Cassie McCullough

What are they looking for, Stuart?

What is it that they need in this small life they're living in a town on the West Australian coast?

And at first they get it by holding their breath, by diving in the river and holding onto the roots at the bottom and seeing how much they can scare people.

And then they realise that if they head out to the beach, if they take their surfboards, then they're going to find something wondrous and exciting.

But then they meet an older surfer, Sando.

What happens then?

But what he's doing is he's also showing them that they might reach for something sublime, something dangerous, something huge.

And so they go out towards the Bombora and the huge breaks off the coast, the most dangerous waves.

Johan, what did you make of those descriptions of these almost sort of crazy beautiful waves?

And it's a small book, but it is so powerful in the way that it takes you into breathlessness and fear and bravery.

But reading this next to Bluebird, it interested me that Bluebird was about living beside the ocean and breath is about being in it.

But I think both books are also about looking backwards at something and making sense of it.

So here's Tim Winton speaking on ABC Perth in 2008.

all those tomorrows and those dangerous yesterdays, because that reaching for the sublime and the beauty and the largeness, I mean, it did something to Pikelet.

And so I wonder what it makes us think about what bravery is, Stuart.

I mean, was Pikelet brave in saying, no, I'm not going to do that wave?

This struck me as a very poetic novel.

I mean, it's a story about these characters in a, you know, in a very specific place on the coast.

But you could almost read it like poetry.

And part of the poetry is the dance on the waves.