Speaker 1: It is more or less impossible to imagine Australian literature
Speaker 1: of the past half century without Tim Winton. It was
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one when his debut novel and Open Swimmer
Speaker 1: won the Vogel Prize. Tim was a twenty one year
Speaker 1: old creative writing student at Curtain UNI, and already in
Speaker 1: that first book you can see features that would become
Speaker 1: stylistic hallmarks. The characters, the perceptive insights into the inner
Speaker 1: life of a teen boy, the coast, the bush. It's
Speaker 1: those last points that perhaps are Winton's greatest legacy. Even
Speaker 1: though many of his thirty books are set in cities
Speaker 1: in urban landscapes, think of the writers or eerie. When
Speaker 1: people think of Winton, they think of the surf break.
Speaker 1: They think of lost people trying to find connection and
Speaker 1: words against the backdrop of the natural beauty of wild places.
Speaker 1: There's a moment in his latest novel, Juice, that captures
Speaker 1: exactly this sensibility a character offers. The first form of
Speaker 1: revelation is the natural world, wild living nature, coherent, intact,
Speaker 1: independent and unknowable in its abundance and fecundity. The first
Speaker 1: form of revelation that is classic Tim Winton the language
Speaker 1: of revelation, of wonder, of struggle met with humanity, and
Speaker 1: this underlying faith in the goodness of the planet and
Speaker 1: its creatures. Over forty years, he's written many modern classics.
Speaker 1: What list of Australian books is complete without Cloud Street
Speaker 1: or Breath Show me a reader not swept up in
Speaker 1: the romance of dirt music or the deep love of blueback.
Speaker 1: The man's won the Miles Franklin Award four times, but
Speaker 1: in recent years, alongside that literary output, there's also been
Speaker 1: the rise of Tim Winton, activist. His passion and anger
Speaker 1: about the state of the climate, about state capture by
Speaker 1: fossil fuel interests has burned hot. His documentary about his
Speaker 1: beloved and Ingaloo Reef is in part a cry of
Speaker 1: anguished fury that such places are being destroyed. Tim's a
Speaker 1: grandfather now, and he understands all too well that the
Speaker 1: world those kids are growing up in is already irrevocably
Speaker 1: changed from the beaches he knew in his own childhood.
Speaker 1: His new book is set hundreds of years into the future,
Speaker 1: in a world that's been destroyed by a climate crisis.
Speaker 1: A man and the young girl that's in his charge
Speaker 1: are being held in an abandoned mine by a disillusioned
Speaker 1: and suspicious captor who wishes them harm. Our protagonist starts
Speaker 1: to tell his story, the story of his life, his past,
Speaker 1: his mother, the things he's lost, and why the world
Speaker 1: is the way it is. Like Tim Winton, this character
Speaker 1: understands this might be our last chance. We need to
Speaker 1: tell the truth in order to imagine a future. I'm
Speaker 1: Michael Williams, and this is read This the show about
Speaker 1: the books we love and the burning planner behind them.
Speaker 2: This is, of course, this is the topic that nobody
Speaker 2: really wants to write about, and nobody wants to read about.
Speaker 2: Let's be honest, I knew that right from the start.
Speaker 2: It's like, you're really you're going to You're going to
Speaker 2: write about this.
Speaker 1: Have you in your writing career before ever had that
Speaker 1: feeling that the thing you're writing about is the only
Speaker 1: thing you can write about. I mean, is that a
Speaker 1: feeling you have to find for any book anyway? And
Speaker 1: it's just more acute this time around, that sense that
Speaker 1: this is the only thing to devote your novelist's mind too.
Speaker 2: Look, by and large, a story grabs your attention and
Speaker 2: has to earn it keep and keep you at it.
