Geography before History

All the world’s an orange. A sun-fucked husk of an orange, to be precise, with an equatorial band of desiccated flesh laid bare. This citrus serves as a mother’s object lesson, its exposed pith her memorable means of teaching her twelve-year-old son how the globe came to be deformed by anthropogenic climate change. As the fruit of a postlapsarian orchard, it offers knowledge of a new exodus. Those who remain must subsist ‘North of Cancer, south of Capricorn’, where the rind is still intact. There, they shelter in the shade, tend fragile crops, conserve water. There, when the seasons change and the risk of calenture increases, they retreat below ground for months at a time. When the heat becomes bearable, they rise and converge, the reclusive few who live on homesteads travelling to hamlets to exchange necessities. There, at a safe distance from the equator, they eke out what you could call a life. They endure, in the mother’s striking turn of phrase, ‘Where there’s still skin’.

In Juice (2024), Tim Winton’s latest tome, there’s still skin – just about. But almost everyone’s complexion is visibly damaged, and characters navigate a social order in which skin is no longer visible in the way that it once was, in which it has ceased to mean much of what it does to us today. One minor character is distinguished by ‘the cankers on his cheeks, the piece of his brow missing’, another by the ‘patchwork of burn scars at her neck’. A veterinarian is ‘freckled with white scab and a couple of darker lesions’. Then there are the commonplace deformities: ‘every soul you met had a white scab, and many suffered pink cankers that ate at them slowly.’ Skin must now be covered by clothing or sun-paste when outdoors, lest it be burned to the point of scarification: exposed limbs routinely bear ‘the same white lesions you see on everyone’, what the homesteaders euphemise as the ‘work of weather’. Yet this repeated attention to dermal texture goes hand in hand with an absence of concern for skin tone. Agrarian living in the wake of climate disaster has diminished rather than intensified the problem of whether other people happen to be black, white, beige, pink, or tan. It’s not the colour but the condition of one’s skin that is now freighted with meaning.

The reasons for so profound a shift are for the most part left implicit. Characters do not comment on it. At no point in Juice is substantive reference made to the social practice of distinguishing between, or discriminating against, individuals based on their skin colour – not even as the proclivity of a bygone world order. When ‘Countrymen’ (the novel’s filial term for its First Nations characters) eventually make an appearance, they too are ‘scarified’, the fact of racial difference indicated primarily by the descriptor ‘dark’. And they are the exemption that proves the rule. Instead, the novel imagines an amnesiac future in which catastrophic global warming has made one of the most conspicuous signs of racial difference all but negligible. Thus the skin of the narrator’s wife Sun is suggestively ‘darker’ than his, but it invites comment primarily because it is ‘unblemished’ – though her name, her ‘almond eyes’, and her family’s ties to what the novel refers to as the Hermit Kingdom imply she may be of Korean descent (this epithet for a nation that wilfully isolates itself originating in William Elliot Griffis’ Corea: The Hermit Nation [1882]). When Sun claims that ‘the only honest story we have is the one our faces tell’, the question of racial difference is floated only to be foreclosed a few sentences later. ‘And maybe that was interesting once, when faces like ours weren’t so common. But these days, really, who cares?’

Melanin, in Juice, has ceased to be a matter of much interest. To descend from survivors in this novel is to be a new kind of minority – the living – which now entails solidarities and hostilities outside racial lines. As an axis of identity, race means as little to the novel’s unnamed narrator as it does to his interlocutor and captor, who is known only as the bowman. The narrator, we learn, was recruited as a young man by a paramilitary organisation known as the Service: for most of his adult life he has worked as an operator, a hitman leading teams of like-minded assassins to eradicate the descendants of oligarchs, their children, their associates, and their servants, dispensing retributive violence in the name of climate justice. He spells it out to his captor, sans identifiers:

In lieu of humans we are given professions, specifically those of a target’s predecessors. The operators are not concerned with the details of their target’s identity because they see themselves as taking ‘the long view’. This is a vantage point from which individuals are so many entries in a family tree, from which living beings can be safely expunged in the name of righting past or portended wrongs.

