Winton’s new novel throws down gauntlet to WA’s biggest companies

This article originally appeared on WAtoday. I republish it here with some exclusive extra info (in bold) for you, my subscribers, at the end as I know you are extra invested!

West Australian author Tim Winton has used his new novel to throw a lit match into the gas-rich environment that is West Australian politics.

While Juice has garnered comprehensive national media coverage and drawn large audiences to author talks across Australia, exactly what Winton penned about the companies whose logos dominate the skyline of his home state’s capital has gone unreported.

Winton said he was getting a huge response from “this moment of shock when the names come out”, with readers describing to him “a sharp intake of breath, a moment of disbelief”.

“Total strangers went from feeling elated that someone was finally saying the names, to suddenly feeling afraid for me: like, ‘can you do this?’” he said.

“Doesn’t that say something about the sway those corporations hold over our society? Where else could they evoke such fear and such dread?”

Winton’s spy thriller is set 200 years in the future, after climate change has caused mass migration, war and death, and social collapse. In retribution, a secret service of operatives systematically locate and execute the descendants, or “clans”, of the former civilisation’s fossil fuel executives.

Over time, operators incorporate the names of those “clans” into a war cry, sung to bolster their spirits and vent their anger. The cry, the book’s “moment of disbelief” eventually reveals, contains the names Rio, Chevron, Shell, BP, Woodside and Santos – companies whose operations, and in some cases headquarters, feature prominently in WA.

The biggest “criminal” is ultimately named as the clan of ExxonMobil, after operatives storm their stronghold set into a canyon wall in Utah.

Juice enters a highly charged political and legal environment in WA, particularly concerning one of those names: Woodside, whose imminent expansion via its Burrup Hub gas export mega-project is causing increasing protest actions outside its Perth headquarters, the latest just last week after a major approval from the WA government.

These protests have recently become more creative, bitter and personal. One staged last year outside the home of Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill resulted in O’Neill taking out a violence restraining order.

At Woodside’s annual general meeting this year, teenage protesters yelled the names of O’Neill’s adult children and those of Woodside chairman Richard Goyder, prompting strong condemnation from WA Premier Roger Cook, which in turn prompted the teens to threaten a defamation suit.

Woodside declined to comment on this story.

Winton said he and his publisher explored other options to publishing the names but decided eventually to go ahead with the blessing of the Penguin Random House lawyers.

Some trepidation had remained, but he said it was nothing compared to the fears he held for his grandchildren.

“All victims have in terms of power is the names, and climate breakdown is creating new victims every day,” he said.

“Does anyone think we won’t remember the names of the perpetrators?

“You can’t write an honest novel about climate breakdown without the names.”

Asked about the book’s reception in his home state, he said: “It hasn’t had any reception. There is no mention of it. And I’m sure that’s just normal for a young up-and-comer like me.

“But it hasn’t gone unmentioned in publishing circles and elsewhere that after 40 years, there would be no mention of this book’s existence if it weren’t for Business News, The Guardian, the ABC and the Nine group.

“It’s very interesting. But then you have to remember it’s WA … the place in which we are told that in order to get clean, we have to get really, really dirty for another 50 years.”

Seven West Media has repeatedly rejected insinuations its proprietor, billionaire Kerry Stokes, whose business interests include oil and gas, asserts any influence over The West Australian in a way that compromises its editorial independence.

It is also worth noting the main paper’s books section was cut some years ago and the writer of the books section in its weekend magazine left the company earlier this year.

Seven West Media and oil and gas peak body Australian Energy Producers were contacted for comment.

Winton also said it was “interesting” that Juice was still “under submission” for US publication despite his 40-year history of publication there.

The book depicts a world in which only the regions north of Cancer and south of Capricorn remain habitable. Winton said his setting was “not without foundation” after years of research into modelling of scenarios associated with 3 degrees of warming, for which the world was currently on track.

He emphasised that depicting violent retribution did not amount to endorsing it, but said it was no stretch to imagine people who were humiliated or victimised lashing out with violence.

“It is painful for me to imagine a world where people are so victimised, so immiserated their only sense of agency is revenge,” he said.

“That is a vision of not just a disfigured world but a disfigured humanity, and that is what I am warning against.”

Book fiends, want to know more?

I asked Winton more about the research he had done in order to paint what the world might look like in 200 years if the current trajectory towards 3C of warming continues. He said he spent years reading the science and accounts from financial journalists and writers about certain corporations, and discussions about modelling – “from what we now understand to be the most sunny and optimistic models, which clearly we have superseded, to the most catastrophic, which leads to the peeled-orange scenario”.

He’s referring to the visual metaphor in the book, in which a belt of skin around the middle of an orange is removed, as the equatorial regions become completely uninhabitable, but the regions north of Cancer and south of Capricorn remain somewhat habitable.

“I had also read a lot about the campaign of deception and cover-up and selling of doubt about science, that has, particularly since 2015, become much more public and well documented,” Winton said.

“Obviously if a huge part of the world becomes largely uninhabitable [this affects] agricultural production, water, [causes] huge movements of climate refugees, civil disorder; there is plenty of work being done about those kinds of scenarios.

In terms of the modelling of some of these kinds of scenarios, David Wallace-Wells’ non-fiction book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) was a book Winton “took some notice of”.

“There is a lot of disagreement about some of its scenarios that are more catastrophic, which three of five years ago were seen to be more extremist than they are now,” Winton said.  

“My scenario is uncomfortably extreme, but what we once thought of as the frontiers of extremity are not too far out and we are having to recalibrate as science realise their modelling was way too conservative. And everything is developing much more extremely than many people anticipated in their worst nightmares. So this extreme world is not just a fantasy, it is speculation, but it is speculation with some foundation. And this is a nightmare that I do not want us to experience.”

On a final note, readers, I understand that this topic is confronting. If you feel affected by it, consider checking out Sarah Wilson’s new book, currently being released in serialised form online, which is readable and gives some context, understanding and practical thoughts on how to live with this idea of collapse. The first two chapters are free.