Speaker 2: And so it has to be it has to be
Speaker 2: interesting enough to you as a tradesperson to press on
Speaker 2: and rattle the tools about over. But I suspect that
Speaker 2: in this sense, and this is a book that I
Speaker 2: would rather have not written, but I felt obliged to attempt,
Speaker 2: I guess. So I don't really think that I've felt
Speaker 2: external forces on me, you know, in terms of determining
Speaker 2: what I should write about. Anyway, I can lace that
Speaker 2: sense of obligation and force. It's not really the right word,
Speaker 2: but you know, being harried by something, you know. I
Speaker 2: try to imagine what it would be like to have
Speaker 2: been alive and been a writer in the thirties with
Speaker 2: the rise of fascism, and you know, to be a
Speaker 2: European and lots of people decided that they couldn't or
Speaker 2: wouldn't write about the state of the world in the thirties,
Speaker 2: or they would do it very artfully and obliquely because modernism,
Speaker 2: I suppose, which is always gave us an out, you know,
Speaker 2: so modernest quietism was always going to give you an
Speaker 2: out at a certain point in history, and I just
Speaker 2: don't think it does now.
Speaker 1: This book is being framed again and again as a
Speaker 1: kind of dystopian vision. But it's funny. The other way
Speaker 1: you can read it is it's a historical novel about
Speaker 1: the present moment, a novel about the implication of a
Speaker 1: world that's so enamored with the idea of the individual
Speaker 1: that it loses track of solidarity, and so juice becomes
Speaker 1: about whether it's possible to put that idea of care
Speaker 1: for others and care for the whole ahead of care
Speaker 1: for the self.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's the central argument of the book.
Speaker 2: It's two blokes and a little girl down a hole
Speaker 2: in the ground, jack and away or one of them's
Speaker 2: yacking in particularly the other ones listening, pretending not to listen,
Speaker 2: but as essentially a guy telling stories, just trying to
Speaker 2: save his life, you know, apart from giving his bona
Speaker 2: fides and explaining himself to the other guy. And he's also,
Speaker 2: as it turns out, explaining himself to himself. But what
Speaker 2: he's really trying to do is get through to the
Speaker 2: other guy and say, look of us, I've got skills,
Speaker 2: you've got skills. The kid can do things. If there's
Speaker 2: three of us, we can make it go of it.
Speaker 2: Where our odds are improved if we cooperate. And that's
Speaker 2: a sort of fundamental conundrum. Whereas as you say, you know,
Speaker 2: the other guys seems to be giving off the vibe
Speaker 2: that he's fine on his own and two more mouths
Speaker 2: to feeds, just to pain in the house, and he's
Speaker 2: not going to pop it, and he's he's a person
Speaker 2: who has shared the ideals and the service ethic of
Speaker 2: our narrator, but he's jaded and he's lost. He's fallen
Speaker 2: out of love with life in a way, he's fallen
Speaker 2: out of love with people, he's lost faith in humankind.
Speaker 2: And so in that sense, yeah, that these three people,
Speaker 2: the voiceless child who has no agency I'm going to
Speaker 2: just thinking of this now, and the wounded idealist and
Speaker 2: the sorely wounded former idealists who's idealism is curdled into cynicism.
Speaker 2: There they are sort of duking it out at the
Speaker 2: end of the world. And I guess it is it
Speaker 2: is emblematic, isn't it, of where we find ourselves and
Speaker 2: those of us who feel the world turning, as well
Speaker 2: as those of us obviously who can read the data,
Speaker 2: we really do have to get through to the people
Speaker 2: who are either callous nihilists or unconscious, you know, or
Speaker 2: so entrapped in their own cynicism that they can't hear
Speaker 2: sense anymore, they can't feel empathy, and also they can't
Speaker 2: feel opportunity. It's really interesting the way that we've in
Speaker 2: Sato capitalism, the way we have reduced the word opportunity
Speaker 2: to a kind of an economic idea, in the same
Speaker 2: way that we've reduced the words opiration to quite a
Speaker 2: mean inception of what it means to aspire and what
Speaker 2: an opportunity is. Because really we're at this moment of
Speaker 2: the edge of the raiser, which is the edge of
Speaker 2: oblivion or the edge of opportunity, to do things differently,
Speaker 2: to go forward in a different way.