Like the boy who anxiously scopes out the sidewalk from his parents’ bedroom window in Winton’s 2004 short story ‘Long, Clear View’, Winton here gives us a character who temporarily effaces himself to embody a perspective. The narrator and his teammates ‘were the long view’, and it is in this capacity that they see themselves as working in the service of memory: to preserve the memory of inequality, they claim, one must eradicate its present-day beneficiaries. Simply to remember the professions of their victims’ forebears (bankers, lawyers) is to make them legitimate targets for retributive violence – targets marked by the primary sign of inherited class in this world, namely, skin:

Pallid, unmarked skin – the eerily slick complexion, perhaps, of a distant inbred descendant of Gina Rinehart – makes this beneficiary of inherited wealth a corpulent nonentity, quasi-majestic yet anomalous. The ‘dregs of the beneficiary class’ keep out of the sun in self-contained ‘citadels’, an arrangement that produces an immediately recognisable difference between the bodies of the haves and have-nots: this is a world in which class has become every bit as conspicuous as the skin on one’s face.

What makes Juice worth the squeeze – what makes it easily, in my view, Winton’s best novel since Breath (2008), perhaps even since Cloudstreet (1991) – are the political contradictions it unpicks through its racialisation of class. ‘The only form of political correctness the right will tolerate’, writes Winton in ‘Using the C-Word’ (2013), ‘is the careful elision of class from public discourse’: this elision is ideologically appealing to a certain type of conservative because it permits ‘poverty and wealth’ to be mistaken for ‘manifestations of character’. Writing against this elision, Juice’s skin-fic returns class to our social conscience and political lexicon with a vengeance, imagining a world in which inherited wealth has taken on the nominal legibility of racial difference. If race, as André Dao writes, ‘like gender and class and sexuality’, is just one of many ‘socially constructed system[s] for […] making certain differences matter’, then part of its social durability as a ‘useful fiction’ stems from its sheer visibility, its status as a ‘cruder signifier’. This is a political fantasy in which one index of difference has attained interpretive priority, in which crude signifiers have grown cruder still, in which skin has become a way of seeing that material differences matter.

Read less sympathetically, Juice’s central conceit might well seem a further illustration of Melissa Lucashenko’s charge that, ‘like a million Australian rednecks, Winton must ignore or distance himself from whiteness’. In the revised version of her essay ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’, included in her collection Not Quite White in the Head (2025), Lucashenko cites an interview in which Winton describes his realisation that he is a European only in the sense that his skin happens to be ‘pink’: his ‘whiteness is something too difficult to claim’, Lucashenko argues, and so he makes a ‘feeble joke’ in a way that works to ‘deny a cultural and racial position he was born into’.

One can imagine Winton retorting that his purpose is less to deny than to specify: he was born and raised ‘antipodean’; Europe is for him a foreign continent. And Juice, Winton might insist, is not a novel that evades the category of whiteness so much as it refuses the privileging of race over class or geography as the proper grounds of identity. It wouldn’t quite be right to say that his characters are cagey about skin – none of them skirt the subject or otherwise allay their insecurities by emphatically insisting that they don’t see colour. It’d be more accurate to claim, as Walter Benn Michaels has of The Great Gatsby, that Juice ‘takes one kind of difference (the difference between the rich and the poor) and redescribes it as another kind of difference (the difference between the white and the not-so-white)’. It’s a redescription that provocatively manipulates the axes of progressive political sentiment: it repurposes the politics of identity to an end that is both radically conservationist (the colour of your skin is irrelevant because the uber-rich have wrecked the climate to the point where almost everyone’s a ‘redneck’) and radically redistributive (the slow violence of inequality is made as plain as the nose on your face).

