My Father's Axe

"My Father's Axe" is a short story by Australian author Tim Winton, from his 1985 collection Scission, in which a grown man's grief over a missing axe opens up a lifetime of memories of the father he idolised. It is a prescribed text for HSC English Studies.

"My Father's Axe" appears in Scission (1985), the short-story collection Tim Winton published in his mid-twenties, and it is a characteristic Winton story: domestic, coastal, wordless where feeling runs deepest, and built around a single working object that carries more than it should have to. It is a memory story wrapped inside a present-tense crisis. A grown man with a wife and son cannot find his father's axe, and that small domestic loss cracks open a lifetime. The narrator moves back and forth between the sleepless present and the past: learning to split wood beside a father he idolised, a family holiday to a beach shack at a rivermouth up north, the slow embarrassment of adolescence, his mother's death, and his father growing frail and giving up the axe. Sleepless, he suffers three violent nightmares in which the axe kills - the father as rescuer, the father cut down, and finally his own son turning the axe on him. Unable to bear the loss, he buys a new axe, and just then a boy and his father arrive at the house: the boy confesses he took the old one, and the narrator swaps them, giving the boy the new axe and the beginnings of the same bond. The collection's title means a cutting or splitting, and the axe literally splits wood while the story splits time in two - the child who worshipped his father set against the adult who has half lost him. The story builds not to an event but to a recognition, then hands the whole pattern on to a new pair of hands.

The story's deepest subject is a love between father and son that is done rather than said. The child knows his father through the body - "I hugged his leg and felt his immovable stance and moulded myself to him" - and experiences him as sheer safety: "If I needed something built, something done, there was my father and he protected me". The son's worship shows in the simile that lifts hard labour into art, the father splitting wood "like a ballet dancer's warm-up". In this working-class Western Australian world, feeling is expressed through doing, and the axe does the father's talking: losing it means losing the one language two men who could not say their love ever shared.

The axe is the engine of the whole construction. Winton builds an entire story on a lost tool, and the disproportion between a cheap object and a grown man's collapse is the point: things carry the people and years attached to them. The irony that a new axe can be bought and changes nothing exposes the gap between an object's price and its meaning, and in the final dream a point of grammar does the symbol's work - "an axe - the axe - was poised" - marking the exact instant an object becomes sacred.

Beneath the love runs guilt, surfacing in dream. The sleepless narrator's mind snags on newspaper dread - "I keep thinking of axe murders, things I've read in the paper, horrible things" - and the nightmares say what the waking man cannot. The father dies "transfixed at the moment of scission in a squint of disappointment", the title-word converting guilt into image, the severing of father from son; and when his own son turns the axe on him, the flat understatement "I felt nothing when he split my head in two" half accepts that a son inevitably replaces a father, as he once replaced his own. Yet even the terrifying first dream casts the father as rescuer, carrying the narrator "out in those red arms".

The resolution converts grief into inheritance. By giving the stranger's boy his new axe, the narrator recognises his younger self and passes the pattern on: the axe descends across three generations, and the story closes on continuity rather than recovery - what a father hands a son is only fully honoured when it is handed on again.

• May Your Pen Grace the Page
• Dear Mrs Dunkley
• The Pedestrian
• Failures of Kindness
• Finding Ways Home
• Sometimes Gladness (Bruce Dawe)
• HSC English resources