Neighbours by Tim Winton (NEB-XII)

 Neighbours by Tim Winton

Vocabularies used in the Story Neighbors

1. Wary(adj.): distrustful, suspicious
2. Sojourners: temporary visitors.
3. Macedonian (adj.): from Macedonia, south-eastern Europe.
4. Moreton Bay (n.):  a bay near Brisbane, the eastern coast of Australia.
5. Docile (adj.): manageable, ready to accept instruction.
6. Moulting (n.):  the shedding of skin, feathers, hair growth, etc.
7. Salvaged (adj.):  rescued ship
8. Muscovies(n.): a large duck from      Mexico or South America.
9. Hilling (n): The process of heaping or drawing earth around plants.
10. Lumber (n.):  timber
11. Brussels sprouts (n.): a type of cabbage.
12. Grappa (n.): a kind of alcoholic beverage, a fragrant grape-based on Italian brandy.
13. Eccentric (adj.): unconventional and strange.
14. Muscovy (n.): a kind of large duck of South American origin.
15. Claustrophobic (adj.): afraid of living in confined places.
16. Liverwurst (n.): meat sausage is also known as liver sausage.
17. Croon (v.): hum or sing in a low soft voice.
18. Vernix (n.): a greasy deposit covering the skin of a baby at birth.
19. Vermillion: a vivid, reddish-orange
20. Mulching(n.): Any material used to cover the topsoil for moisture, and protection

Author’s Background: Tim Winton, real name Timothy John Winton, was born in 1960 in Australia and is a writer of both adult and young-adult novels that explore both the terrain and experiences of his home country. He competed against 35 other authors for The Australian Literary Award given for the finest unpublished book manuscript, and his manuscript An Open Swimmer took home the honor in 1982. That Eye, the Sky (1986), Dirt Music (2001), and Breath are some of his books (2008). He also wrote several children's books, including The Deep, Human Torpedo, The Bugalugs Bum Thief, and Lockie Leonard (1998). This passage, "Neighbors," is from Harwood Lawler's edited collection, Migrants of Australia.

Setting: Tim Winton, an Australian author, penned the story in 1985. As the immigrant population grew, there was an increasing mistrust of migrants and their very different ways, and by the end of the 1970s, there was an increasing push to end immigration and limit non-British Europeans from settling in Australia. Australia had accepted a significant influx of European immigrants in the years after World War II, or 1946, and had started to establish itself as a multicultural nation.

Neighbors extract: The sounds of spitting, washing, and morning watering are shocking to the young man and woman because they have lived all their lives in the vast outer suburbs where nice neighbors are rarely seen and never heard. The Macedonian family also shouts, swears, and screams. The newcomers don't realize their neighbors aren't killing each other; they only realize it after six months. The elderly polish man, whose yard is full of salvaged lumber and who adds to it but does not construct with it, spends the majority of his day driving nails into the wood only to pull them out again.

Summing Up: Tim Winton's short story "Neighbours" centers on a young couple who recently relocated to a neighborhood with a large immigrant population from Europe. Both the young couple and their neighbors, though the author has not given any characters ‘names in the story, initially have prejudices toward one another because they can only see the peculiar and occasionally repulsive customs of their new neighborhood. However, as they become accustomed to their new environment, and the young couple begins to like their neighbors, they realize that their neighbors are actually not all that bad. They learn that they can be friends and support one another in their daily activities to make everyone happy in their community and with their lives.

The author describes a young couple who formerly reside in a sizable outer suburb. The young guy or a newlywed husband sits at home writing his thesis on the development of the twentieth-century novel, whereas his wife, the young woman, is employed at a clinic. The couple loses contact with their friends and family as a result, and they relocate from the suburbs to another metropolis. In the story, the writer mentions the 20th-century novel to show how writers were crucial to the emancipation of people in Europe during the 20th century. English authors departed from the Victorian novel's conventional concerns with amusement and storytelling in favor of concentrating on people and their day-to-day struggles while also creating propaganda and social themes. David Herbert Lawrence, a well-known writer of the twentieth century, makes extensive use of the Oedipus complex to show the social discomfort many British citizens have as a result of their discontent with society's norms and values. Several notable nineteenth-century authors, including the French novelists Honore de Balzac, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Gustave Flaubert, as well as the Russians Feodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, influenced influence the novel at the beginning of the twentieth century. They taught them how to portray people as they are a mix of good and terrible traits rather than one or the other. The traditional protagonist and antagonist structure was abandoned. One seldom ever finds a pure villain in contemporary works. Characters struggle with themselves or a situation; they do not, however, battle an image of pure evil.

The entire neighborhood then begins to engage with them and extends an offer of assistance. The young couple is thus pleased with their neighbors. The young woman becomes pregnant in the spring, even though the couples have not anticipated doing so, and after a short period because their comrades did not have children until several years after being married. People smiled tirelessly at them. The deli owner, who is not a smoker, gave her tiny gifts of chocolates and cigarette packs that he keeps at home. Italian ladies start to give in to names in the summer. The young woman is stopped by Greek women who lift up her skirt and check her belly before assuring her that the baby is going to be a boy. At the end of the summer, the next-door neighbor makes the baby a suit, complete with gloves and a hat. The Polish widower has almost finished building his two-car garage in the middle of the summer, and the young woman feels grateful, happy, scared, and furious. The Polish man comes over one evening while the young man is reflecting and griping about the noise. He is carrying a barrow load of wood scraps for their fire. The young man finds it hard to comprehend why a man without a car would act in such a way.