Then there’s the sting in the tail. While the persecution of the descendants of those deemed most responsible for the state of the world is something with which we might be tempted to sympathise, in Winton’s de-historicised dystopia, it is rendered as an at least residually racial form of bigotry. This is what it means for a professional killer to be repulsed by the sight of his target’s unblemished skin. A disturbing epidermis, here, is part of the rationale for climate justice. Noticing this complicates the sense in which, as Tara June Winch observes in her admiring review, Juice retells the story of those historically ‘displaced, disfranchised and dispossessed’ by colonialism ‘within the story of [those] newly displaced, disfranchised and dispossessed’ by anthropogenic climate change. When the narrator half-heartedly suggests to his wife that his ‘people were refugees too, I guess’, she accepts though qualifies the claim: his people were ‘Internal refugees’, she retorts, a phrase that also happens to describe the way the novel contrives a scenario in which settlers now understand themselves to be exiles. He also claims to experience indigeneity, of a kind, though his mother is quick to remind him that the ‘old people’ he sensed the presence of while sketching in a rock shelter are ‘not our old people’; that he’s ‘just feeling people’. This tendency to reach for personhood accounts for some of the narrator’s readiness to assert the humanity of persecuted artificial intelligences – such as the solar-powered humanoid ‘sim’, known only as ‘the woman’ – who elicit a sympathy otherwise incongruous in so tech-averse a novel.

What might be dismissed from a certain angle as blokey class fundamentalism, then, is more accurately described as a series of political and ethical transpositions, in the tangle of which lies much of this novel’s enduring interest. Yet the most provocative of all these transpositions is surely that Juice is a tale in which the retributive violence perpetrated by the newly dispossessed can never quite shake its resemblance to ethnic cleansing, a pogrom, or genocide. These new perpetrators never learn enough about their past to notice the repetition. ‘[I]t’s kinder to acquit [children] along with the object’, quips a medic, because kidnapped youths ‘sowed disquiet in their communities’ whenever reintegration was attempted. ‘[T]here was no way to disguise their oddness’, the medic continues: ‘They presented as defective’. The most obvious historical precedent to this program of child removal and assimilation (here turned mercy killing) never occurs to these characters. Empire, in this novel, refers only to an epoch of oligarchs, whose ‘roots spread to every part of the globe like the tendrils of a cancer’. Like obliviously begets like. At such moments, Juice seems less a post-apocalyptic epic than an anachronistic revenge tragedy: a vigilante’s tale of wild injustice enacted upon the phocine scions of monsters long dead, thereby repeating the sins of their colonial forebears, for crimes committed on a scale no nation’s law could ever adequately punish. To misquote Thomas Middleton: the bad are made to bleed, but the tragedy is no longer good.

A tragedy of this kind can nonetheless be the basis for a good novel. This is not so far from what Paul Giles has in mind when he remarks that the ‘particular strength’ of Winton’s ‘mature aesthetic’ lies in its ‘openness to contradiction and alternative possibilities’. States of contradiction are the novel’s bread and butter. To believe this is to believe, as Henry James once quipped, that novels are ‘large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary’; it is to notice, as Winton does in his essay ‘Born of nightmares’, the neat fit of the novel form with the ‘psychic, political and chemical’ monsters unleashed by fossil capitalism, not to mention the appropriateness of a plot driven by the realisation that one’s ‘ancestors were monsters, that those who came before you committed atrocities on a scale unprecedented in human history, crimes against life itself’.

To write this kind of novel is to locate oneself within a genealogy of man-made horrors avenging themselves on their creators. This dates back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s hyper-canonical Frankenstein, a debt Winton makes explicit in the aforementioned essay. Frankenstein, in Winton’s biographical reading, mourns the child lost at birth to a sixteen-year-old Shelley; Juice, meanwhile, laments the nightmare that its author’s six ‘grandchildren’s grandchildren might be fated to live’. It’s a generic lineage so compelling one could easily forget that cli-fi parables haven’t always been deemed an acceptable basis for literary fiction. Recall Amitav Ghosh’s much-discussed account of this problematic in The Great Derangement. Just a decade ago it could still seem plausible that the sheer scale of climate change rendered it a subject innately inhospitable to ‘the techniques that are most closely identified with the novel’, insofar as ‘its essence consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled’ from realism’s purview on the grounds of their ‘unthinkable magnitude’. These were thought to be contradictions too large to plausibly contain, even for the novel.

