Neighbours

Writer: Tom Winton, full name Timothy John Winton (b. 1960)

Characters:

1. The young couple
2. Macedonian family
3. Polish widower
4. The neighborhood little boy
5. The neighborhood women
6. The midwife

Theme: Multiculturalism; establishment of friendly relationship among neighbours despite cultural and linguistic barriers.

Summary of the story

The short story “Neighbours” by an Australian writer Tom Winton raises the issue of multiculturalism and shows how people can establish relationship and bestow love and compassion to their neighbours despite cultural and linguistic barriers.

The story is about a newly-wed young couple who at first were wary of their neighbours who came from different cultural backgrounds and spoke languages they didn’t know. It is the neighbourhood of Australia, a Western country where people from many third world or developing countries migrate to in search of better job opportunities, better education, and so on. This young couple in the story are educated. The husband stays at home writing his thesis on twentieth century novels while his wife does some job in a hospital. The neighbours are very much curious about this couple. But the couple aren’t friendly. They don’t like their neighbours taking unnecessary interest in their personal life and disturbing them with their loud noise and other ways of uncivilized behavior. This is the situation at the beginning of the story. But as the story progresses, they slowly begin to like and smile back at their neighbours with every little help they receive from their neighbours. For example, the Macedonian family who live on the left offer them advice about vegetable gardening and give garlic cloves to plant. Similarly, the Polish widower on their right once comes inside their house compound uninvited and rebuilds the broken henhouse.

Soon the wife becomes pregnant and the village women begin to show unnecessary concern and care, which the couple actually don’t like very much. On the day of the delivery of the baby, the young man calls a midwife and together they attend to his wife. But he finds his neighbours too gathered around the fences with their expectant faces and good wishes at this troubling hour. Later, when the baby is finally born, and the neighbours outside also hear the baby’s cry, they begin to cheer up. Seeing their empathy and display of love and compassion for the young couple, the young man’s heart melts and he weeps. His education (represented by twentieth century novel) had made him hard and unfriendly, but now he is overwhelmed by the feeling of love, compassion, and gratefulness.