It is more or less impossible to imagine Australian literature of the past half century without Tim Winton. It was nineteen eighty one when his debut novel and Open Swimmer won the Vogel Prize. Tim was a twenty one year old creative writing student at Curtain UNI, and already in that first book you can see features that would become stylistic hallmarks. The characters, the perceptive insights into the inner life of a teen boy, the coast, the bush. It's
those last points that perhaps are Winton's greatest legacy. Even though many of his thirty books are set in cities in urban landscapes, think of the writers or eerie. When people think of Winton, they think of the surf break. They think of lost people trying to find connection and words against the backdrop of the natural beauty of wild places. There's a moment in his latest novel, Juice, that captures
exactly this sensibility a character offers. The first form of revelation is the natural world, wild living nature, coherent, intact, independent and unknowable in its abundance and fecundity. The first form of revelation that is classic Tim Winton the language of revelation, of wonder, of struggle met with humanity, and this underlying faith in the goodness of the planet and its creatures. Over forty years, he's written many modern classics.
What list of Australian books is complete without Cloud Street or Breath Show me a reader not swept up in the romance of dirt music or the deep love of blueback. The man's won the Miles Franklin Award four times, but in recent years, alongside that literary output, there's also been the rise of Tim Winton, activist. His passion and anger about the state of the climate, about state capture by
fossil fuel interests has burned hot. His documentary about his beloved and Ingaloo Reef is in part a cry of anguished fury that such places are being destroyed. Tim's a grandfather now, and he understands all too well that the world those kids are growing up in is already irrevocably changed from the beaches he knew in his own childhood. His new book is set hundreds of years into the future, in a world that's been destroyed by a climate crisis.
A man and the young girl that's in his charge are being held in an abandoned mine by a disillusioned and suspicious captor who wishes them harm. Our protagonist starts to tell his story, the story of his life, his past, his mother, the things he's lost, and why the world is the way it is. Like Tim Winton, this character understands this might be our last chance. We need to
tell the truth in order to imagine a future. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read This the show about the books we love and the burning planner behind them.
This is, of course, this is the topic that nobody really wants to write about, and nobody wants to read about. Let's be honest, I knew that right from the start. It's like, you're really you're going to You're going to write about this.
Have you in your writing career before ever had that feeling that the thing you're writing about is the only thing you can write about. I mean, is that a feeling you have to find for any book anyway? And it's just more acute this time around, that sense that this is the only thing to devote your novelist's mind too.
Look, by and large, a story grabs your attention and has to earn it keep and keep you at it. And so it has to be it has to be interesting enough to you as a tradesperson to press on and rattle the tools about over. But I suspect that in this sense, and this is a book that I would rather have not written, but I felt obliged to attempt, I guess. So I don't really think that I've felt external forces on me, you know, in terms of determining what I should write about. Anyway, I can lace that
sense of obligation and force. It's not really the right word,
but you know, being harried by something, you know. I try to imagine what it would be like to have been alive and been a writer in the thirties with the rise of fascism, and you know, to be a European and lots of people decided that they couldn't or wouldn't write about the state of the world in the thirties, or they would do it very artfully and obliquely because modernism, I suppose, which is always gave us an out, you know, so modernest quietism was always going to give you an
out at a certain point in history, and I just don't think it does now.
This book is being framed again and again as a kind of dystopian vision. But it's funny. The other way you can read it is it's a historical novel about the present moment, a novel about the implication of a world that's so enamored with the idea of the individual that it loses track of solidarity, and so juice becomes about whether it's possible to put that idea of care for others and care for the whole ahead of care for the self.
Yeah, I mean, that's the central argument of the book. It's two blokes and a little girl down a hole in the ground, jack and away or one of them's yacking in particularly the other ones listening, pretending not to listen, but as essentially a guy telling stories, just trying to save his life, you know, apart from giving his bona fides and explaining himself to the other guy. And he's also,
as it turns out, explaining himself to himself. But what he's really trying to do is get through to the other guy and say, look of us, I've got skills, you've got skills. The kid can do things. If there's three of us, we can make it go of it. Where our odds are improved if we cooperate. And that's
a sort of fundamental conundrum. Whereas as you say, you know, the other guys seems to be giving off the vibe that he's fine on his own and two more mouths to feeds, just to pain in the house, and he's not going to pop it, and he's he's a person who has shared the ideals and the service ethic of our narrator, but he's jaded and he's lost. He's fallen out of love with life in a way, he's fallen out of love with people, he's lost faith in humankind.