But by 2024, as Winton writes in his essay ‘Writing in nature’, one could identify a sizable cohort of Australian authors who steadfastly refuse ‘to obscure geography’ in their fiction, who endeavour to inculcate ‘organic literacy’ in their readers, who share his sincere faith that the imperilled state of the natural world is the contemporary author’s ‘most pressing and intimate subject’. Now in his mid-sixties, Winton finds much to admire in the work of ‘Robbie Arnott, Alexis Wright, Laura Jean McKay, James Bradley, Kate Mildenhall, Greg Day, Jock Serong and so many others at work changing the cultural geography’. The tide, it seems, has decisively turned. To Winton’s list we might append Briohny Doyle, Inga Simpson, Madeleine Watts, and Rhett Davis, to add just a few more writers who – with varying degrees of success – have allegorised or otherwise portrayed the reality of climate change in their novels. While for Winton this outpouring demonstrates that our cultural scene has moved beyond a ‘peculiarly vexed form of cosmopolitanism’, when ‘geography was being erased by acts of corporate bastardry and by academic abstractions’, the preponderance of postgraduate degrees and university perches among the above listees suggests eco-fiction is more amenable to instrumentalising research paradigms than he might like to imagine. Though debate will no doubt ensue as to the cause, few would dispute that writing literary cli-fi is now, in a serendipitous twist of fate, a way of cresting the cultural wave.

One account of Juice would thus frame it as a kind of apotheosis, the culmination of years of dedicated literary activism that has coincided with – and even to a degree produced – the renaissance of conservationism in this country. Compare the first decade of Winton’s career to the decade leading up to Juice: between 1982 and 1992 Winton wrote five literary novels – An Open Swimmer (1982), Shallows (1984), That Eye, the Sky (1986), In the Winter Dark (1988), and Cloudstreet (1991) – or seven, if we include Jesse (1988) and Lockie Leonard: Human Torpedo (1990), plus two minimalist short story collections, Scission (1985) and Minimum of Two (1987). Nine books in all. Contrast this with his output between 2014 and 2024: two novels written six years apart, The Shepherd’s Hut and Juice, two book-length works of autobiographical non-fiction, Island Home (2015) and The Boy Behind the Curtain (2016), and numerous essays in online fora. But four titles on the bookshelf, for the record.

Lest this be mistaken for a dip in productivity, in ‘Writing in nature’ Winton gives us good reason to believe otherwise: in lieu of just writing novels, he has thoroughly ‘road-tested the utility of language in defence of nature’, penning countless

Note the alliterative contortions of this seemingly off-the-cuff checklist, the embarrassed hint of a mumble at the memory of a writer made to implore ‘movie stars, musos, premiers and prime ministers’, or the self-deprecating verbal shrug that takes him from ‘social media posts; stickers; banners’ back to ‘stuff in several respectable registers’. Winton can’t resist these little flourishes, even when describing what has kept him from his more literary work.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how Juice is a fictional corollary to these prosaic labours, its narrator’s long period of paramilitary service an extension in extremis of the three-plus decades Winton has dedicated to the ‘redneck wing of the [marine conservation] movement’, to use the description he prefers in another essay, ‘The Battle for Ningaloo Reef’. This is not for a moment to imply that the delightfully named ‘Ninga-turtles’, a band of motley volunteers he recalls ‘gussied up in blue body stockings’ and carting ‘plastic laundry baskets on their backs’, bear any resemblance whatsoever to the novel’s teams of trained murderers. And there is of course no substantive basis for comparison between the ‘corporate types, nervy scientists and dreadlocked vegans’ with whom Winton worked and Juice’s drought-hardened cast: by the time the novel takes place, these professions and hairstyles have long since been driven to extinction. But what of the ‘battle of worldviews’ in which Winton has repeatedly taken up arms against the ‘quarry mentality’ of ‘spiv ethics’, not to mention ‘the lingering settler ethos, the colonial assumption that nature exists to be exploited’ underlying it?

