Plenty of juice: Bron Sibree interviews Tim Winton

02 February 2025 - 00:00 By Bron Sibree
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Tim Winton
Tim Winton
Image: Penguin Random House

Juice ★★★★
Tim Winton
Pan Macmillan

It’s impossible to overstate the nigh-on mythic status that Australian author Tim Winton has earned in the land of his birth. Voted a National Living Treasure by the Australian public in 1997, he has clocked up 42 years of writing and 30 books, which have sold more than 2-million copies and won countless literary awards — including four Miles Franklin Awards. His books have twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Along with his unparalleled ability to evoke the West Australian landscape and its place in the national consciousness, his willingness to do public battle over environmental issues explains, in part, why he remains so revered. Why, too, anticipation for his 11th adult novel, Juice, is at fever pitch. Be it in person or on the page, people cannot seem to get enough of Winton. Even appearances for his upcoming national book tour have been booked out well in advance. Juice, his first novel in six years, is, his publisher insists: “Tim Winton as you’ve never seen him before.” But Winton himself is quick to demur when we speak weeks before the novel’s release. “I think you can see all the strands of my previous work in this work. The only thing that’s different is that we’re in a different moment.” 

He wrote Juice at the same time he was writing his award-winning natural history TV series Ningaloo Nyinggulu, which he also narrated and appears in, describing the Ningaloo peninsular, which also goes by its indigenous name Nyinggulu, as “one of the last intact wild places on the planet”. While the TV series “was a labour of love,” he says, “trying to make a TV series to celebrate, elevate and protect one of the world’s last great places as I call it and then setting a novel in exactly the same place in the future where the world has got away from us was difficult. Not just the physical difficulty of keeping both balls in the air, given that there’s only so many hours in a day, but psychologically as well. Just trying to keep myself afloat while writing about the massive diminution of the place I love was immensely challenging.”

In Juice Winton conjures a hellish future for his beloved peninsular with the same heart-stopping eloquence that he deploys to convey its beauty in the TV series, where he emphasised the, “choices it presents for the future, not just here, but for all our wild places”. Juice sheets home the consequences of some of those choices, or rather, our inaction in the face of the looming climate crisis, with a terrifying potency. Yet it is a narrative so propulsive that it’s impossible to turn away. As Winton observes: “We’re at this moment in history, a turning point, and it will be consequential in ways that we can barely comprehend for those who come after us. So it was a way of forcing myself to feel the consequences in a way that stirs me to action, and might shock some people into a sense of revelation, because we’re still locked in this period of denial and kicking the can down the road. Once you look at what those likely consequences are, to avert your gaze is a moral evasion, if not a moral crime.”

The novel opens in the voice of an unnamed narrator who is accompanied by an equally nameless child, driving across a blighted, ash covered land. Fugitives running from horrific heat and civil disintegration and driving only at night until, two days later, they arrive at the wreckage of an abandoned mine site. “All we need is somewhere out of the weather, something remote and secret,” thinks the man. “I think this could work.” But they soon discover they are not alone. Within minutes these climate refugees become captives to a hostile man armed with a crossbow.

Juice is Winton's 11th novel.
Juice is Winton's 11th novel.
Image: Supplied

So begins this searing epic as Juice’s narrator tries to convince this stranger to let them shelter in the mine shaft by telling his life story. Born into an earlier era when the climate dictated that people live underground during summer, and where winter still packs a ferocious burn, he tells of his youth as a homesteader, eking out a living alongside his widowed mother by cultivating vegetables indoors and trading them in local markets. And how his discovery of the corporate greed, lies and wilful destruction that led to the devastation of his current world had sent him on a different path. His Scheherazade-like quest to save their lives through his story accrues even more ancient resonances as it spools out into a truly epic tale of love and loss, long-held secrets, mysterious international journeys and dark deeds in far off lands.

Winton says it took him a long time to recognise the strange, ancient Homeric-like pattern that resonates in the book, and only afterwards read the Iliad in its new translation. But Juice’s title is no accident. “It not only refers to energy in terms of how people run their machines and cool themselves,” says Winton, “but juice is also used in the sense of physical courage and also moral courage. It’s about whether there are people left who have the juice to proceed and to make a civilised life. Part of the point of the book is that technology isn’t going to save us. What’s going to save us is our capacity to form relationships and alliances; that’s where civilisation comes from, solidarity, not just technical genius. What produces civilisation is moral imagination.”