Speaker 1: At a technical level, how different was this to write
Speaker 1: to your previous books? You know, I remember speaking to
Speaker 1: you in the past and the extent to which character
Speaker 1: and specificity was a kind of crucial thing for you
Speaker 1: in finding the voice, finding the rhythm, finding the engine
Speaker 1: of a book. And it seems to me that when
Speaker 1: there's an element of world building to be done, or
Speaker 1: there's an element of when the framework cannot be accepted
Speaker 1: as a given but has to justify its own presence.
Speaker 1: Did that change the writing process for you? Did that
Speaker 1: kind of throw you off your established rhythms?
Speaker 2: Not really, I mean I guess in a sense, I
Speaker 2: did myself a favor. Sounds very molly of doing as
Speaker 2: little world building as possible, because that's the stuff that
Speaker 2: just bores that tits off me. When I read Speculator,
Speaker 2: I didn't have to generate a fake landscape. So I
Speaker 2: just started again as I always do. You know, I
Speaker 2: begin with the geographical logic. I'm writing about a place
Speaker 2: I know well, study for half my adult life, because
Speaker 2: that's essentially you know, ningaloo generation's hands. So I know
Speaker 2: what that landscape is and what drives it. I know
Speaker 2: that in its current form, it's an extreme environment. Everything
Speaker 2: that lives there is on its geographical and its climactic extreme,
Speaker 2: and it's adapted to survive in that environment. So all
Speaker 2: I'm doing really is just moving the dial on the
Speaker 2: oven and essentially writing, writing according to the dial. And
Speaker 2: so the ecological logic, you know, the setting of the
Speaker 2: book in our current day, it sweats more than it rains.
Speaker 2: There's so little precipitation that you know, the evaporation rates
Speaker 2: higher than the rainfall, so if it's three degrees or
Speaker 2: five degrees hotter. And of course I know what it's
Speaker 2: like to stand in direct sunlight when it's fifty degrees.
Speaker 2: I know what it's like for the weather to be
Speaker 2: in the high forties for three weeks. I know where
Speaker 2: that physically does to your body. I don't know how
Speaker 2: many Australians have really experienced heat stroke or proper heat
Speaker 2: stress and what the symptoms are and how it feels.
Speaker 2: So at least I've I've got that sort of kind
Speaker 2: of peasant knowledge to draw on so day to day
Speaker 2: on the page, No, it was it was just the
Speaker 2: usual problem of moving the furniture, you know, shuffle and
Speaker 2: the crockery about you know.
Speaker 1: I like that description. Shuffling crockery is perfect. Tim. I
Speaker 1: was lucky enough to publish an essay from you in
Speaker 1: the Monthly last month about the nightmares both literal and figurative,
Speaker 1: that fuelled the writing of Jews. You brought in all
Speaker 1: kinds of fascinating ideas that underpin this book, you know,
Speaker 1: Mary Shelley and Dostoyevski. But I was wondering if you
Speaker 1: could talk us through Pankaj Mishra in particular. You say
Speaker 1: in the essay that his book Age of Anger clarified
Speaker 1: some key things for you that helped with Juice coming together.
Speaker 3: How so, I've been interested in Pancash Misher's works since
Speaker 3: really since he started publishing as a novelist quite a
Speaker 3: way back, and I think it was Peter Strauss, my
Speaker 3: then British publisher, who put me onto pan Cash, but
Speaker 3: just following his.
Speaker 2: Work over the years. I don't think I knew about
Speaker 2: Age of Anger when it came out, but I've found
Speaker 2: it through maybe Hannah Arrent, and then of course he
Speaker 2: writes a lot, and it's written quite well about Aarrent's work.
Speaker 2: I think what I really came away from that book
Speaker 2: understanding more about the fruit of humiliation, you know, the
Speaker 2: way the kind of malevolent force of humiliation and the
Speaker 2: way it metastasizes and lives on in a culture, and
Speaker 2: how it drives the worst outcomes of the sort that
Speaker 2: we're seeing in our news feeds twenty four hours a
Speaker 2: day now. And I suppose in a way it helped
Speaker 2: me to understand my own country, even though that was
Speaker 2: probably the last thing on his mind. When you think
Speaker 2: about what colonization does to people, what occupation does to people.