This is the conviction that has driven the warming of Winton; this is what, no doubt, has drawn a new generation of readers to Juice. His novel’s battle of ideas is set long after the exploitative view’s near-total ideological victory, at a time when the history of organised opposition to this ethos has been all but forgotten. Its narrator has little time for the dogma of his instructors in the service, who hold that he has been ‘born into a generation of quietists’ whose hard-won ‘hardiness and competence […] were just a veneer over a deep instinct for evasion’. Born in 1960, Winton can count himself among the baby boomer offspring of the silent generation; his narrator here objects to a characterisation of his parents as salt-of-the-earth battlers wary of dwelling on the history of ecological exploitation behind their present circumstances. For Winton, this alienating blame game is a misstep because the roots of popular conservationism lie in a felt connection to place, and we do little to support the health of the project when we truncate this feeling in its naïve forms. Realising the irreplaceability, even the inimitability, of what Winton calls ‘our natural heritage’ has been the explicit aim of almost all his non-fiction writing, and an implicit ambition of just about every novel of his – from Dirt Music (2001) to The Shepherd’s Hut (2018) – since the turn of the millennium. It is this ethos that reaches its apotheosis in Juice.

But there are equally clear lines of descent we might track all the way back to the first two decades of his career. One could attend, for instance, to his immersion in the regionalist canon as an undergraduate at the WAIT (now Curtin University). In Island Home, Winton recalls whiling away the breaks between semesters by fishing, surfing, and leafing through ‘next term’s set texts under dripping canvas in a fug of wood smoke – Faulkner, Twain, Hardy, Conrad’, a syllabus that stoked in him the desire to ‘do something like that on the southern coast’. A series of concentric wrongs relocates this nascent literary identity as, in a certain sense, oppositional: he felt he was ‘writing from the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere’. This goes some way toward explaining his tastes in fiction. From Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro he learned ‘cussedness’, a ‘refusal to come to heel’ by abandoning the demotic, a determination to ‘train your editors to read you’. When the mood strikes him, Winton can hold up the worn lineaments of a sci-fi scene – its straightforward syntax, its utilitarian portmanteaus – to the sturdier prose of his old modernist flames:

Like the ‘hard morning light’, Winton’s inherited sensibilities continue to define the shape of Juice’s bids for an ever-broader readership. With the arrival of morning they ‘sharpen’, ‘etch’, and ‘silver’: once ‘riven with canyon shadows, the immutable range’ comes to seem all the more so, as a landscape that can be revealed only in relief. Even his neologisms – ‘winterhouses’, ‘shade sails’, ‘growsheds’ – feel natural, and are integrated into the sunrise with a devout realist’s precision. Cli-fi might be new territory, but these are sentences that remain unmistakably Wintonian.

As, for that matter, does the countervailing tendency: his penchant for collapsing lyricism into puerility. Take Juice’s evocation, practically thundered, of a team exposed to an ash storm: ‘But those katabatic winds were mighty. […] The noise was unearthly. The sound of pure suffering. As if something were unwinding, prolapsing catastrophically around us. […] The world is pushing itself through its own arsehole.’ A spiritual descendant, surely, of the well-known scene in Cloudstreet in which the reality of an epiphanic moment between two brothers as they float upriver is crowned by a Joycean intrusion:

Prone to parody as moments like this are – and sure enough, there’s an account on X gleefully devoted to doing so – their cheery crassness could hardly be accused of missing its mark, like the kind of unapologetic dad joke told to make children groan. High seriousness is rather like the sphincter – or is it doing the shunting? – which his prose prolapses for us. This is all to say that Winton has a way of keeping his thumb on the pulse of the common man, or at least a pinkie to his prostate.

