Australian “Living Treasure” and environmental campaigner Tim Winton paints realistic scenarios of a climate-collapse future in his latest novel.
When Australian writer, eco-activist and surf-break devotee Tim Winton began working on his new novel, Juice, which considers how humans might function in an overheated, unstable world, he had two grandchildren. By the time he finished the book, he had six.
Winton’s visualisation of this chaotic near-future, which he has built around a range of climate-data projections, has solidified his fears for his grandkids’ generation, and beyond, and for the natural world he cherishes.
That may be why the 64-year-old National Living Treasure looks so weary in his portrait by Sydney artist Laura Jones, her winning entry in this year’s $100,000 Archibald Prize, the prestigious portrait competition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. When Jones flew to Perth for a sitting with Winton in March, Juice would have been very much on his mind.
The sitting involved taking photos of the famously private writer, who Jones described as a warm host despite his aversion to the camera.
And now with the book set to go, Winton’s privacy has ended again as he embarks on the publicity rounds, not his most favourite part of the job.
When he rings from his home in a tiny town north of Perth (Winton never shares his phone number), he’s affable but not one for small talk. “These days, you just sit there and get photographed,” he says of the portrait. “My father said I looked like an unmade bed.”
Apparently his parents Bev and John, who Winton readers will know from his powerful collection of essays, The Boy Behind the Curtain, published a decade ago, were more excited about their son being made an officer of the Order of Australia in 2023 for “distinguished service to literature as an author and novelist, to conservation, and to environmental advocacy”.
“They’re walking through malls interrupting shoppers just to let them know that that fat middle-aged guy with long hair bothering the megafauna was their son,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald when the honour was announced.
A living hell
At 500 densely packed pages, Juice is a potent portrayal of what climate collapse might feel like in a land so searingly hot you can almost smell the ash wafting from the pages.
Winton personalises the hell of living in this kind of world by using its unnamed central character – an older man bearing thick burn scars – as narrator, relating his life story to a “bowman” holding him captive in a disused mine-shaft, with a girl he’s been trying to protect. When the bowman demands, “Explain yourself”, an extraordinary saga starts to emerge. As it turns out, Winton has plenty to say about it, too, and he is pretty fired up.
Juice must be the starkest novel of his long career, which began in 1981 with his prize-winning An Open Swimmer when he was just 21. Since then, he has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath), and been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker (The Riders, Dirt Music).
Many of his books have been adapted for the stage and screen, and his Lockie Leonard series of YA fiction has won over teen readers around the world, including in the United States.
Winton’s writing has evolved alongside his environmental work, which focuses especially on marine conservation. A species of freshwater fish in the Kimberley region has been named after him, and as a skilled surfer and diver, he’s comfortable swimming with the sharks that frequent the Western Australian coastline.
Whether Winton is writing novels, short stories or non-fiction, his enchantment with nature is one of his greatest strengths; in Juice, the degradation of that world overshadows it.
These losses are made especially affecting by occasional flashes of pure beauty caught in secluded inland rock terraces patterned by old seashells, rare flocks of birds passing overhead, the carpets of tiny flowers which spring up across the plains after torrential rain.
The book is an attempt by one old gentleman to imagine the unimaginable. I had to force myself to go where nobody wants to go.
It took Winton some time to work out how to control the book’s complex narrative, and creating the story itself took a toll.
“I was writing it for years,” he says. “I had so many drafts, then suddenly I thought if [the man] is telling his story to someone else, it meant I could unpack a whole lot of stuff. The book is an attempt by one old gentleman to imagine the unimaginable. I had to force myself to go where nobody wants to go.
“The only reason we are all plugging along in this death-spiral, sleep-walking to extinction, as one scientist called it, is because we are able to refuse to let our minds go to where this is headed.
“Everything is speculative up to a point in the book, but based on the modelling of the current trajectory, I think these are realistic scenarios. I find the world of my book deeply disturbing. It is very difficult to stay in that world for five or seven years.”
He wants to emphasise that in no way is Juice a sci-fi work or akin to Mad Max, as some have suggested. This annoys him.
“I am trying to do something grown-up. I wrote the book grounded in a specific place, a specific set of ecosystems I know well that I could extrapolate from. I wasn’t trying to do that sort of world-building that you have to do as a sci-fi writer, where you are making imaginary places, give everything funny names and a few digits. I was trying to work from the ground up in a form of organic realism.”
Juice’s long gestation unfolded alongside the arrivals of his grandchildren. “Two were born in the last few months. I look in their faces and I look at the statistics. A child born today will experience 24 times as many extreme, deeply traumatic climate events as a person born in the 1960s. It goaded me to work harder to bring attention to this perilous moment.