Speaker 2: And I think on any continent, you know, if there's
Speaker 2: any continent that knows enough now that it's educated enough
Speaker 2: about the consequences and the live unfolding of intergenerational trauma,
Speaker 2: it has to be our island, you know. And the
Speaker 2: fact that we are living amongst and with people who
Speaker 2: are so damaged by what happened before any of us
Speaker 2: were born, and many of us are coming to understand
Speaker 2: from the outside the kinds of lives that our first
Speaker 2: peoples are living in a way that helps explain to
Speaker 2: us some of the behaviors that to those of us
Speaker 2: who aren't indigenous seem inexplicable, you know, I mean, essentially,
Speaker 2: resentment is a big core of Measure's book. And as
Speaker 2: as an Indian who you know, been an immigrants live
Speaker 2: most of his adult life now, I think in the UK,
Speaker 2: a very sophisticated and stylish thinker, it's a really interesting
Speaker 2: perspective from which to learn accidentally or obliquely about your
Speaker 2: own place, and for those echoes to have sort of
Speaker 2: unforeseen consequences in the way you see your own country.
Speaker 1: I want to just come back to that idea of
Speaker 1: humiliation because it seems to me that what humiliation requires
Speaker 1: is recognition. You know, for your narrator, that moment, that
Speaker 1: crucial moment is it's only recognizing and accepting a truth
Speaker 1: that allows you to feel that sense of humiliation. And
Speaker 1: part of the failure we have, particularly on climate in
Speaker 1: this present day, comes from a failure of recognition or
Speaker 1: an inability to look directly at a thing and to
Speaker 1: give it words. Do you think it better sums up
Speaker 1: the modern condition that people don't know or that they
Speaker 1: don't care.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a that's a pointy one. I don't think
Speaker 2: we can really tell ourselves anymore that we don't know.
Speaker 2: But we're not actually brave enough to own the fact
Speaker 2: that we don't care. We're living as if we don't care.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've spent a lot of time in Sunday
Speaker 2: School when I was a kid, so you know, we
Speaker 2: learned all about you know, by their fruits, shall you
Speaker 2: know them? You can you can see what people believe
Speaker 2: by what they do. So by that measure, we don't care,
Speaker 2: but we tell ourselves that we do, which is kind
Speaker 2: of interesting. And you're right, I mean, understanding the force
Speaker 2: of humiliation arrives by a form of recognition or of revelation.
Speaker 2: So I don't think we actually understand yet. We do
Speaker 2: know the consequence is the way we live. We know
Speaker 2: that we're addicted as a global community to a way
Speaker 2: of life and a way of generating energy, but we
Speaker 2: don't allow ourselves the recognition of another kind of humiliation,
Speaker 2: which is the way that the way we live humiliates
Speaker 2: the poorest in our global community, the way that it
Speaker 2: humiliates the world that made us and sustains us, the
Speaker 2: way that it feasts on the poverty and the miseration
Speaker 2: of others. You know, and I've said elsewhere, our system
Speaker 2: runs on the assumptions of cheap nature and cheap labor
Speaker 2: or cheap people. I think it also actually runs on
Speaker 2: what Dietrich Bonhoff called cheap grace. When it's amazing how
Speaker 2: able we are to forgive ourselves everything in advance, perpetually.
Speaker 2: So is this that weird thing of what is knowing?
Speaker 2: I mean, I think most of us really understand the science.