And so in that sense, yeah, that these three people, the voiceless child who has no agency I'm going to just thinking of this now, and the wounded idealist and the sorely wounded former idealists who's idealism is curdled into cynicism. There they are sort of duking it out at the
end of the world. And I guess it is it is emblematic, isn't it, of where we find ourselves and those of us who feel the world turning, as well as those of us obviously who can read the data, we really do have to get through to the people who are either callous nihilists or unconscious, you know, or so entrapped in their own cynicism that they can't hear sense anymore, they can't feel empathy, and also they can't
feel opportunity. It's really interesting the way that we've in Sato capitalism, the way we have reduced the word opportunity to a kind of an economic idea, in the same way that we've reduced the words opiration to quite a mean inception of what it means to aspire and what an opportunity is. Because really we're at this moment of the edge of the raiser, which is the edge of oblivion or the edge of opportunity, to do things differently, to go forward in a different way.
At a technical level, how different was this to write to your previous books? You know, I remember speaking to you in the past and the extent to which character and specificity was a kind of crucial thing for you in finding the voice, finding the rhythm, finding the engine of a book. And it seems to me that when there's an element of world building to be done, or there's an element of when the framework cannot be accepted as a given but has to justify its own presence.
Did that change the writing process for you? Did that kind of throw you off your established rhythms?
Not really, I mean I guess in a sense, I did myself a favor. Sounds very molly of doing as little world building as possible, because that's the stuff that just bores that tits off me. When I read Speculator, I didn't have to generate a fake landscape. So I just started again as I always do. You know, I begin with the geographical logic. I'm writing about a place I know well, study for half my adult life, because that's essentially you know, ningaloo generation's hands. So I know
what that landscape is and what drives it. I know that in its current form, it's an extreme environment. Everything that lives there is on its geographical and its climactic extreme, and it's adapted to survive in that environment. So all I'm doing really is just moving the dial on the oven and essentially writing, writing according to the dial. And so the ecological logic, you know, the setting of the book in our current day, it sweats more than it rains.
There's so little precipitation that you know, the evaporation rates higher than the rainfall, so if it's three degrees or five degrees hotter. And of course I know what it's like to stand in direct sunlight when it's fifty degrees. I know what it's like for the weather to be in the high forties for three weeks. I know where that physically does to your body. I don't know how many Australians have really experienced heat stroke or proper heat stress and what the symptoms are and how it feels.
So at least I've I've got that sort of kind of peasant knowledge to draw on so day to day on the page, No, it was it was just the usual problem of moving the furniture, you know, shuffle and the crockery about you know.
I like that description. Shuffling crockery is perfect. Tim. I was lucky enough to publish an essay from you in the Monthly last month about the nightmares both literal and figurative, that fuelled the writing of Jews. You brought in all kinds of fascinating ideas that underpin this book, you know, Mary Shelley and Dostoyevski. But I was wondering if you
could talk us through Pankaj Mishra in particular. You say in the essay that his book Age of Anger clarified some key things for you that helped with Juice coming together.
How so, I've been interested in Pancash Misher's works since really since he started publishing as a novelist quite a way back, and I think it was Peter Strauss, my then British publisher, who put me onto pan Cash, but just following his.
Work over the years. I don't think I knew about Age of Anger when it came out, but I've found it through maybe Hannah Arrent, and then of course he writes a lot, and it's written quite well about Aarrent's work.
I think what I really came away from that book understanding more about the fruit of humiliation, you know, the way the kind of malevolent force of humiliation and the way it metastasizes and lives on in a culture, and how it drives the worst outcomes of the sort that we're seeing in our news feeds twenty four hours a day now. And I suppose in a way it helped me to understand my own country, even though that was
probably the last thing on his mind. When you think about what colonization does to people, what occupation does to people. And I think on any continent, you know, if there's any continent that knows enough now that it's educated enough about the consequences and the live unfolding of intergenerational trauma,
it has to be our island, you know. And the fact that we are living amongst and with people who are so damaged by what happened before any of us were born, and many of us are coming to understand from the outside the kinds of lives that our first peoples are living in a way that helps explain to us some of the behaviors that to those of us who aren't indigenous seem inexplicable, you know, I mean, essentially,
resentment is a big core of Measure's book. And as as an Indian who you know, been an immigrants live most of his adult life now, I think in the UK, a very sophisticated and stylish thinker, it's a really interesting perspective from which to learn accidentally or obliquely about your own place, and for those echoes to have sort of unforeseen consequences in the way you see your own country.
I want to just come back to that idea of humiliation because it seems to me that what humiliation requires is recognition. You know, for your narrator, that moment, that crucial moment is it's only recognizing and accepting a truth that allows you to feel that sense of humiliation. And part of the failure we have, particularly on climate in this present day, comes from a failure of recognition or an inability to look directly at a thing and to
give it words. Do you think it better sums up the modern condition that people don't know or that they don't care.
