TIM WINTON is an acclaimed Australian author and environmentalist. He has won the Miles Franklin Award four times and he’s been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize. He is the author of 30 books and some of his most notable works include Shallows, Cloudstreet, The Riders, Dirt Music and Breath.

His latest novel, Juice, is a propulsive read that is set in a distant future ravaged by a climate catastrophe. AKINA HANSEN writes.

Spring is here and with it an unseasonably warm beginning. While the sunshine may feel welcome after months of cold weather, the reality is much more sobering. Just over a month ago Sydney recorded its hottest August day in seven years and regrettably 22 July was the hottest day recorded in global history.

Across the world we’re seeing a deluge of extreme weather events: heatwaves in Europe, raging wildfires in California, rising sea levels in the Pacific and fierce tropical storms in Asia.

These events are all a consequence of a warming planet due to the burning of fossil fuels. According to climate scientists, the rate at which we’re currently burning fossil fuels will see global temperatures warm beyond the internationally agreed upon limit of 1.5°C by 2029.

Tipping past that temperature rise will be catastrophic. The very fabric of our ecosystems will continue to alter and eventually collapse. We’ll see a rise in food insecurity, water scarcity, wars waged for resources, displacement of people, heat-related deaths and malaise.

For acclaimed Australian author Tim Winton this possible reality has weighed heavily on his mind for years. A prominent environmentalist, Tim has spent much of his adult life advocating for environmental protection and conservation. He was a part of the ‘Save Ningaloo’ grassroots campaign of the early 2000s and just last year filmed a three-part ABC documentary series to raise awareness about the reef.

‘I’ve been an artist all my adult life, since I was a teenager really. And I’ve been an environmental activist for a very big chunk of my adult life. You try to keep the two rails from touching too often. But if ever there was a moment in history where you can’t keep the rails apart, it’s now,’ Tim says.

Juice is Tim’s latest novel and it’s set in a distant future that’s been irrevocably altered by global warming. In this future world the sun is lethal, and temperatures get so hot that you can’t go outside in summer and have to live underground. Fresh water is scarce, most animals are extinct, the soil is weak, sea water polluted, climate refugees abound, and people are afflicted with blindness, infertility, skin cancers and heat stroke.

‘I don’t think we’re awake to what’s happening and what’s coming. So, the book was making myself face that future because I’ve got six grandkids now. I won’t see the worst of it in my lifetime but the children and grandchildren of our families and our communities – their children – will not just experience it, but this will be the hell that we’ve consigned them to. Less food, less security and more frightening living conditions.’

Juice follows an unnamed narrator and a young girl as they drive through a hot and arid landscape in search of refuge. When they find an abandoned mine site, they are hopeful. Unfortunately, to their dismay they’re not alone and quickly go from being refugees to captives. In an attempt to placate the fears of their captor, the narrator tries to find commonality and begins to tell him the story of his life and what brought him to this moment.

The narrator takes us back to when he’s a 17-year-old boy living on a homestead with his mother in Western Australia where they grow their own fruit and vegetables.

Their life is hard, but the narrator doesn’t know any different. That is until one day he is recruited into the ‘service’ only to discover a shocking truth. That the world wasn’t always like this: it was cleaner, safer and people lived longer.

His hardships are ultimately the consequence of the way people before him lived.

‘I think it’s time to ask ourselves, what kind of world are we leaving? At the moment we’re robbing the unborn, are you okay with this? Our house is on fire, are you okay with this? The boy finds out when he’s a boy, that they knew, and they did nothing. So it does beg the question, how will we be remembered? There will be no Nuremberg trials, sadly, for the crimes against humanity that are being committed by our corporations and our governments at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that our infamies and our crimes will be forgotten.’

Juice reminds us about the legacy we’re leaving for future generations and how our actions and choices today have real detrimental impact on the lives of those yet to come.

‘I’ve got two of my grandkids staying with me at the moment. One’s two and a half and one’s six weeks old and I’ll look at them and I’ll take them out in the sun and the wind and think, “I can still do this.” What will it be like for them with their grandchildren? Will they still be able to do this, stand in the open in the sun? Will they be able to eat the kind of food that I can grow and give them?’

In Juice we see how this new knowledge about the truth of the world drives the narrator to want to better it. He joins the service, a resistance movement that seeks to systematically annihilate any remaining networks from the empire responsible for the state of the planet. In understanding his past, he becomes relentless in his pursuit of preventing past crimes from happening again.

Indeed, history, memory and knowledge are invaluable tools in facilitating change, making informed decisions and allowing us to critically question ideological frameworks.

But what will burying the truth today cost future generations? Across the world we’re seeing the real human cost of a climate crisis already underway. Countries in geographical areas such as deserts and low-lying islands are already experiencing the devastation of climate change. Droughts in the Gobi Desert in China have forced farmers and merchants into the surrounding urban areas; in Somalia over 1.3 million people have become displaced due to drought induced famine; the Indonesian capital of Jakarta is sinking due to ground water extraction; the city of Venice is sinking rapidly too, with its population halving since the 1950s, and closer to home, Australian residents of Malacoota were evacuated from their homes in 2020 due to bushfires.

‘The whole middle band of the world will become largely uninhabitable. We will be forced into the north of the north and the south of the south. And billions of people will die and suffer. This is all happening to us now in the refugee crisis. We’re all not really facing up to it with any realism or decency.’

As land becomes more and more uninhabitable in the world of Juice we see how the displacement of people and breakdown of communities drives fear and desperation.

‘Any chance we will have is if we act like we are comrades, whether that’s across race or gender or class, or nationality or continental distance. We’re on this blue boat together and we’re either going to sail on to some sort of liveable future, or we’re going to be doing what the chief of the UN is basically telling us, based on the science, and we’re sailing off on a highway to hell. I know which way I’d like that to go.’

As history has shown us time and time again, no matter how hard we try to deny or ignore hard truths, one way or another they have a way of surfacing. Juice is a timely reminder of the very real consequence of what could happen if we choose to ignore the climate science we’re faced with today.

‘I haven’t lost my faith in humanity. I find it tested. But I still think that there’s enough decency in people that enough good people can create change and pull us back from the brink of being a generation of monsters.’