Speaker 2: We know that this is a one way street, and
Speaker 2: it comes to the central problem of the novel. I
Speaker 2: guess juice is clearly about generating energy, but juice is
Speaker 2: really also used by the people in the book as
Speaker 2: a kind of code for moral courage. Do I have
Speaker 2: the juice to keep going? Do you have the juice
Speaker 2: to make the hard decision? Have you still got the
Speaker 2: juice for this? You know, people ask each other, and
Speaker 2: I guess that's what I'm asking myself in relation to
Speaker 2: your question, and in general, in this moment on the
Speaker 2: knife's edge as we are, I'm asking myself, I'm asking
Speaker 2: my culture, and I think I'm asking lawmakers and the
Speaker 2: people who inhabit the c suites who seem to have
Speaker 2: such an inordinate influence over our lawmakers. Do you have
Speaker 2: the juice to make the hard decisions, to make the
Speaker 2: right decisions? Are you on the side of life or
Speaker 2: are you on the side of the money? You know,
Speaker 2: to put it boldly, I mean it might sound a
Speaker 2: bit manichey, and but ultimately we're on this raiser's edge
Speaker 2: where we have to make hard choices, and in order
Speaker 2: for life to prosper after us, for people to flourish
Speaker 2: after we're gone, we have to make hard decisions now.
Speaker 2: And I hope that we do have the juice to
Speaker 2: make that call, the moral and practical and political decisions
Speaker 2: to do the right thing by life typically pisces people
Speaker 2: off that I have these open endings in a book,
Speaker 2: And I don't think it's too much of a spoiler
Speaker 2: to say that, you know, this book has a characteristic ending,
Speaker 2: and it's an open question. You know, do we have
Speaker 2: the juice to do the right thing? And I guess
Speaker 2: the end of the book leaves you wondering personally, I
Speaker 2: hope we do.
Speaker 1: When we returned, we discuss what it's like to write
Speaker 1: a book land Juice, and how Tim despite it all,
Speaker 1: remains optimist stick in the face of climate crisis. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back. Given the book is a vision of
Speaker 1: the future, the book reaches conclusions about the present day,
Speaker 1: answers to the questions that you're posing there, about political will,
Speaker 1: about courage, about juice on the razor's edge rather than
Speaker 1: after the event. And I think, when I allow myself
Speaker 1: to think about it, I'm a deeply pessimistic person about
Speaker 1: some of this stuff that I there is. It seems
Speaker 1: to me an innate structural selfishness to our Western way
Speaker 1: of life now and late capitalism. That means that inertia
Speaker 1: is almost baked on or a lack of willingness to
Speaker 1: give up comforts that we have is baked on and
Speaker 1: I want to I want to ask you about the
Speaker 1: relationship between emotion and writing. For you, about the extent
Speaker 1: to which Juice is an angry book, or a sorrowful book,
Speaker 1: or even a despairing book. Tim Winton's head sitting down
Speaker 1: at the desk to write each day, and to write
Speaker 1: about this and to live and breathe in this imagined
Speaker 1: world for months on end. What's the emotional state of
Speaker 1: that writing process?
Speaker 2: Oh? That was It was a nervous laugh. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: was years and years on end, just from the off.
Speaker 2: I have to say, I don't think this is a
Speaker 2: despairing book, because I'm not a despairing person, because despair
Speaker 2: for me is anathema. It's a submission to a defeat
Speaker 2: I won't accept. But having said that, I think it's
Speaker 2: honest of me to say that the seven years of
Speaker 2: writing the book, my emotional state was incandescent fury, deep, foreboding, sorrow, alarm,
Speaker 2: particularly when I was you know, in the last decade,
Speaker 2: we've just learned so much about the way our world
Speaker 2: is changing. You know, for those of us who live
Speaker 2: most of our lives, or quite a lot of our
Speaker 2: lives in the outdoors. That's bodily registered in a corporeal sense.