Yeah, that's a that's a pointy one. I don't think we can really tell ourselves anymore that we don't know. But we're not actually brave enough to own the fact that we don't care. We're living as if we don't care. I mean, I've spent a lot of time in Sunday School when I was a kid, so you know, we learned all about you know, by their fruits, shall you know them? You can you can see what people believe
by what they do. So by that measure, we don't care, but we tell ourselves that we do, which is kind of interesting. And you're right, I mean, understanding the force of humiliation arrives by a form of recognition or of revelation. So I don't think we actually understand yet. We do
know the consequence is the way we live. We know that we're addicted as a global community to a way of life and a way of generating energy, but we don't allow ourselves the recognition of another kind of humiliation, which is the way that the way we live humiliates the poorest in our global community, the way that it humiliates the world that made us and sustains us, the way that it feasts on the poverty and the miseration
of others. You know, and I've said elsewhere, our system runs on the assumptions of cheap nature and cheap labor or cheap people. I think it also actually runs on what Dietrich Bonhoff called cheap grace. When it's amazing how able we are to forgive ourselves everything in advance, perpetually. So is this that weird thing of what is knowing? I mean, I think most of us really understand the science. We know that this is a one way street, and
it comes to the central problem of the novel. I guess juice is clearly about generating energy, but juice is really also used by the people in the book as a kind of code for moral courage. Do I have the juice to keep going? Do you have the juice to make the hard decision? Have you still got the
juice for this? You know, people ask each other, and I guess that's what I'm asking myself in relation to your question, and in general, in this moment on the knife's edge as we are, I'm asking myself, I'm asking my culture, and I think I'm asking lawmakers and the people who inhabit the c suites who seem to have such an inordinate influence over our lawmakers. Do you have the juice to make the hard decisions, to make the right decisions? Are you on the side of life or
are you on the side of the money? You know, to put it boldly, I mean it might sound a bit manichey, and but ultimately we're on this raiser's edge where we have to make hard choices, and in order for life to prosper after us, for people to flourish after we're gone, we have to make hard decisions now.
And I hope that we do have the juice to make that call, the moral and practical and political decisions to do the right thing by life typically pisces people off that I have these open endings in a book, And I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that, you know, this book has a characteristic ending, and it's an open question. You know, do we have the juice to do the right thing? And I guess the end of the book leaves you wondering personally, I hope we do.
When we returned, we discuss what it's like to write a book land Juice, and how Tim despite it all, remains optimist stick in the face of climate crisis. We'll be right back. Given the book is a vision of the future, the book reaches conclusions about the present day, answers to the questions that you're posing there, about political will, about courage, about juice on the razor's edge rather than
after the event. And I think, when I allow myself to think about it, I'm a deeply pessimistic person about some of this stuff that I there is. It seems to me an innate structural selfishness to our Western way of life now and late capitalism. That means that inertia is almost baked on or a lack of willingness to give up comforts that we have is baked on and I want to I want to ask you about the
relationship between emotion and writing. For you, about the extent to which Juice is an angry book, or a sorrowful book, or even a despairing book. Tim Winton's head sitting down at the desk to write each day, and to write about this and to live and breathe in this imagined world for months on end. What's the emotional state of that writing process?
Oh? That was It was a nervous laugh. Yeah, it was years and years on end, just from the off. I have to say, I don't think this is a despairing book, because I'm not a despairing person, because despair for me is anathema. It's a submission to a defeat
I won't accept. But having said that, I think it's honest of me to say that the seven years of writing the book, my emotional state was incandescent fury, deep, foreboding, sorrow, alarm, particularly when I was you know, in the last decade, we've just learned so much about the way our world is changing. You know, for those of us who live most of our lives, or quite a lot of our lives in the outdoors. That's bodily registered in a corporeal sense.
But when you read the science and then you watch the watch the politics, and then we're reading more and more material about it. And also the bulk of the book was written during the years we pissed away, you know, the wasted years of you know, when climate deniers and
weirdos were in power. You know, we had the wasted Abbot years, you know, having a prime minist who says climate changes crap, and having a prime minister who previously had wielded a lump of coal in the Parliament just to show us whose side you know he was on, you know who then when the country is burning, is
throwing shackers and telling us that he doesn't hold eyes. So, you know, obviously you can imagine the state that I was in watching that, as my children are having children, as I'm kind of writing and producing and shooting for four hundred and something days and natural history documentary about you know, one of the last great wild places and very vulnerable places in the world. I guess I was
in a state. But in order to get through that, you get into a kind of disciplined I'm kind of reluctant to say the word, but you can get into a warrior state in order to manage yourself and to try to produce beautiful pros, which is my gig. That's what I'm required to do. Otherwise I wanted to just be an advertising in order to get the job done, to make something of that foreboding and anguish and rage, I had to go into a kind of Yeah, I
can't think of a better word for it. I mean, I'm a pacifist, so the warrior state, it's not comfortable positions for me to be in. But of course what I'm writing about, this is a weird thing to own up to. I was I watched every episode of every season of The Vikings when I was writing this book, and I, yeah, it's it's it's an odd it's an
odd thing. But so I had to parden up and get through the hours of the nightmare because I was essentially cutting myself off into a projected nightmare, one that I desperately want us to avoid and I'll do everything in my power to ensure that we have a chance of avoiding it. But to go there every day, it's just it's not not good on the spirit.
