Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Welcome back to another episode
Speaker 1: of Read This, which we're running each Sunday on seven am.
Speaker 1: Hosted by editor of the monthly Michael Williams. It features
Speaker 1: conversations with some of the best writers from Australia and
Speaker 1: around the world, and in this episode, we're going to
Speaker 1: hear from one of Australia's most famous authors, Tim Winton.
Speaker 1: Before we do, Michael is here to share a bit
Speaker 1: about their conversation. Michael, welcome back.
Speaker 2: How are you, Ruby Jones? Very well, how are you?
Speaker 1: I'm great, So, Michael, I think that almost everyone who
Speaker 1: listens to us will be familiar with your guests today.
Speaker 2: What do you think. Look, it's always nice to shine
Speaker 2: a spotlight on a plucky, upstart, fresh new talent. Introducing
Speaker 2: people to a writer who's a bit wet behind me
Speaker 2: is what I reckon has a bold future in front
Speaker 2: of him now. Tim Winton is such a fixture of
Speaker 2: the Australian landscape. It's over forty years since his first
Speaker 2: book came out and in the intervening time he has
Speaker 2: become kind of emblematic with Australian literature. It's hard to
Speaker 2: think of a time pre Tim Winton.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. And Tim has really spent his career writing these
Speaker 1: big stories that focus on the Australian landscape. It's natural beauty.
Speaker 1: But his new book, Juice, that's really about what losing
Speaker 1: these environments through the climate crisis, what that might mean
Speaker 1: for humanity. So tell me a bit about what the
Speaker 1: book's like. Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons readers so loved Tim is his
Speaker 2: synonymous with a kind of capacity to capture the beauty
Speaker 2: of the natural world and a sense of kind of
Speaker 2: joy and wonder with these kind of inarticulate lost protagonists
Speaker 2: who are making sense of their place in a world
Speaker 2: that seems so much bigger than they are. For his
Speaker 2: latest book, Tim combines that storytelling instinct with decades of
Speaker 2: activism and he's a man who's deeply exercised by the
Speaker 2: climate crisis. People may have seen the documentary made for
Speaker 2: the ABC last year about an Ingaloo reef. It's a
Speaker 2: gorgeous documentary and a celebration of a place that he loves,
Speaker 2: But the thing that underpins it is this sense of
Speaker 2: grief and fury at the fact that it's in jeopardy.
Speaker 2: And to a certain extent, Juice is the culmination of
Speaker 2: that grief and fury. It's opposed to apocalyptic story. It
Speaker 2: follows an unnamed narrator who just between us I kept
Speaker 2: trying to imagine as an older Lucky Leonard as he
Speaker 2: navigates the wasteland with a young girl who he's responsible for,
Speaker 2: who's not his own child, but a child who he
Speaker 2: needs to look after. It's a classic setup, a terrifying story,
Speaker 2: but it is also Tim Winton. I think it is very.
Speaker 1: Best coming up in just a moment. Tim Winton's got
Speaker 1: the juice.
Speaker 3: This is, of course, this is the topic that nobody
Speaker 3: really wants to write about, and nobody wants to read about.
Speaker 3: Let's be honest. I knew that right from the start.
Speaker 3: It's like, you're really you're going to You're going to
Speaker 3: write about this.
Speaker 2: Have you in your writing career before ever had that
Speaker 2: feeling that the thing you're writing about is the only
Speaker 2: thing you can write about. I mean, is that a
Speaker 2: feeling you have to find for any book anyway? And
Speaker 2: it's just more acute this time around, that sense that
Speaker 2: this is the only thing to devote your novelist's mind too.
Speaker 3: I look, by and large, a story grabs your attention
Speaker 3: and has to earn it, keep and keep you at it.
Speaker 3: And so it has to be it has to be
Speaker 3: interesting enough to you as a tradesperson to press on
Speaker 3: and rattle the tools about over. But I suspect that
Speaker 3: in this instance, this is a book that I would
Speaker 3: rather have not written. But I've felt obliged to attempt,
Speaker 3: I guess. So I don't really think that I've felt
Speaker 3: external forces on me, you know, in terms of determining
Speaker 3: what I should write about. Any way, I can lace
Speaker 3: that sense of obligation and.
Speaker 4: Force.
Speaker 3: It's not really the right word, but you know, being
Speaker 3: harried by something, you know. I try to imagine what
Speaker 3: it would be like to have.
Speaker 4: Been alive and been a writer in.