Speaker 2: But when you read the science and then you watch
Speaker 2: the watch the politics, and then we're reading more and
Speaker 2: more material about it. And also the bulk of the
Speaker 2: book was written during the years we pissed away, you know,
Speaker 2: the wasted years of you know, when climate deniers and
Speaker 2: weirdos were in power. You know, we had the wasted
Speaker 2: Abbot years, you know, having a prime minist who says
Speaker 2: climate changes crap, and having a prime minister who previously
Speaker 2: had wielded a lump of coal in the Parliament just
Speaker 2: to show us whose side you know he was on,
Speaker 2: you know who then when the country is burning, is
Speaker 2: throwing shackers and telling us that he doesn't hold eyes. So,
Speaker 2: you know, obviously you can imagine the state that I
Speaker 2: was in watching that, as my children are having children,
Speaker 2: as I'm kind of writing and producing and shooting for
Speaker 2: four hundred and something days and natural history documentary about
Speaker 2: you know, one of the last great wild places and
Speaker 2: very vulnerable places in the world. I guess I was
Speaker 2: in a state. But in order to get through that,
Speaker 2: you get into a kind of disciplined I'm kind of
Speaker 2: reluctant to say the word, but you can get into
Speaker 2: a warrior state in order to manage yourself and to
Speaker 2: try to produce beautiful pros, which is my gig. That's
Speaker 2: what I'm required to do. Otherwise I wanted to just
Speaker 2: be an advertising in order to get the job done,
Speaker 2: to make something of that foreboding and anguish and rage,
Speaker 2: I had to go into a kind of Yeah, I
Speaker 2: can't think of a better word for it. I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm a pacifist, so the warrior state, it's not comfortable
Speaker 2: positions for me to be in. But of course what
Speaker 2: I'm writing about, this is a weird thing to own
Speaker 2: up to. I was I watched every episode of every
Speaker 2: season of The Vikings when I was writing this book,
Speaker 2: and I, yeah, it's it's it's an odd it's an
Speaker 2: odd thing. But so I had to parden up and
Speaker 2: get through the hours of the nightmare because I was
Speaker 2: essentially cutting myself off into a projected nightmare, one that
Speaker 2: I desperately want us to avoid and I'll do everything
Speaker 2: in my power to ensure that we have a chance
Speaker 2: of avoiding it. But to go there every day, it's
Speaker 2: just it's not not good on the spirit.
Speaker 1: You know, so you have to rest your mind in Vikings.
Speaker 1: That's what you're doing as your escapism or is that
Speaker 1: where the kind of where a pacifist finds their killer
Speaker 1: is watching Viking?
Speaker 2: Oh, it was just interesting to watch people so intent
Speaker 2: on doing what they thought was necessary. But no, I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't watch Vikings as respect. I think I did
Speaker 2: it as homework. You know what I get respect from
Speaker 2: is that is the healing power of the world and
Speaker 2: its people. I mean, I still proceed from the assumption
Speaker 2: and determined belief that the world is good and we're
Speaker 2: at home in it, and that the people who were
Speaker 2: made by the world are essentially good and want to
Speaker 2: do good.
Speaker 1: So if you're not an emotional optimist, and you're not
Speaker 1: a dreamer, it still seems fair to say, through reading
Speaker 1: your work, you strike me as someone with a deep
Speaker 1: sense of and I don't mean this in a particularly
Speaker 1: religious sense, but a sense of faith and a sense
Speaker 1: of joy. The ways in which you have reverence and
Speaker 1: love for beauty, for the natural world, for the capacity
Speaker 1: for goodness infuses all of your work, and Jewics is
Speaker 1: no exception. Many people will hear the description of this book.
Speaker 1: There are associations with dystopian fiction, and I think Tim Winton,
Speaker 1: author of The Beautiful, is still very present here in
Speaker 1: this book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think. So. I mean to go back to
Speaker 2: the optimism thing, you know, and I've said this before,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm not an emotional optimist, and I
Speaker 2: think we put too much weight on optimism as an
Speaker 2: emotion just to offset your stuff about joy and faith
Speaker 2: and beauty and all that. Optimism is a discipline. It's
Speaker 2: something that you put on. It's something that you seek
Speaker 2: and meet and wear and arm yourself with in order
Speaker 2: to endure, to persist, and to make life bearable and
Speaker 2: bearable for others. I mean, where there is no hope,
Speaker 2: someone who gives a shit is determined to live as
Speaker 2: if hope is possible, and so I do everything in
Speaker 2: their power to engender the conditions of hope. So for me,
Speaker 2: it's we live on a miracle. You know, of all
Speaker 2: the rocks in the vastness of anoxic space and dark matter,
Speaker 2: there's one rock that we know of, and we're on it.
