Literature of Western Australia

Tim Winton has written thirty books, won Australia’s prestigious fiction prize the Miles Franklin Literary Award four times, and is Western Australia’s best-known novelist.

His work fits into a rich tradition of Western Australian literature that grapples with the legacies of colonialism. Winton is among novelists like Randolph Stow, Dorothy Hewett, and Kim Scott who have authored fiction surveying the damage done and interrogating how Western Australians relate to landscapes deemed harsh when viewed through European eyes.

Most Western Australians younger than forty would have encountered Winton at some point in their schooling — Cloudstreet and Lockie Leonard are staples in English classrooms. In WA, you’ll see copies of his novels being read on beach towels, in cafes, and in university literature departments. Winton speaks to readers by writing in the vernacular about working-class life, beloved landscapes, and common Western Australian pastimes like fishing and surfing.

Despite his broad appeal, Winton is also a countercultural force, in part due to his environmental activism. In 2022, he made waves in the local arts scene when he delivered the closing speech to the Perth Festival and called out its fossil fuel sponsorship. In a secular society where mining profits are sacred, he’s also a committed Christian whose work contains a mystical strain.

Like Winton’s other novels, Juice depicts recognizable Western Australian places with a loving attention to detail. But as his first work of science fiction, Juice is set around two hundred years from now, in a world ruined by climate crisis, whose population has been reduced by billions. As a result, Winton presents a vision of Western Australian landscapes that have been transformed and degraded. He imagines “undulating gravel country where remnant stands of eucalypts stood in clumps, as if huddled against the weather,” and “bare, baked rock” where forest once grew.

It’s with imagery like this that Juice reminds us of the weight of our historical moment, of how decisions made in our time will haunt our descendants for generations. Although in many ways a departure for Winton, Juice also feels like a natural expression of his long-term interests and concerns, and his reckoning with what it means to live through consequential times.

In Medias Res

The novel begins mid-journey, as the unnamed narrator drives with a child through an ashy landscape destroyed by fire. The language and imagery evoke both awe and terror: “on and on we go, hour after hour, over country as black as the night sky, across a fallen heaven starred with eruptions of white ash and smears of milky soot,” the protagonist tells us. In a device that recurs throughout the novel, beauty and horror are encountered together.

The pair reach an abandoned mine site, hoping it might make a suitable place to stay. However, another man already squatting there imprisons the two travelers in an underground cell. Overnight, in an attempt to avoid being killed, the narrator shares his life’s story with his captor. We learn of his life as a “grower,” — a farmer — in Western Australia’s arid north, and how he was recruited as a young man into a militant activist organization called the Service.

The protagonist recounts that as part of his training, the Service revealed to him how different the world once was, and how prior generations built a “Dirty World” that “gorged on the future,” leading to cataclysm. He was taught that descendants of the “gangsters” — fossil fuel oligarchs — responsible for climate destruction were living in luxurious hideouts and citadels, waiting out the turmoil to return to power. The Service’s mission was to kill them, to prevent any chance of their rule being reinstalled.

The Service bears little resemblance to contemporary climate and environmental movements. It’s intensely secretive and embraces extreme violence as its core tactic. But experienced activists will nevertheless recognize much in the narrator’s account of his time with the Service. Members of the Service must navigate tensions between their personal commitments and the pursuit of the greater good. They encounter occasions where movement leaders value ideology above tactics and strategy. Ultimately, however, sacrifice for a cause helps members of the Service find value within desolate lives.

A Crime Against the World

There are points where Winton could be accused of heavy-handedness. For example, when the narrator first encounters the Service, their operatives tell him the actions of previous generations amount to “a billion crimes that make one crime against humanity. A crime against the world.” But a novel with this subject matter can be forgiven for being obvious. After all, the reality it points to is one many avoid acknowledging, despite how obvious and catastrophic it is. As the narrator’s mother tells him, “[T]he great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they’ll deceive themselves.”

At another point in the novel, the names of fossil fuel companies — including those that operate in Western Australia — are recited in song. To the characters in Juice, so much knowledge and so many names from our current age have been lost. But these names in particular are passed down and remembered for the irrevocable damage they’ve done. For leftist readers, there’s a sense of shock and thrill that comes from hearing these names recast as a list of criminal entities, when they’re more commonly encountered on billboards and praised by politicians.

Winton draws on his own experience to lend depth to the novel’s setting, and to make clear its stakes. The narrator of Juice is born and spends much of his life near what is recognizable as Western Australia’s Ningaloo coast, although it is never named as such. It’s a place Winton has deep history with. Twenty years ago, he fronted a “Save Ningaloo” campaign that prevented the construction of a marina development. More recently, he wrote and presented a documentary series on the area.

Winton has spent much of his life showing us what could be lost at Ningaloo, and his new work is, in part, an extension of those efforts. In the novel, Ningaloo’s coral reefs have been totally bleached, and their remains extracted for building materials. Fresh water supplies have been ruined by a rising seabed. Many species have been made extinct and people are forced to live half the year underground to avoid lethal heat and humidity. As the weather keeps getting more extreme, social conditions continue to decline, forcing residents to flee as climate refugees. In Juice, people and place — nature and humanity — are bound up together. To inflict harm on lands and waters is to inflict harm upon those who live with them.

These themes can make Juice a harrowing read. However, it’s also deeply compelling due to its carefully constructed language, touching depictions of domestic life, and — in another departure for Winton — tightly paced action scenes. There’s further satisfaction to be found in piecing together the implied descent of our present world into a dystopian future. As the novel progresses and more details are filled in, the trajectory seems increasingly plausible.

Finding Solidarity

Even through periods of extreme loneliness, Juice’s narrator continually yearns for and reaches toward solidarity. Despite having witnessed and perpetrated atrocious violence, he maintains faith in both humanity and the world’s innate goodness. As the narrator recounts his story to the man who is imprisoning him, the narrator repeatedly refers to his captor as “comrade.” He knows that the other man may be planning to kill him, and even while considering how he might turn the tables and kill first, the narrator suggests to his captor that they could work together to build something new.

The narrator’s combination of pragmatism and idealism makes the novel emotionally compelling. We keep reading as he keeps living — in spite of the desolation. The depth of his inclination toward solidarity becomes apparent when he recounts a joyous dream from earlier in life:

I was deep in the sea, and it was alive, with a million fish — bronze and silver and gold — pressed against me in one shimmering, quivering phalanx. And I was just like them, one of them, swimming effortlessly. The water was cold and clear. I felt safe, one of many, and we were all turning, turning, weaving and twitching as one, like a single creature, at one purpose, banking and diving through the soup of increase and possibility in which we were all suspended. And we swam together, angling, spearing, hurtling up toward the lucid pale surface. Shining like a complete and unified thought.

The character has little familiarity with ocean life. Most of his experiences of nature come from sketches in a notebook passed down to him from his father. And yet this dream arises from within him as a vision of common purpose that arises from the innumerable connections between living things. It suggests the human impulse toward solidarity is innate, and that it springs from our being in and of the world.

At the same time, the novel warns us that if we continue our current assault on the natural world, it will only begat further violence. To avoid the worst of it, the power of fossil fuel elites must be undermined. And the later this happens, the more likely humanity is to adopt the brutal tactics employed by the activists in Juice.

From one of the epicenters of extractive capitalism, Winton has written a novel that shows how we might live and act in a world being mined of its vitality. We have already passed many thresholds beyond which it is impossible to avoid specific impacts of climate change — and we will pass many more. But Juice suggests that it will never be too late for those who survive to find solace in working alongside each other to try and build something better.