Yet there is at least one element of Cloudstreet that Juice has set aside. In a word, history. By this I don’t just mean the difference between the novels’ temporal settings (two decades from the lifetime of Winton’s grandparents, as opposed to several decades from the lifetime of his great-great-grandchildren), or between the structures of feeling that underpin them (Cloudstreet’s nostalgia for the recent past; Juice’s desiderium for our present). History is absent from Juice in the sense that the past is no longer the ground of self-definition for Winton’s characters. It’s barely remembered, having been transmuted into the vagaries of saga and myth. Instead, geography is what tells you who you are.

In the world of Juice, characters refer to themselves as ‘northerners’, ‘southerners’, ‘equatorials’, ‘homesteaders’, ‘plainsmen’, and ‘cityfolk’ – designations that can be confirmed on first glance. They aren’t bigoted, but they can tell after a few minutes of conversation whether or not someone has ‘been abroad’. To the typical plainsman, one’s provenance is more readily noticed than one’s epidermis. ‘You sound like you’re from the East,’ the narrator remarks to his captor, by way of beginning his story. He is later proven correct: the bowman admits he hails from Sydney, or at least that ‘People can’t help where they’re from.’ The continent they share is no longer a nation-state presided over by a government, because the organising social unit is now the ‘syndicate’ or ‘direct association’. This is implied to be the case elsewhere, too. Worldwide, the local reigns supreme. Juice is a typical work of postapocalyptic fiction in this regard: as Mark McGurl writes, the genre’s ‘deepest commitment is to the construction and defense of the romantic idyll, the reassuringly small and pointedly non- or post-capitalist community’. We can also see this commitment latent in Winton’s longstanding interest in makeshift families defined by their missing members: Fred and Billie in The Riders; Georgie and Jim in Dirt Music; Pikelet, Loonie and Sando in Breath; Keely, Gemma and Kai in Eyrie. In the long shadow of Cloudstreet’s packed-to-the-rafters household, these duos and trios consistently attempt to reassemble some form of collective that might draw its constituents beyond self-interest.

But Juice is unusual for the rhetorical force with which it elaborates (and eventually sunders) this idyll, its commitment to delimiting the close-knit family at its heart. ‘Geography before history’, the narrator’s mother advises him, in a lesson plan that is simultaneously legible as a roadmap for their reconfiguration of identity. ‘Geography is destiny’, she later quips, while ‘blood tells many stories’, a maxim that takes things a step further by elevating locality over biology as the force that exerts a determining influence over one’s future. Her inadvertent allusion is to the philosopher Auguste Comte: geography has replaced Comte’s ‘demography’ as the new providential force in an age after the end of nation-states. Analogous substitutions recur. Much the same elision lies behind a little dictum that reframes the question of who as a matter of where: ‘This is me. This is where I’m from.’ Teetering on the cusp of banality and profundity, utterances of this kind belie the force of conviction that animates them – what we might call the migrant’s hope that to labour on land is eventually to define oneself by it. In this novel ‘we are where we find ourselves’, rather than, by implication, where our ancestors once found themselves. For the rich to have skin that demonstrates they have ‘never stood under the sun’ is for them to belong nowhere on earth. Down a ‘dank hole’, Winton’s narrator feels ‘different’: ‘Claimed. Not by blood or clan. By everything. Things themselves. Life, I suppose’. One can just about flip to a page at random and find a permutation of this grounded philosophy. ‘If we make it work here, then we’re from here’, quips the narrator to his warden. ‘Don’t you think?’

