As Byron Writers Festival marks its 30th year this August, some of the country’s sharpest minds turn to the defining question of our time: the future of the planet.
Investigative journalist Marian Wilkinson examines corporate power in Woodside vs the Planet: How a Company Captured a Country, revealing how Australia’s fossil fuel giant plans to keep producing gas out to 2070 even as the world commits to decarbonising.
Where Western approaches falter, ancient answers wait. Tagalaka man Victor Steffensen, whose bestselling Fire Country transformed conversations about caring for land, returns with The Knowledge, a pathway for healing the planet grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems. As catastrophic wildfires overwhelm countries from Australia to Canada and Greece, Steffensen shares a simple yet profound belief: humans are part of the natural world, and the way forward is to realign ourselves with the Earth.
Economist Richard Denniss follows the money in More Fool Me: How the Gas Industry Tricked Australia, arguing that one of the world’s richest countries gives away billions of dollars of gas to multinational companies while being told it can’t afford decent schools and hospitals.
Fiction offers its own reckoning. Miles Franklin-shortlisted novelist Romy Ash returns with Mantle, in which geologist Ursula is called to the Tasmanian coast as a mystery illness spreads across the island. Ash depicts a natural world in restless evolution, where the ground beneath our feet is anything but solid, and where change may signal not an end but a beginning. It is a moving meditation on how our fate is entwined with the fate of the planet.
And hear ‘Saltwater Stories’ from Bundjalung storytellers Ella Noah Bancroft, Delta Kay and Dakota Feirer with Naomi Moran as they share tales of ocean, climate and Country.
• Explore more climate and environment-focused sessions throughout the program at www.byronwritersfestival.com.
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