Hi there. It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce another episode of Read This, our Sister podcast. It's hosted by the editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams, and features conversations with some of the best and most beloved writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're going to hear from Tasmanian writer Robbie are Not Before we do, Michael is here to share a bit about their conversation.
Hi Michael, Hi Ruby.
So Michael. For some of our listeners, Robbie might be a bit of a household name at this point. All of his books have been very successful, in particular his twenty twenty two novel Limber Lost. But for those who might be new to his writing, tell me a bit about his work.
Look, my father is generally supportive of what I do, but he's from Tasmania originally, and the enthusiasm with which he fell on the fact that I was talking to Robbie Arnott suggested that he didn't give two shits about everything else that we do on Read This as successful. Tasmanian for my father is the pinnacle of anything that matters, and Robbi Arnott is Tasmania's best export since Richard Flanagan.
He's an incredible writer and he has three novels to his name before this new one, and with each of them he would be shortlisted for the Mars Franklin, he'd win the Age Book of the Year award again and again. This kind of young writer was celebrated as one to watch, and his new novel, Dusk is no exception.
And so, Michael, I know that you are the parent two teenage boys. I also have a child, a young child, so I think we're both familiar with the sleep deprivation of the first year of having a newborn. I have say during that time I was only really half alive. But Robbie's latest book had actually came out during that time for him, which is pretty incredible.
I mean, you can say the word sickening, Ruby. It's fine to say it's sickening that anyone in the fugue state of a newborn child who can produce the kind of soaring literature that Robbie's himself capable of, can frankly go and get stuffed. The book is fantastic. It has all his hallmark attention to landscape, to the power of the natural world to the kind of beauty of the wild places in Tasmania. It's a Western, it follows a
pair of twins. It's an extraordinary novel, and he did it all in the weird half state that is a parent of a.
Newborn coming up in just a moment, Robbie Arnott's restless mind.
Fans of Robbie Arnott will find in Dusk many of the qualities he's already made his own. There's plenty of beautifully rendered wild places and creatures here. But while it's every bity's own voice, there are echoes here of other books Patrick Dewitz The Sisters Brothers, for example, or Kevin Barries The Heart in Winter. There's hints of Cormack McCarthy, even Annie Prue. Because beyond its letter, this is a book with definite genre beats. There's mythical elements and tropes
from horror, predator on the loose, terrorizing locals. But most of all, this is a book with a debt to Westerns. Strangers on horseback, hunting for a bounty and trying to escape their past. So I wanted to start there to ask about Robbie's experience of Westerns. Did he grow up loving them, or is it simply a genre that was useful for the story he wanted to tell in Dusk.
I do enjoy western I'm not a voracious reader of them or watcher of them. It's not a huge part of my cultural life, but there's a part about Westerns and the directness that really appeals to me. I was in on holiday in Stanley and Northwest Tasmania and we're in a bar and I picked up a book. There was a bookshelf and it was called gun Smoke Cure, and I remember just thinking that's a title. It's ridiculous,
but that's a title. And it just opens this incredible scene of a shootout in a bar and everything goes terribly wrong for the protagonists, who you assume it will go well for. It all happens in two pages. And even though it's not maybe the sort of writing i'd like to and emulate, there was a level of directness and emotion in there that I thought was really quite remarkable that gets sneered upon in a lot of genre conversations, and so I think it just kind of wormed its
way into my head. I wouldn't want to write a book that's blunt or didactic or moralistic. But there's a level of directness about motivation and narrative that I think can be quite arresting.
Part of what interests me about the relationship between you and Westerns, and I think the directness makes perfect sense of it. But I heard an interview with you back around the time Limberlost came out, and you were saying, you're not so interested in plotting, by and large, You're more interested in how an event feels than the kind of nuts and bolts of what happens in an event. But there is something about the rhythm and the weight of a Western that is plot forward.
Yeah, very much so.
And I quite like that tension in almost being forced to have a plot but not being personally very interested in it, and being invested in characters and landscape and environment and how all these things are intertwined with each other and what effects they're having on each other in a way that's propelled along by a plot, and then having the plot be directed by the environment and the characters rather than them being yanked forward by a particular
plot device. I thought that would be really, I guess, challenging and fun to do so I didn't plot Dusk out. I didn't don't plot any of my novels out, And that probably sounds a bit crazy to some people, but maybe normal to others, in.
Sense you weren't even conscious for that.
No.
Yeah, I was kind of in a waking dream the whole time. But it's a really simple element in that if I know exactly what's going to happen, I'll be too bored to write it. I've got quite a restless mind, and I'm quite an impatient person. And if I'm not quite excited by the act of creation while I'm writing, and the act of figuring things out as I'm going, and I'll probably get a bit too bored and move on to something else.