Do we? Perhaps this is an instance of a thought within a novel ‘that belongs to the work as distinct from its characters, authors, or narrators’, as Timothy Bewes has written of recent fiction. Or perhaps not. Many of Juice’s maxims seem pretty much interchangeable with what Winton thinks, or at least has claimed to think, albeit dialled up a few decibels. In his non-fiction, he minces few words: ‘Geography trumps all’ is the tagline in Island Home, a statement that summarises his view that even the history of the oldest continuous culture on earth is ‘overshadowed by the scale and insistence of the land that inspired it’. Though he intends no disrespect by this, it’s clear that his belief in the pre-eminence of place operates in a state of tension with those who see a historical connection to a culture or ethnicity as more fundamental to their sense of self. We might call this a continental, even hemispheric, formulation of group identity, in which the self is a function of impersonal scale. This is what is implied when Winton says he is ‘calibrated differently to a European’; he’s ‘antipodean enough’, he avers, to take seriously the idea that culture is ‘what you console yourself with once wild landscape has been subsumed’. A shared sense of locality is the basis of his non-racial, sub-national account of identity. It is ‘geography, distance and weather’, Winton insists, that have ‘moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations. […] Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family.’ (Note how even the influence of family is redescribed as geological.) These are the stakes in their baldest form: in Winton’s view, lived experience of a place matters at least as much to who you claim to be as the place your forebears called home. In an age of mass immigration, such a view, for Winton, holds out the best hope of a conservationism that is at once genuinely populist and authentically felt.

If Juice is the apotheosis of Winton’s career as an activist, it is also the apotheosis of this account of identity. It is an account with an emphatic reverence for land rights, to be sure: when, near the end of the novel, the narrator encounters a group of Countrymen during his flight south-west, they tell him he ‘can’t be here’ and he accedes to their request with barely a moment’s hesitation. Here, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of respect for traditional custodianship. Given how taciturn Winton’s Countrymen are, this set piece seems more or less a rewriting of the opening of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, in which the would-be settler now respectfully heeds rather than impertinently issues the call to ‘Be off!’ By repeating Grenville’s considered refusal to ventriloquise, Winton avoids the pitfall of appropriation, at the cost of leaving relatively unelaborated the conflict between the climate refugee’s dire need for asylum and the Countrymen’s rightful claim to sovereignty. In its reluctance to stage an engagement with the questions that its plot barrels headlong towards, this scene functions as something like the narrative equivalent of the land acknowledgements that preface many recent novels, though these often read as anxiously performative in a way that Winton’s scene does not. Juice simply opts for respectful silence in lieu of further reflection. It raises the quandary, then elects to say no more.

Perhaps it is unfair to suggest that this is a question to which any one novel could possibly provide an answer. Arguably, this question is simply an enunciation of the central dilemma of contemporary Australian climate fiction, the cliffs against which countless recent novels have splintered themselves. Tact could hardly be called a flaw, even if an excess of it might pose a problem for a novelist, might make them reluctant to render all their characters lamentably human.

By the end of Juice, the narrator has left most of the trappings of his identity behind him. He has written his name in the dirt, then erased it. He hopes the little girl he protects will remember it. He has left her a ‘chisel-edge old as human consciousness […] an expression of the earth, a signal of time’, a tool ‘chosen, then flaked, carried hand to hand from inland to the coast’. He hopes she will think of him, and come to see herself as a maker, not a destroyer. He elects not to run from the bolt in his back, because to do so would leave her exposed. He doesn’t know who she is, who her parents are, or where she’s from. Not even her name. This is the conservationist’s relation to an unknowable future, or Winton’s to his grandchildren’s grandchildren.

And yet it does not end there. This book plagued by drought ends with a dream of rising from the ocean after having become ‘a thing of the sea’; it ends with the dreamer’s fantasy of breaking through the surface, ‘the skin between me and the world beyond’. Having done so, this holy leviathan whales in air ‘as cool and clean as the deeps themselves’ and stretches his ‘limbs to float and glory in it, [his] skin mottled with moving shadows’ cast by a ‘constellation of hovering birds’. As a being or entity in a social order, this creature is all but illegible. What it portends is as slippery as its skin, or the skin it breaks through. All we might say is that life here returns when there is no skin between the self and the world beyond, when a body finds itself exactly where it ought to be.