Speaker 3: The thirties with the rise of fascism, and you know,
Speaker 3: to be a European and lots of people decided that
Speaker 3: they couldn't or wouldn't write about the state of the
Speaker 3: world in the thirties, or they would do it very
Speaker 3: artfully and obliquely because modernism, I suppose, which.
Speaker 4: Is always gave us an out, you know.
Speaker 3: So modernist quietism was always going to give you an
Speaker 3: out at a certain point in history, and I just
Speaker 3: don't think it does Now.
Speaker 2: This book is being framed again and again as a
Speaker 2: kind of dystopian vision, but it's funny. The other way
Speaker 2: you can read it is it's a historical novel about
Speaker 2: the present, a novel about the implication of a world
Speaker 2: that's so enamored with the idea of the individual that
Speaker 2: it loses track of solidarity, and so juice becomes about
Speaker 2: whether it's possible to put that idea of care for
Speaker 2: others and care for the whole ahead of care for
Speaker 2: the self.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that's the central argument of the book.
Speaker 3: It's two blokes and a.
Speaker 5: Little girl down a hole in the ground, yacking away,
Speaker 5: or one of them's yacking in particularly the other ones listening,
Speaker 5: pretending not to listen, but as essentially a guy telling stories,
Speaker 5: just trying to save his life, you know, apart from
Speaker 5: giving his bona fides and explaining.
Speaker 3: Himself to the other guy. And he's also, as it turns,
Speaker 3: explaining himself to himself. But what he's really trying to
Speaker 3: do is get through to the other guy and say, look,
Speaker 3: if there's three of us, I've got skills, you've got skills.
Speaker 3: The kid can do things. If there's three of us,
Speaker 3: we can make it go of it, where our odds
Speaker 3: are improved if we cooperate. And that's a sort of
Speaker 3: fundamental conundrum. Whereas as you say, you know, the other
Speaker 3: guys seems to be giving off the vibe that he's
Speaker 3: fine on his own and two more mouths to feeds,
Speaker 3: just to pain in the house.
Speaker 4: So he's not going to pop it.
Speaker 3: And he's he's a person who has shared the ideals
Speaker 3: and the service ethic of our narrator, but he's jaded
Speaker 3: and he's lost. He's fallen out of love with life
Speaker 3: in a way, he's fallen out of love with people.
Speaker 3: He's lost faith in humankind. And so in that sense, yeah,
Speaker 3: that these three people, the voiceless child who has no
Speaker 3: agency I'm going to just thinking of this now, and
Speaker 3: the wounded idealist and the sorely wounded former idealist whose
Speaker 3: idealism is curdled into cynicism. There they are out sort
Speaker 3: of duking it out at the end of the world.
Speaker 3: And I guess it is a It is emblematic, isn't it,
Speaker 3: of where we find ourselves, and those of us who
Speaker 3: feel the world turning, as well as those of us
Speaker 3: obviously who can read the data. We really do have
Speaker 3: to get through to the people who are either callous
Speaker 3: nihilists or unconscious, you know, or so entrapped in their
Speaker 3: own cynicism that they can't hear sense anymore, they can't
Speaker 3: feel empathy, and also they can't feel opportunity.
Speaker 4: It's really interesting.
Speaker 3: The way that we've in Sato capitalism, the way we
Speaker 3: have reduced the word opportunity to a kind of an
Speaker 3: economic idea, in the same way that we've reduced the
Speaker 3: word aspiration to quite a mean inception of what it
Speaker 3: means to aspire and what an opportunity is. Because really
Speaker 3: we're at this moment in the edge of as the
Speaker 3: edge of the raiser, which is the edge of oblivion
Speaker 3: or the edge of opportunity, to do things differently, to
Speaker 3: go forward in a different way.
Speaker 2: At a technical level, how different was this to write
Speaker 2: to your previous books? You know, I remember speaking to
Speaker 2: you in the past and the extent to which character
Speaker 2: and specificity was a kind of crucial thing for you
Speaker 2: in finding the voice, finding the rhythm, finding the engine
Speaker 2: of a book. And it seems to me that when
Speaker 2: there's an element of world building to be done, or
Speaker 2: there's an element of when the framework cannot be accepted
Speaker 2: as a given, but has to justify its own presence.
Speaker 2: Did that change the writing process for you? Did that
Speaker 2: kind of throw you off your established rhythms?
Speaker 3: Not really, I mean I guess in a sense, I
Speaker 3: did myself a favor.
Speaker 4: Sounds very Molly.
Speaker 3: Of doing as little world build as possible, because that's
Speaker 3: the stuff that just bores that tits off me. When
Speaker 3: I read Speculator, I didn't have to generate a fake landscape.
Speaker 3: So I just started again as I always do.
Speaker 4: You know, I begin with the geographical logic.
Speaker 3: I'm writing about a place I know well, studied for
Speaker 3: half my adult life, because that's essentially you know, ningaloo generations. Hence,
Speaker 3: so I know what that landscape is and what drives it.
Speaker 3: I know that in its current form it's an extreme environment.
Speaker 3: Everything that lives there is on its geographical and its
Speaker 3: climactic extreme, and it's adapted to survive in that environment.
Speaker 3: So all I'm doing really is just moving the dial
Speaker 3: on the oven and essentially writing, writing according to the dial.
Speaker 3: And so the ecological logic, you know, the setting of
Speaker 3: the book in our current day, it sweats more than
Speaker 3: it rains. There's so little precipitation that you know, the
Speaker 3: evaporation rates higher than the rainfall, so if it's three
Speaker 3: degrees or five degrees hotter. And of course I know
Speaker 3: what it's like to stand in direct sunlight when it's
Speaker 3: fifty degrees. I know what it's like for the weather
Speaker 3: to be in the high forties for three weeks. I
Speaker 3: know what that physically does to your body. I don't
Speaker 3: know how many Australians have really experienced heat stroke or
Speaker 3: proper heat stress, and what the symptoms are and how
Speaker 3: it feels.
Speaker 4: So at least I've got I've.
Speaker 3: Got that sort of kind of peasant knowledge to draw
Speaker 3: on so day to day on the page. No, it
Speaker 3: was it was just the usual problem of moving the furniture,
Speaker 3: you know, shuffling the crockery about you know.
Speaker 2: I like that description. Shuffling crockery is perfect. Tim. I
Speaker 2: was lucky enough to publish an essay from you in
Speaker 2: the Monthly last month about the nightmares both literal and figurative,
Speaker 2: that fuelled the writing of Jews. You brought in all
Speaker 2: kinds of fascinating ideas that underpin this book, you know,
Speaker 2: Mary Shelley and Dostoyevski. But I was wondering if you
Speaker 2: could talk us through Pankaj Mishra in particularly. You say
Speaker 2: in the essay that his book Age of Anger clarified
Speaker 2: 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 work over the years. I don't think
Speaker 3: I knew about Age of Anger when it came out,
Speaker 3: but I've found it through maybe Hannah Aarenton. Then, of
Speaker 3: course he writes a lot, and it's written quite well
Speaker 3: about our it's work. I think what I really came
Speaker 3: away from that book understanding more about the fruit of humiliation,
Speaker 3: you know, the way the kind of malevolent force of
Speaker 3: humiliation and the way it metastasizes and lives on in
Speaker 3: a culture, and how it drives the worst outcomes, you know,
Speaker 3: of the sort that we're seeing in our news feeds
Speaker 3: twenty four hours a day now. And I suppose in
Speaker 3: a way it helped me to understand my own country,
Speaker 3: even though that was probably the last thing on his
Speaker 3: mind when you think about what colonization does to people,
Speaker 3: what occupation does to people, and I think on any continent,
Speaker 3: you know, if there's any continent that knows enough now
Speaker 3: that it's educated enough about the consequences and the live
Speaker 3: unfolding of intergenerational trauma, it has to be our island,
Speaker 3: you know. And the fact that we are living amongst
Speaker 3: and with people who are so damaged by what happened
Speaker 3: before any of us were born, and many of us
Speaker 3: are coming to understand from the outside the kinds of
Speaker 3: lives that our first peoples are living, in a way
Speaker 3: that helps explain to us some of the behaviors that
Speaker 3: to those of us who aren't indigenous seem inexplicable, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, essentially you Resentment is a big core of
Speaker 3: Measure's book. And as as an Indian who'd been an
Speaker 3: immigrants live most of his adult life now, I think
Speaker 3: in the UK a very sophisticated and stylish thinker, it's
Speaker 3: a really interesting perspective from which to learn accidentally or
Speaker 3: obliquely about your own place, and for those echoes to have.
Speaker 4: Sort of unforeseen consequences in the way you see your
Speaker 4: own country.
Speaker 2: I want to just come back to that idea of humiliation,
Speaker 2: because it seems to me that what humiliation requires is recognition.
Speaker 2: You know, for your narrator, that moment, that crucial moment
Speaker 2: is it's only recognizing and accepting a truth that allows
Speaker 2: you to feel that sense of humiliation. And part of
Speaker 2: the failure we have, particularly on climate in this present day,
Speaker 2: comes from a failure of recognition or an inability to
Speaker 2: look directly at a thing and to give it words.
Speaker 2: Do you think it better sums up the modern condition
Speaker 2: that people don't know or that they don't care.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a pointy one. I don't think we can
Speaker 3: really tell ourselves any more that we don't know. But
Speaker 3: we're not actually brave enough to own the fact that
Speaker 3: we don't care. We're living as if we don't care.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've spent a lot of time in Sunday
Speaker 3: School when I was a kid, so you know, we
Speaker 3: learned all about you know, by their fruits, shall you
Speaker 3: know them? You can see what people believe by what
Speaker 3: they do. So by that measure, we don't care, but
Speaker 3: we tell ourselves that we do, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker 3: And you're right, I mean, understanding the force of humiliation
Speaker 3: arrives by a form of recognition or of revelation. So
Speaker 3: I don't think we actually understand yet. We do know
Speaker 3: the consequences of the way we live. We know that
Speaker 3: we're addicted as a global community to a way of
Speaker 3: life and a way of generating energy, But we don't
Speaker 3: allow ourselves the recognition of another kind of humiliation, which
Speaker 3: is the way that the way we live humiliates the
Speaker 3: poorest in our global community, the way that it humiliates
Speaker 3: the world that made us and sustains us, The way
Speaker 3: that it feasts on the poverty and the miseration of others.
Speaker 3: You know, and I've set elsewhere. Our system runs on
Speaker 3: the assumptions of cheap nature and cheap labor or cheap people.
Speaker 3: I think it also actually runs on what Dietrich Bonhoff
Speaker 3: called cheap grace. It's amazing how able we are to
Speaker 3: forgive ourselves everything in advance, perpetually. So is this that
Speaker 3: weird thing of what is knowing? I mean, I think
Speaker 3: most of us really understand the science. We know that
Speaker 3: this is a one way street, and it comes to
Speaker 3: the central problem of the I guess juice is clearly
Speaker 3: about generating energy but juice is really also used, you know,
Speaker 3: by the people in the book as a kind of
Speaker 3: code for moral courage. Do I have the juice to
Speaker 3: keep going? Do you have the juice to make the
Speaker 3: hard decision? Have you still got the juice for this?
Speaker 3: You know, people ask each other, and I guess that's
Speaker 3: what I'm asking myself in relation to your question, And
Speaker 3: you know, in general, in this moment on the knife's
Speaker 3: edge as we are, I'm asking myself, I'm asking my culture,
Speaker 3: and I think I'm asking lawmakers and the people who
Speaker 3: inhabit the sea suites, who seem to have such an
Speaker 3: inordinate influence over our lawmakers. Do you have the juice
Speaker 3: to make the hard decisions, to make the right decisions?
Speaker 3: Are you on the side of life or are you
Speaker 3: on the side of the money? You know, to put
Speaker 3: it boldly, I mean it might sound a bit manichy,
Speaker 3: and but ultimately we're on this raiser's edge where we
Speaker 3: have to make make hard choices, and in order for
Speaker 3: life to prosper after us, for people to flourish after
Speaker 3: we're gone, we have to make hard decisions now. And
Speaker 3: I hope that we do have the juice to make
Speaker 3: that call. The moral and practical and political decisions to
Speaker 3: do the right thing by life. Typically pisces people off
Speaker 3: that I have these open endings in a book, And
Speaker 3: I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to
Speaker 3: say that, you know, this book has a characteristic ending,
Speaker 3: and it's an open question. You know, do we have
Speaker 3: the juice to do the right thing? And I guess
Speaker 3: the end of the book leaves you wondering personally, I
Speaker 3: hope we do.
Speaker 2: When we returned, we discuss what it's like to write
Speaker 2: a book like Juice, and how Tim despite it all,
Speaker 2: remains optimistic in the face of climate crisis. We'll be
Speaker 2: right back. Given the book is a vision of the future,
Speaker 2: the book reaches conclusions about the present day, answers to
Speaker 2: the questions that you're posing there, about political will, about courage,
Speaker 2: about juice on the razor's edge rather than after the event.
Speaker 2: And I think, when I allow myself to think about it,
Speaker 2: I'm a deeply pessimistic person about some of this stuff
Speaker 2: that I there is. It seems to me an innate
Speaker 2: structural selfishness to our Western way of life now and
Speaker 2: late capitalism. That means that inertia is almost baked on,
Speaker 2: or a lack of willingness to give up comforts that
Speaker 2: we have is baked on and I want to I
Speaker 2: want to ask you about the relationship between emotion and writing.
Speaker 2: For you, about the extent to which Juice is an
Speaker 2: angry book, or a sorrowful book, or even a despairing book.
Speaker 2: Tim Winton's head sitting down at the desk to write
Speaker 2: each day, and to write about this and to live
Speaker 2: and breathe in this imagined world for months on end,
Speaker 2: what's the emotional state of that writing process?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: That was It was a nervous laugh. Yeah, it was
Speaker 4: years and years on end, just from the off.
Speaker 3: I have to say, I don't think this is a
Speaker 3: despairing book, because I'm not a despairing person, Because despair
Speaker 3: for me is anathema.
Speaker 4: It's a submission to a defeat I won't accept.
Speaker 3: But having said that, I think it's honest of me
Speaker 3: to say that the seven years of writing the book,
Speaker 3: my emotional state was incandescent fury, deep, foreboding, sorrow, alarm,
Speaker 3: particularly when I was you know, in the last decade,
Speaker 3: we've just learned so much about the way our world
Speaker 3: is changing. You know, for those of us who live
Speaker 3: most of our lives, or quite a lot of our
Speaker 3: lives in the outdoors. That's bodily registered in a corporeal sense.
Speaker 3: But when you read the science and then you watch
Speaker 3: the watch the politics, and then we're reading more and
Speaker 3: more material about it. And also the bulk of the
Speaker 3: book was written during the years we pissed away, you know,
Speaker 3: the wasted years of you know, when climate deniers and
Speaker 3: weirdos were in power. You know, we had the wasted
Speaker 3: Abbot years, you know, having a prime minist who says
Speaker 3: climate changes crap, and having a prime minister who previously
Speaker 3: had wielded a lump of coal in the parliament just
Speaker 3: to show us whose side you know he was on,
Speaker 3: you know who then when the country has been earning,
Speaker 3: is throwing shackers and telling us that he doesn't hold eyes. So,
Speaker 3: you know, obviously you can imagine the state that I
Speaker 3: was in watching that as my children are having children,
Speaker 3: as I'm kind of writing and producing and shooting for
Speaker 3: four hundred and something days and natural history documentary about
Speaker 3: you know, one of the last great wild places and
Speaker 3: very vulnerable places in the world. I guess I was
Speaker 3: in a state. But in order to get through that,
Speaker 3: you get into a kind of disciplined. I'm kind of
Speaker 3: reluctant to say the word, but you can get into
Speaker 3: a warrior state in order to manage yourself and to
Speaker 3: try to produce beautiful pros, which is my gig.
Speaker 4: That's what I'm required to do.
Speaker 3: Otherwise I might just be an advertising in order to
Speaker 3: get the job done, to make something of that foreboding
Speaker 3: and anguish and age, I had to go into a
Speaker 3: kind of Yeah, I can't think of a better word
Speaker 3: for it. I mean, I'm a pacifist, so the warrior state,
Speaker 3: it's not comfortable positions for me to be in. But
Speaker 3: of course what I'm writing about, this is a weird
Speaker 3: thing to own up to. I was I watched every
Speaker 3: episode of every season of The Vikings when I was
Speaker 3: writing this book, and I, yeah, it's it's it's an
Speaker 3: odd it's an odd thing. But I so I had
Speaker 3: to pardon up and get through the hours of the
Speaker 3: nightmare because I was essentially cutting myself off into a
Speaker 3: projected nightmare, one that I desperately want us to avoid
Speaker 3: and I'll do everything in my power to ensure that
Speaker 3: we have a chance of avoiding it.
Speaker 4: But to go there every day It's just it's not
Speaker 4: not good on the spirit, you.
Speaker 2: Know, So you have to rest your mind in vikings
Speaker 2: if that's what you're doing as your escapism, or is
Speaker 2: that where the kind of where a pacifist finds.
Speaker 3: Their killer is watching faking? Oh, it was just interesting
Speaker 3: to watch people so intent on doing what they thought
Speaker 3: was necessary.
Speaker 4: But no, I didn't.