Speaker 2: And the odds against us existing on a world that's
Speaker 2: infused with creativity and regeneration. And what I think is,
Speaker 2: you know, the miraculous fact of organic life. You don't
Speaker 2: have to be very sentimental to cop to the weirdness
Speaker 2: of that. That's so absurd in my mind as to
Speaker 2: be sacred. Yeah, and so you know, I embrace the absurd,
Speaker 2: but I come at it from the other angle of existentialism,
Speaker 2: you know. And I am religious, but I'm a I
Speaker 2: guess I'm a religious existentialist. So you know, my joy
Speaker 2: in the world is corporeal. It's profane and sacred. It's
Speaker 2: not just some optimistic or high minded ethereal notion. To me,
Speaker 2: it has to be organic. So the fact that we're
Speaker 2: privileged to be living in this existence, I just feel
Speaker 2: like we should be living as if we're conscious and
Speaker 2: care about that, that we value it. Again, going back
Speaker 2: to our earlier part of the conversation, we just have
Speaker 2: to live as if our lives and the lives of
Speaker 2: our children and the people all around us matter, as
Speaker 2: if we actually value the gift of life. And I
Speaker 2: think it's incumbent on all of us to require the
Speaker 2: people who we entrust with leadership. We have to require
Speaker 2: that they take that stuff seriously to govern on our behalf.
Speaker 2: And if they don't, I think we have to do
Speaker 2: whatever means are available to us while they are available
Speaker 2: to us, to hold them to account, remove them. And
Speaker 2: when democracy no longer is available to us, well, perhaps
Speaker 2: we'll have to do that by other means. Throw the
Speaker 2: book at them was the bloody heavy book it would do.
Speaker 1: Look, thank you for writing the book that we can
Speaker 1: throw at them. Here's hoping that they read it rather
Speaker 1: than need it through more forceful means.
Speaker 2: He's hoping.
Speaker 1: Tim Winton, thank you so much for your time, pleasure.
Speaker 2: Thank you mak.
Speaker 1: Tim Winton's new novel, Juice, is available everywhere right now.
Speaker 1: Before we go, two things. Firstly, I thought it was
Speaker 1: worth giving a shout out to my own personal favorite
Speaker 1: of Tim's books. I adore Cloud Street, but to my mind,
Speaker 1: his greatest achievement is two thousand and four's The Turning,
Speaker 1: seventeen intertwined short stories set in and around the fictional
Speaker 1: seaside town of Angelus. It's pure poetry and I think
Speaker 1: a masterpiece. I revisit it regularly. And then, lastly, before
Speaker 1: we get out of here, a big congratulations to Melissa Lukashenko.
Speaker 1: Last week she won one of the richest literary prizes
Speaker 1: in the country, the Historical Novel Society of Australasia AWA.
Speaker 1: It's a prise sponsored by read This sponsor the AR Group,
Speaker 1: and one that celebrates the incredible work being done in
Speaker 1: historical fiction. Melissa is a deserving winner for her book
Speaker 1: Eden Glassie. Go to the read This archive to revisit
Speaker 1: my chat with Melissa about the book, and then head
Speaker 1: to your favorite independent bookstore to get a copy of
Speaker 1: Eden Glassie along with the swag of Tim Winton Books
Speaker 1: and frankly anything else it takes your fancy. And while
Speaker 1: you're on the website checking out the archive, take a
Speaker 1: moment to rate and review us. Forward your favorite episode
Speaker 1: to a friend, spread the word. That's it for this
Speaker 1: week's show. Next week on read This, I'm chatting with journalists,
Speaker 1: documentary filmmaker and author Santilla Chingarpe about her new book
Speaker 1: Black Convents. Read This is a Schwartz Media production made
Speaker 1: possible with the general support of AR Group. The show
Speaker 1: is produced and edited by Clara Ames. Mixing is by
Speaker 1: Travis Evans and original compositions above Sultan Fetcher. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: See you next week.