Tony Birch

write.

If I can't do it with confidence and some sense of authority, I would write really badly.

So I suppose the counter to this is that I'm obviously in my fiction very interested in inequality.

I'm very interested in how the marginalized survive in society, how Aboriginal people survive under colonization.

And that is my thing, for want of a more technical term.

I would think if you're interested in climate, and I am very much so, I've worked in this area as an academic, is that if you write a novel which is valuing people, valuing community and valuing place in ways that don't directly or indirectly discuss the climate crisis, I think you're still fulfilling an obligation to readers that really are about that people matter, that community matters, that place matters, and therefore what you...

learn or what you engage with about fiction, I think would have an impact on how you regard the need to protect the planet.

Oh, absolutely.

And thinking back as you were talking, thinking back to my second novel, Ghost River, which I wrote in, I think, 2011.

Yeah, 2011.

I think what's important to remember there in that novel is that there is an engagement between two teenage boys, Sonny and Wren, with a group of homeless men who are, you know, heavy drinking alcoholic men, led by a wonderful Aboriginal man called Tex or Texas.

And Tex tells the boys the story of the deep time history of the Birrarung, the Yarra River.

And again, that novel doesn't discuss the current climate crisis in any way.

It's set nominally in the early 1970s.

But I would imagine that someone reading that book in contemporary Australia and reading about how this Aboriginal man is able to talk about the deep value of country, again, I would think that someone interested in climate justice or the climate crisis would

would get from that book, okay, this is someone telling us a story that we have to understand the vital history of this place and we have to care for this river.

So in other words, I think we don't have to be directly engaging with this issue to engage with this issue.

The other responsibility or thought that I have here in regarding to writing climate, I won't go into detail, but in the research fellowship that I was awarded to deal with climate justice, which was a five-year professorial fellowship,

One of the issues of concern was how do you talk about climate crisis in a way that engages people and doesn't unnecessarily make them feel optimistic, but in a way energises them to act.

And if you were to take, say, a novel like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I mean, brilliantly written book, but so depressing and so dark that you want to go to bed and hide.