Your books have such faculty with stillness that it seems curious to me that you're a restless person. You know that again and again. In your books, characters are able to approach the world at their own rhythm as a way of paying respect to that world, even they're not rushing around. Your characters are rarely restless. Your characters are kind of steady.
Yeah.
I think in many ways that's a trait that I probably want to embody. I probably need to see a therapist about. But that is definitely something I feel in connection with the natural world. When I go bushwalking or snorkeling and you're floating above a reef or you know, you reach the peak up a mountain or an outcrop and you do achieve that level of stillness is hard to achieve elsewhere, and I think that comes through on
my work. I mean, one of the problems I guess in trying to be a writer who is responding to their own instincts and being instinctive rather than planned, that you're vulnerable too revealing things about yourself you didn't meet on doing, which I'm learning more and more of the
war books I write. But yeah, achieving that s illness is something that I really value and find quite transformative, and I think I feel so passionate about it, and it means so much to me that it comes out in the characters who are generally nothing like me, but they find that much easier.
Yeah, there's something comforting about that way to live, especially if it's something that eludes you on a personal level. I mean, the Renshaws are a prime example. They never get to stop moving for a variety of reasons. You know, I think we've got a wonderful light about for a few moments there stood still for once, not rushing, running, not fighting the rough grip of a hard world. That kind of perpetual motion for them is in a sign of distractedness. It's not a sign for kind of agitation.
It's purely survival.
Yeah, it's just a fact of their lives. In order to eat, in order to find shelter, they need to keep moving because not accepted anywhere, and they generally have to work twice as hard as anyone else because of their heritage. I think it's an interesting way to write, and hopefully it's an interesting way to read, to have a propulsion in I guess in narrative and in characters
that's not of their own making. That's something that is forced upon them, and then you are there with them, and they keep moving, and they keep doing and changing because they have no choice. I think it's a very old way of telling a story, but I think it's an appealing way as opposed to sitting with someone who's actively out there trying to make decisions to enlive in their lives.
So plots a function of character, and then character is a function of landscape. Is it reasonable to assume that your starting plan for a new novel is almost inevitably a place.
Almost always, Yeah, you bang on.
And I never deliberately set out to write about a place years in advance. I'll kind of encounter somewhere in time somewhere or feel strongly about somewhere, and just know that eventually I'll write about it, and I'll kind of wait. This sounds a bit mystical, but I'll kind of wait to figure out what that story is, or let my subconscious figure that out.
So with Dusk.
I used to camp on a large lake in the Tasmanian Highlands called Lake Echo on a friend's farm when I was a child, and very magical experiences for me up there. And then as an adult, I drove through to West Coast to Tasmania quite a few times and we traveled around there and did a lot of walking around there and up in the highlands, and at various moments I would think this is too incredible a place to not write about, and not set a novel here. I have no idea what it will be, and it
wasn't until I was a few years ago. In the South Island of New Zealand, traveling around the Fiords there, and it's almost like it was a weird melding of these two places in my mind. And we had a beautiful daughter with us, and she was not sleeping, and I was probably spaced out in Milford Sound somewhere fighting off sandflies. And then it's almost the Tasmanianhighlands and that place merge into my head, and then I remembered gun smoke cure, and I just started thinking, that's.
What would work.
Two people driven to keep moving, driven to keep finding themselves, driven to find somewhere to live. The book kind of then just kicked and clawed its way out of my head.
So how long has that been part of your personal mental makeup, that link between the appreciation of a thing, a place, the love of it, and an impulse that says, this place is too special not to write about.
Look, I think since about twenty seventy, when I was about twenty five. Before that, I was a very serious, earnest young man who wanted to be a writer, and I didn't think writing about place was very interesting. I had this notion that, well, everywhere is basically the same. People aren't that different wherever you go and people are what matter in stories.
That's what I was always told.
So I spent a couple of years writing basically terrible, minimalist, really Tasmanian Raymond carbon knockoff sort of stuff. And they were really bad. And I don't say that to be you know, so humble. They were genuinely quite terrible.
Did you show them to people as well? Yeah?
I submitted them to every magazine you think of.
I have that you know, white male, middle class confidence or I just thought someone would like it, you know.
And I was about to chastise you, I've been too hard on yourself, but go on, Yeah no, no, yeah, no, I've got pretty thick skin.
And then I was living in Melbourne and having a good time and my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, was in Higbart and we thought she'd move over, but she graduated from UNI and got this wonderful job offer in Hobart and I was working in an advertising agency in Melbourne and it was going well, but you know, I was in love with it, and she said, well, why don't you move back here? It makes more sense.
So I thought I was.
Going to be on the mainland Australia for twenty or thirty years before I could, you know, romantically move back to Tasmania. And I moved back after two and the minute I got back there, I started writing my first novel, Flame, because I went for a bushwalk and I thought I had missed this place so much. I didn't know how much it meant to me. And then it almost kind of poured out of me. And it was only then that I realized that that's what I should be writing about.
