Tony Birch

In other words, that we should proactively engage with this issue because of the desperation that we're in.

Um, that's different than I'd like to hear.

It's probably a bit heavy handed to say, no, I disagree because obviously they're both important writers, both really smart writers.

So I suppose I should reserve my opinion for listening to how they place that.

I think it is the case that, you know,

Some fiction that is not entirely or centrally engaged with climate does address climate in some way.

So even going back to my novel, The White Girl in 2019, it's not in any way a climate novel, but by the way, there are blackbirds in it.

And there was a dry riverbed in that novel that the Aboriginal matriarch Odette walks along.

And yeah, from the surface, you would think it was a dead or dying river.

But in fact, during that walk, she is nurtured by the spirits in the land that she's on.

So that, in a way, looks at the idea of a damaged landscape under sort of colonization, but the Indigenous vitality of that same land.

So that is dealing with the issue.

I just think that there is, yeah, obviously, there's a lot of fiction out there that, you

that doesn't address climate even in the most oblique way and that's just the reality of the world we're in.

My point of, I suppose, disagreement or my point where I would depart from what we should be writing about or what our writing is concerned with is that I think...

If we feel that we should include or write about climate and ecological damage or destruction in our fiction, if it doesn't work in, for want of a better term, an organic or, again, this is a loaded word, but in a natural way, I think what we can end up with is producing either quite didactic fiction, fiction by colour, by numbers, or just bad writing.

And I think it's no different than if someone to say, oh, look, you know,

crime fiction's going really well now.

Tony, write a crime fiction novel, or this is going well, or that's important.

And of course I know how important the issue is, but in my case, I think regardless of important social, political issues, if it doesn't feel...