While Juice is a deeply engaging read, it is also a powerful call to arms. Yet Winton concedes: “It was a book I was scared to write and I tried to avoid writing. Up until now, I’ve managed to keep the two rails of my life, my artistic life and my activist life, reasonably separate, but in this moment in history I can’t keep them separate any more.” In some senses, he says he felt corralled by “the accretion of information about this looming climate catastrophe, and the enormous frustration that was building up in the face of the corporate and political nihilistic response to it. I could see the impact on the landscape, I could feel the weather changing”. As a grandfather too, he adds: “I could see the likely future of the most vulnerable people in my life. So I had to confront it.”

He is quick to state: “I’m not that naïve or vainglorious to think I can solve all the problems of the world, but I do think writing can make a contribution, and I don’t think novels should be written to make people comfortable. Everyone says 'oh I don’t want to read about or think about a dystopian future' as if it is just in the future. But it’s already here. In the north west of Australia, we’ve just got through a winter when temperatures were in the 40s. Half a million people a year globally are already dying from heat-related causes. As an artist you respond to the conditions, the preoccupations and the urgencies of your time. There isn’t anything more pressing.”

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
Image: Supplied

TIM WINTON ON THE BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HIM

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: The older I get, the more respect I have for Steinbeck trying to meet his moment, and the older I get the more relevant that book seems and the more courageous Steinbeck seems. All those people fleeing the dust bowl, which was a result of wicked, entwined problems created by economic and agricultural policy. It created this massive internal migration. Some people found out certain information and decided not to act on it. Steinbeck had a crack, and we’re still reading it. It’s not just the first climate novel but it’s probably the most incandescent expression of human solidarity in literature that I can think of. It becomes more important over time.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs The Climate by Naomi Klein: There have been a lot of important books about climate but in terms of one that’s influential but also manages to put in human and political context the challenges of climate, the bastardry of the fossil fuel industry and its disproportionate influence on governments all over the world, this is a front-runner.

Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope by Joëlle Gergis: This book had a big impact on me. It’s essentially a climate scientist writing about the problem of climate without leaching out the emotion, without pretending to be just a vessel of data. There’s a sort of wounded aspect to it where she just talks about getting to the end of a day working through the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report process, and just crying her eyes out inconsolably, wondering how she can get through to people what’s happening in their time and why isn’t anybody paying attention. It is a beautifully written and useful book. Because a lot written about this issue is dry and abstract with complex data. But to be able to marry that human emotion and that impact of being a scientist seeing the world change and watching the data coalesce into this kind of “don’t look now, big show approaching” — I really felt the emotional power of that.

Private Empire: ExxonMobile and American Power by Steve Coll.
Private Empire: ExxonMobile and American Power by Steve Coll.
Image: Supplied

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll :This is a sort of a magisterial book, it’s a history of the ways in which these corporate institutions somehow became imperial institutions and private empires, Exxon being the prime example. And I think that came out in 2013, but he wrote the bible on Exxon. And lot of the climate activists are just putting the pieces together in terms of, how they built their influence all over the world, Russia, Africa. But Steve Coll wrote the bible on Exxon. It’s very instructive, chillingly so. It’s a devastating book, and Exxon are a notoriously litigious organisation and some of their former CEOs are just scary people. Of course, one of them ended up in the US cabinet, Rex Tillerson.

Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm: This is essentially a survey of the way our economies and states are influenced by fossil capitalism. Malm writes interestingly about climate activism and wonders why it has been thus far so meek. He’s a Marxist and he’s wondering where and when the radical flank will arrive. In every movement, whether it’s liberation in South Africa or the civil rights movement in the States or the suffragette movement, you get the mainstream movement where they’re doing quiet civil disobedience or non-violent direct action, but that’s often pushed forward by the radical flank. Malm is interesting about all that stuff, I don’t share all his ideas, but he’s a bit of an authority on the study of fossil capitalism, and he’s an interesting theorist.


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