How Climate Anxiety Is Changing The Face Of Australian Fiction

Sydney Morning Herald - Broede Carmody

When Jennifer Mills began writing her Miles Franklin longlisted book Dyschronia in 2011, there weren't a great deal of Australian novels grappling with a post climate change world.
Fast forward several years and a large number of critically-acclaimed works have featured some sort of environmental catastrophe. Australian publishers and booksellers have even adopted a term to help classify the string of books blurring the lines between genre and literary fiction: cli-fi.
"It's an exciting time to be a novelist," Mills says. "But in some ways I wish it wasn't."


Australia lacks a national environment policy amid the increasing impact of climate change according to a scathing independent environment report. Courtesy ABC News 24.

Mills believes climate change seeping its way into fiction reflects a broader trend in Australia: one in which we debate school students protesting in the streets and people from all sides of politics coming together to remember the legacy of former prime minister Bob Hawke as a strong leader on environmental issues.
"All novels are Anthropocene novels," she says (the Anthropocene is the current geological age characterised by human-induced climate change and mass extinction, according to scientists). "I don't feel very positive about the future – I feel quite angry and upset. We're stuck in this real sense of loss and grief. But it's also too soon for grief. There's still a lot we can do. Stories create catharsis. We can use that catharsis to get past the paralysis."

"All novels are Anthropocene novels... We're stuck in this real sense of loss and grief"

Jane Rawson, who has written a novel set in a future, tropical Melbourne, isn't surprised that climate change is a more prominent theme in Australian fiction than 10 years ago.
"Drought and fire, in particular, are long-running themes in Australian literature," she says. "So a climate-changed version of that is pretty comfortable terrain for an Australian writer."

Australian author Mireille Juchau believes writers can help make the climate change debate more nuanced and empathetic. Credit: James Brickwood

Sydney-based author Mireille Juchau is another writer who explores ecological disasters. Her most recent novel, The World Without Us, won a Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 2016 and was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize. The book explores grief and family through a world in which bees are dying out as a result of climate change. It has also been optioned for television.
Juchau believes climate change novels are popular because Australians are increasingly bombarded with alarming statistics. Fiction, she believes, is uniquely placed to explore what happens when those projections become reality.
"I feel like the current political debate – not just in this country, but particularly in this country – is impoverished," she says. "Fiction can help fill those gaps by providing a much more nuanced, exciting, imaginative and profound exploration of what is happening in our current moment. Fiction has this unique ability to articulate the inner life."
James Bradley, who has featured climate breakdown in several of his books, agrees.

Jennifer Mills says she hopes fiction can help people work through their fear and anger over climate change. 

"It's not a coincidence there are so many dystopias around or that we keep telling stories about zombies and the undead, or even time travel stories," he says. "They're all expressions of a larger sense of a future that's slipping out of our control."
But Victoria University professor and author of the new book The White Girl, Tony Birch, is sceptical about what kind of impact "cli-fi" books can have on people's opinions – let alone government policy.
"I've read some really great fiction dealing with climate change and I hope the genre continues," he says. "But like any other form of communication, its impact will remain limited while we are subject to the deafening shriek of denialism."
Potential outcomes aside, Mills says one thing is clear: these themes aren't going away any time soon. Frequent bushfires and rising oceans haven't been restricted to fiction, either. Flood Damages, a book by young Australian poet Eunice Andrada, recently won the prestigious Anne Elder Award.
"Having done six years of fiction editing ... I've read a lot of emerging writers' submissions," Mills says. "If anything, the new  generation of writers are more passionate about this, more engaged and more aware."

Links

• 7 Novels That Will Fire You Up About Climate Change 
• Could Cli-Fi Help Inspire Real Climate Change Action?
• How Climate-Change Fiction, Or “Cli-Fi,” Forces Us To Confront The Incipient Death Of The Planet
• Planet Earth Calling Doctor Who’s New Time Lady: Save Us
• 10 Climate Change Books To Help You Understand Our Environment
• 8 Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any Classroom