Part of what strikes me about the natural world. And you capture this so well, the sense of awe and wonder and kind of reverence for the natural world. But it seems to me that that can often be something that's meant with kind of the inarticulate that it's very hard to corral words, sentences, this kind of structure to something that willfully defies it. Do you feel any crisis of measuring up when you put your words up against these places you love so much?
It is tricky at times.
I focus quite hard on detail before emotion, because if you jump straight to the emotion a place of oaks, then you get very wafty, very quickly, and it might feel real to you, but it won't quite be real, because.
It's very hard to capture a specific.
Emotional experience in wage, which is why I do focus quite a lot on descriptive writing and then imbuing those descriptions with slivers of the sharpest pieces and truest pieces of emotion I can, as opposed to making it all an emotional thing and then saying also the tree was green.
That's how I try and do it, because I think that best captures these places by looking at them as if a photographer would and capturing the truth of them and then putting in just the smallest but right amount of emotion.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean it makes sense to me that you know, Tim Winton's a fan of your work, for example, and I think about what Winton does with inarticulate beauty, and I think there is something there that when it lands, it's so incredibly resonant. I'm curious beyond that with the natural world. The kind of corollary of that that seems interesting to me is the role of animals and creatures, because again, he have
these living things with motivation, with agency. In your stories, you don't anthropomorphism, but you're also very careful to give them a voice. How do you get that balance right? Yeah.
The thing I always lean on his animals don't care about people, particularly wild animals, and I think that's something I find doesn't work very well in fiction is when a connection is form between a wilde animal person and then it serves as a lesson and a teaching experience for the character, and then the animal is there as a function to serve humanity, and even if it's not
deliberately done, that's how it comes out. And I think it's best to write again about animals with ultimate truth, which is they are beautiful and savage and they do not care one iota for humans at all, apart from what they can get out of them, because animals are surviving, and focusing on that survival aspect helps them come true on the page, I hope, and I think hopefully just my own fascination with animals as opposed to people and
the differences between them and some of the similarities, it just interests me.
I've learned to lean into your interests as an artist and.
A novelist, because you can't fake passion, no, And like readers are clever, and I don't just say that just to be nice.
Tour and it picks up book.
But generally, like most people these days, are scrolling on their phone and half watching TV and half looking at their phone and half listening to something, and the act of actually picking up a book, especially a novel like requires a lot of effort and it's not as easy as most entertainment options are these days. Anyone who's going to that air first, you have a pretty implicit contract with them that they're going to go with you, and
if they don't, they can put it down. So I think trusting that people will realize this might be not what they're expecting, but they can feel your passion.
When we're returned, Robbie reveals the simple rules that he writes by and explains why he sees himself not just as an Australian writer, but as a Tasmanian one. We'll be right back, and the heart of this book not for the first time in your books. A sibling relationship is crucial, and Iris and Floyd know each other so well that the shorthand they use and the ways in which bluntness and affection play out are really really beautifully captured in this book.
I think, yeah, thank you, I found them such a fascinating pair to write about, you know, I initially didn't imagine their relationship.
At the start of the book.
I imagined it would be a really interesting way to follow a novel by essentially having two protagonists but always staying close to one and really getting to know one of them through by sticking third person close narration to them and the other one always being there but almost at arm's length, and come to know the meat through the way they interacted with each.
Other, and then having a brief dive to the other protagonist.
But as I created the character, so I was going the death of love and tension and anger and mistrust and devotion to each other, all kind of spoiled out. He was actually really enjoyable to write and painful at other times. I do sometimes wonder what my brother and my sister think of I guess most of my books, actually, but I.
Leave you guessing they're not giving you like robust commentary or WhatsApp.
Group a little bit. Yeah, they read them. They're always eager to read them. They're very proud of me. They're not really like me.
They're much more kind of analytical people, so they find me a bit bizarre. But you know, they're very happy that it's working out, and the fact that I write about siblings is just confusing to them as it is to me.
But here we all are.
Do you have a consciousness like I am always delighted when Richard Flanagan's a great pains to insist is not an Australian writer as a Tasmanian writer. Do you feel a similar kind of sense of that different being an important defining one.
For all my scenes?
I think I do not out of you know, I don't have a problem any more of a problem with mainland Australia than anyone else should. But growing up at the Tasmania and I'm sure everyone listening to this it's butt of a joke, you know, it's like incest jokes, and nobody can read, nobody can write. It's boring, there's nothing to do sort of stuff, and it's all generally
said in good humor. But like you know, you just get so used to it, and then we have this like Bond villain who sets up a giant art layer in Hobart and.
Suddenly Hobart's cool.
Yeah, and everyone wants to come down and visit, and everyone wants to buy a condo and hobart and it makes us all very wary because we're thinking, like, how long is this going to last? Until you're all making fun of us again? So it does set you apart from Mainland Australia a little bit.
