
-
Waiting for Godot
- By: Samuel Beckett
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, David Burke, Terence Rigby, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There is now no doubt that not only is Waiting for Godot the outstanding play of the 20th century, but it is also Samuel Beckett's masterpiece. Yet it is both a popular text to be studied at school and an enigma. The scene is a country road. There is a solitary tree. It is evening. Two tramp-like figures, Vladimir and Estragon, exchange words. Pull off boots. Munch a root vegetable. Two other curious characters enter. And a boy. Time passes. It is all strange yet familiar.
-
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
- By: Richard Flanagan
- Narrated by: Richard Flanagan
- Length: 15 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
-
-
Going to read the book - can't listen any more
- By John on 08-05-2015
Publisher's Summary
'I grew up on the world's largest island.'
This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton's beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how this unique landscape has shaped him and his writing.
For over 30 years, Winton has written novels in which the natural world is as much a living presence as any character. What is true of his work is also true of his life: from boyhood, his relationship with the world around him - rock pools, sea caves, scrub and swamp - was as vital as any other connection.
Camping in hidden inlets of the southeast, walking in the high rocky desert fringe, diving at Ningaloo Reef, bobbing in the sea between sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, with its rhythms, its dangers, its strange sustenance, and learned to see landscape as a living process.
Island Home is the story of how that relationship with the Australian landscape came to be and how it has determined his ideas, his writing and his life. It is also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet. Much more powerfully than a political idea or an economy, Australia is a physical entity. Where we are defines who we are in ways we too often forget, to our detriment and the country's.
Wise, rhapsodic, exalted - Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers but a compelling investigation into the way our country makes us who we are.
Critic Reviews
"At times, this audiobook is poetic, and narrator David Tredinnick gives a languid and dreamy narration.... There is no more perfect fit for an Australian memoir that ranges from meditative beauty to disbelieving anger than Tredinnick. It's pure listening joy." (AudioFile)
More from the same
Author
What listeners say about Island Home
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Ruth
- 28-02-2016
Excellent listening
Thought provoking account of being Australian and living in this harsh and majestic place
If you enjoy Tim Winton's novels and his writing style this is worth listening too
Thank you Tim for your insights
Not so much of a story as an essay on how we inhabit the country
Excellently read by David Tredenick
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jacob
- 16-11-2016
review
narrator took some getting used to. amazing story, I'll have to actually read it one day
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 24-08-2018
Sublime
Compulsory reading for all Australians, particularly those discovering their own identity within their landscape - connection to Country.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Meg
- 28-06-2018
Captivating
Winton's love of his homeland is shown in almost poetic prose. The Kimberly region being the place of my forebears made the book interesting for me. Love this writing.
The narrator is way more suited to reading dialogue. This narration too 'dramatic' and staged.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Susan Myers
- 19-11-2017
Very moving
As an Australian living overseas (And terribly homesick) this book resonated very strongly. It should be compulsory reading for us all! The narration is perfect, too
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Jarrod
- 11-10-2015
What does it really mean to be an Australian?
As an Australian who has lived in Europe for the last five years, I found Winton's description of what it feels like to be an Australian (especially when overseas) to be spot on. This was a truly pleasurable read by one of our literary greats. I can't wait to give a copy to my girlfriend.
1 person found this helpful
16 Best Audiobooks by Aboriginal Authors
Across genres, there’s no shortage of brilliant titles from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers of Australia.



25 Best Celebrity Audiobooks
It’s always a pleasant surprise to pick up a familiar story and find an unexpected famous friend in the narrator’s booth.



Best Audiobooks of 2020
We've crunched the numbers, heard from our listeners and gotten expert opinions to round up the best listens of 2020.


