Tony Birch

Well, this might sound really odd.

I think that some Aboriginal writers who are dealing with historical fiction that may not

seem to have anything to do with the climate crisis actually inform my sense of what's happening in contemporary Australia.

And again, this seems like a long bow, but Kim Scott, who I've written a short book about, that dead man dance.

And just to give the premise here, hopefully to make sense to people,

That book is centrally about Aboriginal people in this part of Western Australia deciding that cohabitation and coexistence may be possible and that friendship with settler invaders may be possible.

And there are moments when it does become possible and then the whole potential of productive relationships is entirely shattered.

And then, of course, we end up in a situation of extreme poverty.

colonial violence.

And why I say that is informative in the sense, when I think of the hubris of colonial societies, when I think of the ecological damage done by societies that have no understanding of how country works, when I think about parts of the Western District of Victoria, which were really destroyed agriculturally within a generation of European farming,

What I think about there is had settler Australians just listened, observed and engaged with the knowledge of local Aboriginal nations and communities, the whole way we would conceive of our relationship to place in Australia would be different.

And the other point there, Kate, which is relevant about that book and that, I suppose, Kim Scott's philosophy is that when I did the Climate Change and Climate Justice Fellowship

I understood that, one, there were short-term crises that we had to deal with immediately, both in Australia and internationally.

Yeah, you've got whole nations about to be submerged by rising seawaters.

You've got the gravesites of ancestors on the Torres Strait being lost to community.

So I understand the immediate crises of extreme weather events.

But I finished that fellowship believing that

if we're really going to tackle climate justice and we're going to reverse these terrible problems, we actually need generational change, philosophical, ethical, intellectual change, which would take a generation to completely shift the way we think about our relationship to nature, to place, to country.

And I think a writer like Kim Scott, he has been trying to allude us to the fact that you got these things wrong

Here's the opportunity to read a historical novel and think about how we might get it right.