“There was no apocalypse, no singular cataclysmic event… just the passing of each day under the accumulating weight of evidence….” That’s how a new, landmark Tasmanian novel set a few decades into the future describes the changing climate just before it began really hurting.
Climate change and its inseparable companion, environmental destruction, should get all the attention in this election campaign, but elections are ruled by one thing: money or its absence. This is a plea to pause before you vote, switch off the party noise and read a good book. And think.
Our noise drowns out the rest of Creation. Again and again, humans have shown that they can cause great damage to Earth’s life systems without noticing a thing. If only we could stop and listen, we might hear the plaintive call of the currawong.
The Clinking, Susie Greenhill’s remarkable debut novel (it takes its name from the currrawong call), is about suffering: the suffering of the nature we are steadily destroying, and the suffering of people. It is a voice that Earth’s life systems – notably but not only those here on our southern island – desperately need.
Daughter of Hobart biologist Julia Greenhill and her late husband John, an astronomer, Greenhill grew up in a household that encouraged an open mind and a deep respect for nature. Her own intellectual journey won her a PhD in a non-science field, along with the award that kick-started her career as a novelist, the 2016 Richell Prize for emerging writers.
In the story Elena, a climate refugee from Colombia, tries to engage her husband Tom in their shared responsibility for their daughter Orla. But Tom, a specialist in the impact of climate change on species and habitats, becomes consumed with grief over continuing extinctions. One winter’s night he disappears.
Weeks later, a terrifying storm hits southern Australia, destroying their Hobart home. In the wake of the storm Kit, a climate activist who brought Tom and Elena together, meets up with Elena and Orla, and together they decide to search for the man they love. Following a hunch, they undertake an arduous journey into the island’s wild south-west.
Our natural future – the fate of coasts, valleys and flood plains, of forests and savannahs and peatlands ravaged by drought and fire, storm and flood, and of the myriad species that inhabit them – is vividly and convincingly imagined by the author.
Greenhill now lives with her son on a Huon Valley coast facing Bruny Island and the Southern Ocean. Most of the time it’s an idyllic part of Tasmania, but recently aquaculture workers had to remove from Greenhill’s beloved beach odorous fatty globules that had drifted out of salmon pens where tens of thousands of fish had expired in warming waters. Climate change at work.
You can find any amount of vision and words recording what climate change does to nature, and it’s all deeply disturbing. But Greenhill’s most telling future insight is about us, the social element. About people and how they relate to each other.
While Tom is grieving for his beloved natural world, Elena is justifiably angry over his apparent abandonment of her and their daughter, who has developed a close attachment to her father that complicates his bleak outlook on the future of humanity.
“There aren’t many more effective ways to shape the future than planting a seed,” a family friend says early in the narrative, talking about tree plantings by the Food Resilience Network. “A child is a seed,” says Elena a few pages on. “I can think of no way of honouring life more, than by creating it.”
It seems Elena knows something Tom doesn’t: that when push comes to shove, when all else seems lost, connecting and staying connected with others is what truly counts. While understanding and valuing our absolute dependence on the natural world, we must also stay in touch with humanity.
That conundrum has been present in Greenhill’s life, which was turned upside down in the buildup to the 2019-20 Black Summer fires when her son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. His condition requires a daily injection of insulin, a life-long dependence that makes him especially vulnerable to supply chain fluctuations.
There is an edge about this book, likely reinforced by that searing personal experience, which sets it apart from everything else I’ve read about a future that is not somewhere out there but here, now. The Clinking is a beautiful, important story for our own time and place.
GREENHILL is one of 50 Tasmanian writers represented in Voices of the Southern Ocean, a UNESCO City of Literature anthology launched in Hobart last week.