Everyone is courteous and offers to help. All of their neighbors are happy for them and send their best wishes after the birth of their child. The young man finds birth to be a wonder, and in the end, he recognizes that the fiction from the twentieth century had not adequately prepared him for this. The narrative demonstrates how immigrants might be viewed as socially enhancing Australian society. The couple's strong sense of community aids them in seeing that ignorance is at the root of all intolerance and bigotry. Last but not least, in the story "Neighbors," a young married couple lives in a diverse and multilingual suburb, illustrating how linguistic and cultural differences do not prohibit people from exhibiting kindness and affection. Above all, according to an adage from Nepalese, neighbors make good traveling partners for both funeral and wedding processions. We, humans, must be symbiotic to sustain where we go or live in. 

Analysis: Tim Winton's Neighbors offers an insightful look into the lives of a young couple who have recently moved to suburban Melbourne. The story discusses how ethnic minorities in Australia live differently than Australians, and we can see from the text how the author successfully achieves a positive response from readers. Examples that add to the rich reading experience include our way of life, morals, and beliefs, the importance of characters in a text, and our cultural backgrounds. The characters in Neighbours proved to be typical of those from second-world nations like Poland and Macedonia, who are known for being hard workers and loving cultural activities. The narrative indulges in the perspective of the two spouses who had recently relocated into the new area, which is surrounded by culturally diligent ethnic families. The newlyweds first struggled to blend in since they thought their neighbors were a little strange. This can be demonstrated by the remark, It took the newcomers six months to understand that their neighbors were not killing one another, they were only talking that illustrates how the couple's level of loudness, which they had recently moved from a quiet and serene suburb, is torturing and agonizing them. 

The couple in the story who have trouble expressing themselves in their new neighborhood can be compared to many other Australian residents who are from different parts of the world and find it difficult to communicate with Australians. It is clear to argue that the author intentionally evoked this unpleasant sensation in the poem to connect it to Australians of ethnic minorities and elicit a positive response from readers. Including morals and values in a book is another approach for an author to get a better reaction from their audience. The couple eventually learned how to blend in after some time. Like most stories, this one has a moral lesson the author needs to grasp to improve reader response once more. The lesson from Neighbours is to never give up striving to be accepted and to work for equality, just as the couple struggled to win their neighbor's acceptance. Because of this, an author can make the characters important to us, the readers, to elicit a positive reader response from a novel that does not give enough information, which will undoubtedly draw in more readers. 

The story's couple can have significance for the typical Turkish couple who immigrated to Australia in the previous ten years. Without appropriate English, persons with varied skin tones and lifestyles may have had similar hardships to the ones the story's couple. Tim Winton has done a fantastic job of giving the story's characters relevance to Australia's large and rapidly expanding ethnic communities. To summarize, depending on how we read and relate to the text, readers can have many different experiences with the short story. Examples of this include our own lives, morals, and beliefs, as well as the relevance of the text's characters and our cultural backgrounds.

 Understanding the text: Answer the following questions.

a. Describe how the young couple’s house looked like.

The young man could see out of his study window over the rooftops and used car yards to the Moreton Bay figs in the park where they walked their dog. They lived in a modest house with high ceilings and paned windows, and the neighbors seemed cautious of the dog, a gentle, molting collie.

b. How did the young couple identify their neighbors at the beginning of their arrival?

The sounds of spitting, washing, and morning watering shocked the young couple because they had spent their entire lives in the vast outer suburbs, where decent neighbors were seldom seen or heard. The Macedonian family cried out in a loud voice. It took the newcomers six months to realize that their neighbors were simply talking to one another and not engaging in murderous exchanges.

c. How did the neighbors help the young couple in the kitchen garden?

In the autumn, the young couple cleaned up the debris in their backyard or the kitchen garden and turned and fertilized the soil under the watchful eyes of their neighbors. When they planted leeks, onions, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and broad beans, the neighbors dropped by the fence to give them tips on mulching, hilling, and spacing their plantings. The young man was irritated by the interruption, but he took good notes. The woman with black eyes and butcher's arms handed his wife a sack full of garlic cloves to plant.

 d. Why were the people in the neighborhood surprised at the role of the young man and his wife in their family?

The young man put consistent effort into his thesis on how the modern book came to be. He prepared dinners for his wife while listening to her tales of bizarre patients and subpar medical care that the people in the neighborhood were surprised at the role of the young man and his wife

e. How did the neighbors respond to the woman’s pregnancy?

The young couple eventually realized that everyone in the neighborhood had been smiling at them due to the pregnancy case. When Italian women began giving names in the summer, the young woman was stopped by a Greek woman who lifted her skirt and checked her belly before assuring her that the baby was going to be a boy. The deli owner, who does not smoke, gave her tiny gifts of chocolates and cigarette packs that he kept at home. After the summer, the next-door neighbor made the baby a suit, complete with booties and a beanie. The girl felt grateful, flattered, constricted, and furious.

f. Why did the young man begin to weep at the end of the story?

At the end of the story, the young guy started to cry since he had been very moved by the neighbors' assistance, which was unexpected of him owing to their human sympathies toward them.

g. Why do you think the author did not characterize the persons in the story with proper names?

The reason, in my opinion, why the author didn't give the characters in the story proper names is that he wants to generalize the situation to all global citizens who come from different cultures, nationalities, ethnicity, and language. To do this, the author makes the couple into a type of universal character and tries to convey the idea that, in a neighborhood. Tim Winton wants to show humanity that still prevails despite linguistic and cultural differences among the people.