You know, so you have to rest your mind in Vikings. That's what you're doing as your escapism or is that where the kind of where a pacifist finds their killer is watching Viking?
Oh, it was just interesting to watch people so intent on doing what they thought was necessary. But no, I didn't. I didn't watch Vikings as respect. I think I did it as homework. You know what I get respect from is that is the healing power of the world and its people. I mean, I still proceed from the assumption and determined belief that the world is good and we're at home in it, and that the people who were made by the world are essentially good and want to do good.
So if you're not an emotional optimist, and you're not a dreamer, it still seems fair to say, through reading your work, you strike me as someone with a deep sense of and I don't mean this in a particularly religious sense, but a sense of faith and a sense of joy. The ways in which you have reverence and love for beauty, for the natural world, for the capacity for goodness infuses all of your work, and Jewics is no exception. Many people will hear the description of this book.
There are associations with dystopian fiction, and I think Tim Winton, author of The Beautiful, is still very present here in this book.
Yeah, I think. So. I mean to go back to the optimism thing, you know, and I've said this before, I don't know. I'm not an emotional optimist, and I think we put too much weight on optimism as an emotion just to offset your stuff about joy and faith and beauty and all that. Optimism is a discipline. It's something that you put on. It's something that you seek and meet and wear and arm yourself with in order to endure, to persist, and to make life bearable and
bearable for others. I mean, where there is no hope, someone who gives a shit is determined to live as if hope is possible, and so I do everything in their power to engender the conditions of hope. So for me, it's we live on a miracle. You know, of all the rocks in the vastness of anoxic space and dark matter, there's one rock that we know of, and we're on it. And the odds against us existing on a world that's infused with creativity and regeneration. And what I think is,
you know, the miraculous fact of organic life. You don't have to be very sentimental to cop to the weirdness of that. That's so absurd in my mind as to be sacred. Yeah, and so you know, I embrace the absurd, but I come at it from the other angle of existentialism, you know. And I am religious, but I'm a I guess I'm a religious existentialist. So you know, my joy in the world is corporeal. It's profane and sacred. It's not just some optimistic or high minded ethereal notion. To me,
it has to be organic. So the fact that we're privileged to be living in this existence, I just feel like we should be living as if we're conscious and care about that, that we value it. Again, going back to our earlier part of the conversation, we just have to live as if our lives and the lives of our children and the people all around us matter, as if we actually value the gift of life. And I think it's incumbent on all of us to require the
people who we entrust with leadership. We have to require that they take that stuff seriously to govern on our behalf. And if they don't, I think we have to do whatever means are available to us while they are available to us, to hold them to account, remove them. And when democracy no longer is available to us, well, perhaps we'll have to do that by other means. Throw the book at them was the bloody heavy book it would do.
Look, thank you for writing the book that we can throw at them. Here's hoping that they read it rather than need it through more forceful means.
He's hoping.
Tim Winton, thank you so much for your time, pleasure.
Thank you mak.
Tim Winton's new novel, Juice, is available everywhere right now. Before we go, two things. Firstly, I thought it was worth giving a shout out to my own personal favorite of Tim's books. I adore Cloud Street, but to my mind, his greatest achievement is two thousand and four's The Turning, seventeen intertwined short stories set in and around the fictional seaside town of Angelus. It's pure poetry and I think
a masterpiece. I revisit it regularly. And then, lastly, before we get out of here, a big congratulations to Melissa Lukashenko. Last week she won one of the richest literary prizes in the country, the Historical Novel Society of Australasia AWA. It's a prise sponsored by read This sponsor the AR Group, and one that celebrates the incredible work being done in historical fiction. Melissa is a deserving winner for her book
Eden Glassie. Go to the read This archive to revisit my chat with Melissa about the book, and then head to your favorite independent bookstore to get a copy of Eden Glassie along with the swag of Tim Winton Books and frankly anything else it takes your fancy. And while you're on the website checking out the archive, take a moment to rate and review us. Forward your favorite episode to a friend, spread the word. That's it for this
week's show. Next week on read This, I'm chatting with journalists, documentary filmmaker and author Santilla Chingarpe about her new book Black Convents. Read This is a Schwartz Media production made possible with the general support of AR Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames. Mixing is by Travis Evans and original compositions above Sultan Fetcher. Thanks for listening. See you next week.