What are the.
Rules you set for yourself when you write? I mean you write largely in a realist mode, but then you also allow yourself freedom to embrace more things in heaven and earth. Do you have an idea of how grounded you have to be, what that ratio should be?
Not necessarily whenever I do anything that veers into magical or particularly imaginative. The simple rule I have is like, if it's not real, do I want it to be? And can I believe it almost to be? Like?
Do I really want that?
As a reader?
What I love that to be something? Rather than is this just quite a sparkling piece of imagination? And am I just essentially showing off? So no showing off is my biggest rule. No self indulgence, because I don't think that does anything for anybody. And I guess my other one is just no dead sentences. Obviously, you can't have everything be turn around the corner and the man's with a guns there, but.
Just no dead weight is what I try and avoid.
One of the things in Dusk particular is not just a kind of reverence for the landscape, but it's the brutality of the landscape. You know. The wrenals reflect over their life for the many places they've been, and again and again. The thing that comes through is that they're
places of kind of great violence. And I'm curious about the extent of which that was a deliberate decision based on the story you were telling and the genre, or whether you think that kind of underlying violence is an important part of understanding the physical the natural world.
Yeah, I do, definitely the latter.
It wasn't so much a decision I made, as looking into this novel is said in roughly historical times, let's say somewhere in the late eighteen hundreds, if we were to be forced to put a date on it, and looking at how people actually live, particularly outside of large civilization centers, A lot of what I think I described is just pretty straightforward and where to remove for about now in depicting in large cities, And I think it's just necessary to include their because that informs how people
behaved and views they had and what they did and why.
They did it for good or for bad.
And I think it's a level of detailing there that some people might find a little confronting. I don't think it's particularly confronting, but I'm odd, but I think it's necessary in order to understand the characters and societies of these places. Civilization hasn't moved on from things like this
as much as we think it has. Some when you read a book like in Dusk or one of our maybe one of my other books, where maybe someone who's treated with violence or is enacting of violence on the natural world, it's not that far from where we've come from and where we are.
No is that complicated by or added to by As you say, the book has a historical setting, and we're talking about Tasmania of the kind of late nineteenth century. The proximity to violence in relation to land is incredibly acute. You know, that's within the generation. You know that the level of atrocities that were going on there. Does that give you as a writer pause or anxiety to be kind of playing in that soundbox?
I think, if anything, it gives me a sense of responsibility because you're looking at a period of history and not writing about that, at least on some level, then
you're doing something very old. It's the huge and defining feature of let's say Tasmania, but honestly Australia and almost every colonial territory of the former British Empire and other European empires is the atrocities of colonization and the fact that people don't like talking about it, and people like it not to be referred to, or like to kind of avert their gaze. I think is a very strange thing.
When I say responsibility to refer to it, I just mean in order to tell the truest version of fiction possible, if that makes sense. To not include it would be not only the wrong thing to do.
But just bizarre. Why would you bother even writing about it?
So I think, whether it hangs large or small in the backdrop of a novel, I think it just should be there because why else are you doing it? And it definitely crops up in the book, I guess yeah.
I mean, are those twin polls of violence and horror on the one hand and beauty and wonder on the other. I mean, that's your Quintessential Robbie Antt novel right there in the space careening between those two.
Yeah, I suppose so.
And you know I feel compelled to write about it and to look into it and to I guess, interrogate it in fiction because it's something that's unresolved in Australian society today. We have absolutely no reconciliation in this country and it's very hard to imagine a sensible or harmonious path forward without any of it. And so you know, it comes out in this book, and it comes out
of my work because why wouldn't it. You know, I come from a culture in Northern Tasmania of people who just don't like talking about the Frontier conflict and they just basically it didn't happen, or if it did, stop winching and I wasn't there.
It's nothing to do with me.
Get over it. And it's that's that's a stance that's incredibly comfortable where I'm from, and it just makes my head spin because like, not only is it a level of denial that seemed childish, it's also just the little of not even wanting to talk about it. I don't, I don't, I won't go on too much about it. But I guess it becomes president in the work because
I don't see how it couldn't be. It's strange that all this stuff is happening and it's come out of me writing a novel set about some children of books for ages hunting a puma in Tasmanian highlands.
But there we go.
It's never a straight line these things.
No, No, maybe if I planned these things out, it would make a lot more sense.
You'd enjoy yourself so much later, Robbiana, Dusk is absolutely a wonderful read, and imagine your legion of fans are going to love it. So thank you so much for joining us today.
That's so kind of you, and thanks so much for having.
Me Robbie on It's latest novel, Dusk is available at all Good bookstores now.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite interviews from the show, Listen out for upcoming conversations with Sanila Ginabe and our very own Rick Morton. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to read this, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts,