Tim Winton: ‘I lived in the worst possible space for seven years. It knocks some paint off you, I can tell you’

Two years ago, Tim Winton walked on stage at the Perth festival and delivered a blistering closing address that was, as he puts it now, “a bit like dropping a turd in the pool”. Perhaps some in the room had expected the Australian literary giant, Western Australia’s homegrown hero, to say something pretty and benign about the arts. Instead, Winton tore into fossil fuel giants Woodside and Chevron – both at that time long-term sponsors of Perth festival – with his plain-speaking, moral directness that comes through so clearly on the page.

That fossil fuel companies would – and could – sponsor cultural festivals even as they staged works about the climate crisis, was “really embarrassing. He told the room: “For, who else in the corporate world, sailing so close to reputational oblivion, could feel that safe and so confident? You reckon a brewery would put itself forward for a show about foetal alcohol syndrome? How about tobacco sponsoring ventilators for lung patients?” As he pointed out, even banks and superfunds were divesting from fossil fuels: “So how is it that the arts community should show less creativity and moral imagination than bankers?”

“It wasn’t what they thought they’d come to hear,” the 64-year-old says now. “But if that wasn’t the moment for me, then there was no moment.” He wasn’t concerned about pissing off fossil fuel executives or festival directors; he was thinking about his newest grandson, born just weeks before, and the world he was going to inherit. “I thought, if I can measure a certain level of progress in his lifetime, we’ll have managed to pick some tentacles off. The arts is suffering from the same sense of occupation that we’re all trying to unshackle ourselves from. We’re all trying to get unfucked.”

What no one in that room knew, even some people very close to him, was that Winton was writing a novel about how future generations could react if they knew climate change was the result of choices we made now. And now, after seven years, spent research and writing and agonising, Juice is finally out.

“A novelist could spend an extra 10 years trying to come to terms with climate change, but I don’t think we have that time,” he says. Writing Juice “was a strange experience”, he says, rubbing his big hands over his face. He looks haunted. “I wonder if I’ll ever recover from it.”

Juice follows an unnamed narrator in a future Australia that has been devastated by climate change: “Winters were hot. The summers lethal … locals were hardy and adaptable, but it was rare to see people of a great age. And for reasons nobody seemed to understand or discuss, the number of births had begun to wane.” Hardy survivors barely get by in constant dust storms, cyclones, fires and locust plagues, spending months of every year sheltering underground.

The narrator is recruited by the Service, a secretive activist group, which lets him in on the truth: Earth’s conditions were not inevitable, but the result of decisions made by his ancestors. “To be told that my trials were not random accidents but deliberate acts undertaken with the knowledge of their consequences? … It was infuriating to the point of derangement. It was impossible to imagine that humans had knowingly let this happen.”

Winton is well-known for his environmental activism: he has donated thousands in prize money to protect Ningaloo reef; written articles to raise awareness of whaling, the Great Barrier Reef and shark protection; scientists even named a fish after him to honour his championing of conservation in the Kimberley. Last year he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for “distinguished service to literature and to environmental advocacy”.

But even he didn’t really want to write a novel about climate change. “Can anybody pick a subject that’s more likely to turn people off, or make people roll their eyes? It is a big, abstract, wicked problem,” he says. “But a novel can solidify amorphous things in strange ways that I don’t really understand, even after 40 years of being in the caper.”

He did not tell anyone about Juice for years because he was worried someone would warn him against it. “I fessed up when it was done,” he says. “But my American publishers won’t publish it. That could be because I’m a bad bet. I’d hate to think it was because they were too afraid.”

The only thing that’s likely to save us as a species is solidarity

Tim Winton

Surely you can do anything when you’re Tim Winton, I say, and he snorts. “You say that like its a good thing!” he says. “Frankly, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing it for 40 years, it doesn’t mean you can do it this morning. You have to hypnotise yourself into believing that you can do it every day – pull your big girl’s pants up and crack on.”

Winton is exasperated that Juice is already being compared to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (“It is slightly irritating – maybe it is because there is a kid in it?”) or even Mad Max (“Furiosa was just so lame. Petro-panto for 11-year-olds.”). What frustrates him most – “apart from the stupid ideological gridlock in politics” – is that people, including artists, won’t engage with the climate crisis more imaginatively.

“You can only keep going as you are if you refuse to imagine the consequences of the way we live. If you can detect a bit of grief and rage in the book – well, you should have seen the early draft. This is the toned down version.”

Why did he tone it down?

“I guess, in the end, you want people to read it,” he says and smiles ruefully.

***

Juice is his way of “grabbing people by the lapels”. On the day we speak, a new report warns that almost 68% of Australia’s tourism sites will be at major risk by 2050 if the climate crisis continues . “2050 used to sound far away,” Winton says. “My grandkids will be at uni then.”

Winton now has six grandchildren. Much of the grief he has felt while researching the science of climate change has been imagining their future. He shares an ugly statistic: a child born now will face 24 times more extreme climate events than a child born in the 1960s . “I was born in 1960. Most of our political leaders and corporate leaders were born in the 60s. So in that sense, this is already real. The world has already changed,” he says.

In some ways, it changed for the better: both of Winton’s parents left school in their mid-teens, and his grandparents at 11 or 12. He was the first in his family to attend university; he got to live overseas; built a career in the arts. “My life is radically different to theirs, in a good way. But when I look into my grandchildren’s faces, I can’t tell myself that,” Winton says. “That’s deeply haunting. That’s one of the reasons why I wrote this book and lived in the worst possible space for seven years. It knocks some paint off you, I can tell you.”

He has seen first-hand how his part of the world has changed (“I know what it feels like in 50 degrees”), but spending years looking at scientists’ models changed him. “We’re on a razor’s edge,” he says. “The consequences of our decisions now will be the biggest in our species’ history. Can you imagine a generation of people who could, by the way that they act over less than a decade, have such a profound consequence for those who come after?” he asks.

“I feel that gravity every day. To feel that our legacy might be one of shame is – well, it concentrates the mind,” he says, and laughs that sad laugh again.

***

Winton’s world is contained in interesting ways. His wife Denise was a childhood friend; he first asked her to marry him when he was nine. Where he lives in WA is “1,000 miles away from the nearest bookshop”. He adores cinema but hasn’t trekked out to the movies in five years. On the east coast, Juice has just come off the presses but he’s always the last person to see his books: “I’ve got to get on a camel, or maybe someone will send a pigeon over.” He rarely flies now, and won’t be touring Juice overseas.

Multiple times throughout our interview he brings up his hero: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pacifist who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Winton is a devout man, a pacifist, but he’s fascinated by radical, even violent, activism. He brings up Andreas Malm, the Swedish climate activist and author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline: “Malm has written about the strange meekness of the current climate movement. I don’t share all his views, but I think that is a really interesting point. As the weather gets worse, as people get more desperate – anybody who’s read history can see what happens next.”

He doesn’t believe there will be “Nuremberg trials for climate criminals”, but that doesn’t mean those responsible for the climate crisis won’t be remembered, he says. “There are a couple of generations of people in Europe who’ve been wrestling with the fate of six million people. Further east, over the fate of 20 million people. What about the fate of billions?” he asks. “We’re all living in The Zone of Interest. Nobody can say we didn’t know.”

Related: Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread | Tim Winton

Who are the climate criminals – fossil fuel executives, polluters, politicians? “It’s not for me, like some Jeremiah, to wave my knobbly stick at anybody,” Winton says. “History will be the judge. Just go up the pyramid and see who’s living at the top. And they’re already afraid.” He sees proof in this in how world governments are cracking down on activists in record numbers over non-violent protests.

“This is the thing that shocks me: nobody’s bombing them,” Winton says, then adds, heavily: “Yet.”

***

Without spoiling Juice, the narrator and his comrades resort to violent means. While Winton anticipates violence in our future, he dreads it too. “How long is this going to go before it gets really ugly? Anyone who doesn’t think that’s a real, potent possibility, I don’t think they’re paying attention,” he says. “It’s certainly not something that I’m encouraging. But one of my great heroes was a pacifist who tried to murder Hitler.

“Perhaps I’ve already said too much,” he adds with a laugh. “This book is an attempt to shock people into thinking about that possibility. It’s my way of saying, let’s save this before it gets to that.”

Winton still feels hope that things can change. “When you read the accounts of people in extremis, in war and catastrophe, it’s interesting that they live as if hope is reasonable and possible, even if the things you say to your children in the rubble can’t be substantiated.

“We discount the power of our determination, but I think that’s what will save us. We won’t be saved by our scientific genius. The only thing that’s likely to save us as a species is solidarity.”

Just as he did on that stage in Perth, in moments he feels himself falter he thinks of his grandchildren. “I want there to be a world that will still feed them and theirs. That’s what I’m fighting for. That’s what I’m writing for.”

• Juice by Tim Winton is out now in Australia (Penguin Random House) and on 17 October 2024 in the UK (Picador)