Speaker 3: I didn't watch vikings as respect. I think I did
Speaker 3: it as homework. You know what I get respect from
Speaker 3: that is the healing power of the world and its people.
Speaker 3: I mean, I still proceed from the assumption and determined
Speaker 3: belief that the world is good and we're at home
Speaker 3: in it, and that the people who were made by
Speaker 3: the world are essentially good and want to do good.
Speaker 2: So if you're not an emotional optimist and you're not
Speaker 2: a dreamer, it still seems fair to say, through reading
Speaker 2: your work, you strike me as someone with a deep
Speaker 2: sense and I don't mean this in a particularly religious sense,
Speaker 2: but a sense of faith and a sense of joy.
Speaker 2: The ways in which you have reverence and love for beauty,
Speaker 2: for the natural world, for the capacity for goodness infuses
Speaker 2: all of your work, and Jewics is no exception. Many
Speaker 2: people will hear the description of this book, there are
Speaker 2: associations with dystopian fiction, and I think Tim Winton, author
Speaker 2: of The Beautiful, is still very present here in this book.
Speaker 4: Ye I think.
Speaker 3: So I mean to go back to the optimism thing,
Speaker 3: you know, And I've said this before. I don't and
Speaker 3: I'm not an emotional optimist, and I think we put
Speaker 3: too much weight on optimism as an emotion just to
Speaker 3: offset your stuff about joy and faith and beauty and
Speaker 3: all that. Optimism is a discipline. It's something that you
Speaker 3: put on. It's something that you seek and and meet
Speaker 3: and wear and arm yourself with in order to endure,
Speaker 3: to persist, and to make life bearable and bearable for others.
Speaker 3: I mean, where there is no hope, someone who gives
Speaker 3: a shit is determined to live as if hope is possible,
Speaker 3: and so I do everything in their power to engender
Speaker 3: the conditions of hope.
Speaker 4: So for me, it's we live on a miracle.
Speaker 3: You know, of all the rocks in the vastness of
Speaker 3: anoxic space and dark matter, there's one rock that we
Speaker 3: know of, and we're on it.
Speaker 4: And the odds against us.
Speaker 3: Existing on a world that's infused with creativity and regeneration.
Speaker 3: And what I think is, you know, the miraculous fact
Speaker 3: of organic life. You don't have to be very sentimental
Speaker 3: to cop to the weirdness of that. That's so absurd
Speaker 3: in my mind as to be sacred. Yeah, And so
Speaker 3: you know, I embrace the absurd, but I come at
Speaker 3: it from the other angle of existentialism, you know. And
Speaker 3: I am religious, but I'm a I guess I'm a
Speaker 3: religious existentialist. So you know, my joy in the world
Speaker 3: is corporeal. It's profane and sacred. It's not just some
Speaker 3: optimistic or high minded ethereal notion. To me, it has
Speaker 3: to be organic. So the fact that we're privileged to
Speaker 3: be living in this existence, I just feel like we
Speaker 3: should be living as if we're conscious and care.
Speaker 4: About that, that we value it.
Speaker 3: Again, going back to our earlier part of the conversation,
Speaker 3: we just have to live as if our lives and
Speaker 3: the lives of our children and the people all around
Speaker 3: us matter, as if we actually value the gift of life.
Speaker 3: And I think it's incumbent on all of us to
Speaker 3: require that people who we entrust with leadership, we have
Speaker 3: to require that they take that stuff seriously to govern
Speaker 3: on our behalf.
Speaker 4: And if they don't, I think we have to do
Speaker 4: whatever's means are.
Speaker 3: Available to us while they are available to us, to
Speaker 3: hold them too account, remove them. And when democracy no
Speaker 3: longer is available to us, well, perhaps we'll have to
Speaker 3: do that by other means.
Speaker 2: Throw the book at them.
Speaker 4: Was the bloody heavy book it would do?
Speaker 2: Look Thank you for writing the book that we can
Speaker 2: throw at them. He is hoping that they read it
Speaker 2: rather than need it through more forceful means. He's hoping,
Speaker 2: Tim Winton, thank you so much.
Speaker 4: For your time, pleasure. Thank you more.
Speaker 2: Tim Winton's new novel, Juice is available everywhere right now.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our
Speaker 1: favorite interviews from the show and listen out for upcoming
Speaker 1: conversations with Santilla Gingape and our very own Rick Morton.
Speaker 1: And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday
Speaker 1: to dive in to Read This, you can search for
Speaker 1: it wherever you listen to podcasts.