Tim Winton is on stage, seated, in conversation about his new book, Juice, a novel about the dystopian future that awaits us all because of rapid, fossil fuel-induced global warming.
‘You’ve all heard of stop the boats,’ he says.’ But it’ll be stop the utes,’ the four-times Miles Franklin award winner tells the packed audience at Sydney’s art deco Cremorne Orpheum cinema.
Winton is alluding to a warmer, inhospitable future where vast reaches of Northern Australia become uninhabitable as temperatures in summer soar past 50 degrees, prompting an internal migration of climate refugees to the relatively cooler but also dystopian, climate-charred southern cities.
Juice has a Cormac McCarthy tone, in a manner similar to The Road, with two main characters – a child and an adult – who travel across a charred landscape, challenged by survivors of a world where people live shorter lives, and are not as healthy as now, and spend a lot of their time underground as the outdoors is just too hot to live in.
Most of the book is set in the north west of Western Australia, an area Winton knows well. But he also writes of the blackened mountain pass that leads to the Sydney Wall and of ‘scabrous fellows, dirty and ill-looking and high-end holdouts that continued to evade.’
Past failures
Winton, ever the thoughtful writer, poses this question to the attentive audience. ‘What sort of ancestor do you want to be remembered as?’
The question goes to the very heart of the book. When the central character finds out that the world had been a much more temperate, habitable, place but that the generations of the past failed to do anything about the planetary heating that led to their dystopian hell.
Winton is now in his mid-60s, and a grandparent several times over, a time of life that gives fresh perspective on the meaning of generation. On stage, he talks to his audience of activities he did as a younger man that his grandchildren will never be able to do because of the rapidly changing natural world. Marine heatwaves have all but destroyed the Western Australia abalone and the species is now in a closed fishing zone. Winton used to dive for abalone to eat as a younger man. His grandchildren will never be able to do that.
Science fiction
Juice is Winton’s first foray into science fiction, but its foundation is entrenched in fact. He was writing the book, while at the same time being filmed for a documentary about the beauty and wonder of Ningaloo Reef, with the two disparate activities playing on his mind about just how much the next generations face to lose in terms of natural amenity, let alone a structured sense of community. With the expected, forthcoming, massive, environmental degradation comes social and economic upheaval on an unprecedented scale.
Internet-free future?
He quips to the audience, that a future generation might not even have the internet, pointing to the fact that without political or economic structure, there wll be no one to launch, let alone look after the satellites that keep the World Wide Web going.
The taste of dystopian is seated deep within the recent Australian experience of off-the-scale floods, rainforests burning, and, lately, oceans and global vegetation no longer acting as net absorbers of carbon dioxide.
Readers are only all too aware that they already live in the most fire-prone and flood-prone parts of the continent. The Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020 and the floods of 2022 – the second one within 30 days of the first – are but a portent of a climate rapidly changing for the worse. Climate refugees are already among us on the Northern Rivers, yet there is still widespread government inaction on adaptation to global heating.
This month’s Port of Newcastle Blockade by Rising Tide and COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan are at polar opposites on tackling climate change. The latter being the port-and-cigars talkfest that after 30 years still has not made a communique that there is an urgent, rapid need to cut greenhouse emissions to zero by mid-century at the latest, by ending the addiction to fossil fuels.
The former, a people’s protest carnival at the planet’s biggest coal export port that a Minns Labor government tried to stop through backing NSW Police taking action in the Supreme Court to kybosh any on-water activity.
Winton, in a video, posted his support for the blockade, saying – in essence – there’s no time to lose in getting government to take notice and actually do something about dangerous climate change, by calling a stop on all new coal and gas developments.
In a world of carbon budgets and climate tipping points where the natural world starts to go haywire, from loss of ice to loss of coral reefs – there is not enough space in this column to do justice to both concepts. But time is rapidly running out. The planet is either close to, or is just about to cross 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times for a global average temperature. That is the upper limit of what the COP process believes is a safe limit, as set out in its Paris Agreement of 2015.
Fossil fuel captives
Two degrees Celsius on current rates of emissions trajectory, which is running above worst-case estimates, is only 10 or 15 years away. At that level, global temperatures will be hotter than at any time in the history of the human species, homo sapiens ‘thinking man’.
The trouble is – our political masters (Labor and LNP) and their commissars, especially in the mainstream media, remain totally captive to the fossil fuel industry. The Australian petro-state makes a mockery of the moniker ‘thinking man’.
As Winton writes in Juice, upon the main character finding out that disastrous climate change could have been avoided, he says: ‘And so full of fury and grief. I let go. Like a crying child, and sang:
O! Oh!
Aramco, Sunco, Conco, Rio-Rio, Chevron
Sinopec, Shell-o, Shell-o, Peabod, BP, Climate Depot
Oh!
Woodside, Santos, Petrobas
O!
Koch
Oh!
Koch!
O! Oh!
Fuckers! Fuckers! Fuckers!
Oooohhh!
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