“I was born in 1960 and most of our political and corporate leaders were born in the 60s, so they have experienced a safer, kinder, more clement world than the one they are handing on. We are on the razor’s edge yet we still kid ourselves that we are moral people. If we are prepared to do what is indefensible and immoral, I wonder what we think we are.”
‘Legacy of bastardry’
Juice’s narrator grows up in claustrophobic, hard-graft isolation with his mother, trying to grow food in plant houses during the hot winters or underground in the scorching summers on a peninsula in the northwest of Australia. Uneducated, he accepts their daily grind as a matter of fact, with no concept of any alternative or history.
But he has a restlessness that makes him vulnerable to recruitment by a secret group called the Service, which indoctrinates him in the “billion crimes that make one crime against humanity”: the forces that knowingly caused climate change. Trained to become a “janitor”, he obediently follows the Service’s campaign of revenge, going after figures familiar from today’s real-life international corporate network. One name in particular, the primary target, is so prominent it’s a shock, as if Winton is throwing down the gauntlet.
“This is the thing: there is nothing in the novel that isn’t already in the public record,” he says. “Scholarly books have been written about, shall we say, ‘the name of all names’ … that legacy of bastardry is not a secret. The novel is only echoing what is already known.”
The man’s secret life as a janitor is “not something I am promoting,” he adds. “I am a pacifist. I think the flaws of this response are built into the outcome.”
Unsurprisingly, Winton takes a dim view of politicians he sees as aligned with the corporate “legacy of bastardry”.
“I have to say most of this book was written during the grim Tory years – Morrison, Abbott – who took decisive action to do nothing about climate. It was a dark time. In Australia, sometimes it’s difficult to see the space between the fossil fuel interests and our elected leaders. Nobody elected [these companies] into positions of power and we can’t vote them out.”
But this view may apply on a broader scale to any country where the ambitions of the petro-gas industries remain active, including our own.
“It’s awful to see that in a country like New Zealand, which had made so such progress – being punished, that’s what it feels like, in a manner that seems from the outside to be self-destructive. But I am saying that from the western part of Australia, which is known as a petro-state, so it’s not as if I am wagging the finger.
“The really sad thing is some of the people doubling down on fossil fuels are useful idiots who don’t understand the consequences of what they are doing. A lot of idiots get elected; that’s the nature of democracy. But enough of them are educated and aware enough to know the consequences of doubling down in the midst of a climate crisis inside the last decade of agency we have to mitigate against the worst climate chaos.
“I think this generation of political and corporate leaders who knowingly undertook this when the world’s science community is telling them it is putting us and our descendants on a road to hell, well, I think they will be judged as criminals.”
When Winton was well in the swing of writing Juice, he foreshadowed his concerns in an essay published last December in The Monthly magazine, which ran with the preamble: “The laureate of the Western Australian surf break sees a task ahead for our essayists, novelists and poets alike in the fight against climate catastrophe”, in which he urged his peers to place the issue front and centre of their work.
In the essay he asked, “What can I do? I’m just a writer.” I wonder if the process of writing Juice has helped Winton channel his anxiety, even if it can’t dispel it. “There’s no question there is grief and anger in the book,” he says, “but I think this is me putting up a possible future that I fear, not just the suffering of the people of the future but the kinds of things it will make them do to each other, and to those they think, rightly or wrongly, are the source of their suffering.”
However, Winton’s hopes for the future are more upbeat than the book would suggest. “I think young people are increasingly disenchanted and understandably angry,” he says. “During the lost decade of the Tory years, as the science solidified and the problems intensified, a whole new cohort of young activists came into play and I found that very heartening. And I have found it very heartening how smart, educated and creative they are.
“I am thinking of people in Australia, the UK, New Zealand – all these smart young people still believe in civilisation and non-violent means of affecting change and that’s something to celebrate.”
We are on the razor’s edge yet we still kid ourselves that we are moral people.
There are signs this might be working already, he adds. “What I have seen in the last couple of years is a disproportionate response from governments and fossil fuel corporations to any resistance, to the point where they are now, with the help of a compliant media, persecuting young climate activists who are doing what is within their democratic rights to speak out.
“I guess what I am alluding to is that when I started the book, the fossil fuel industry was evincing a kind of smugness of those who have everything stitched up, that they had achieved state capture and they felt unthreatened.
“I don’t think that’s the case any more, otherwise this response to resistance, to the prospect of a just transition they now claim to believe in but are doing everything they can to prevent, this response wouldn’t be there if they weren’t afraid.
“I think what we are seeing now is the beginning of a sort of ripple of panic through the big fossils. They know they are on the nose, their social licence is in rapid decay. They can see the young people who will be in power in a very short time will not have the same compliance as the current cohorts. They won’t be as meek or as enthusiastic as some of our leaders at the moment.”
And for the first time in our conversation, Winton starts to sound more cheerful. Perhaps the future might be brighter after all.
