Cloudstreet

Two rural families, the Pickles and the Lambs, wash up together in a big rambling house in working-class inner Perth and share it for twenty years. The map runs from the Lambs' lost country home in the south-west, into the shared house and its shop in the western suburbs, out to the wartime city on Perth Water, and always back to the Swan River, where a boy drowns at the start and is made whole at the end.

Fish Lamb

The Lambs' country home, Margaret River

The country

Before Perth there is the south-west, where the Lamb family keeps a coastal home and a shop. On a late-afternoon prawning trip the favourite son, Fish, is dragged under the net and drowns; his mother beats the water out of him and he lives, but the family always feels that not all of him came back. The loss drives them north to the city, and the river never lets go of him.

Opening chapters, 1943

explicit The novel names the Margaret River as the family's home in the south-west, but not an exact spot on it, so this marks the town in the river valley, about 270 kilometres south of Perth. It sits far outside the Perth setting on purpose.

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