Romy Ash

All right, we'll have you in a moment.

We won't go too far.

But yeah, they're just so ever present on the coastline in southern Tasmania where the book is set.

So you just can't get away from them.

And especially over the last couple of years, you know, last summer, I don't know if listeners read about all those, you know, like fat

bergs washing up on the coast down there.

So there was so many deaths of salmon in the pens that like just these floating bergs of fat.

It's so disgusting.

It was just washing up on the beach, you know.

And I think some recent figures came out around this year's summer season.

The salmon farms, they're losing about 12% of the fish over summer, you know.

And then there's this, um, you know, the, the effects of the salmon farming, you know, all that, um, those nutrients, all that antibiotics, everything going in the water.

So we have this environment in peril and then it's just turned up, turned up, turned up because you have this sort of industrial farming right there, really close to the shore.

Yeah, you know, this is just what Ursula thinks.

But yeah, I guess with fiction, we can talk about these things.

And I just feel like...

For these characters living in these places, you know, this is something that's like a daily reality.

It's, yeah, it's there.

You can't not see it.

Yeah, absolutely.