The Rewilding features a young person who is passionate to the point of fanaticism about promoting her version of “rewilding”. She believes it is too late to stop the disasters that will engulf the world because of climate change and yet does all she can to persuade everyone to forsake their climate-destroying habits. Her ‘loyalty is to the Earth, the reef, the trees, all living things, now and at the hour of my death’. Her name is Nia. She practises what she preaches.
I have to confess I had to look up “rewilding”, though it’s a word that’s been in use since the 1990s. I learned that rewilding is a way of helping living things in order to increase biodiversity and to restore natural processes to create resilient, self-regulating and self-sustaining systems – which is a somewhat stilted way of saying it means helping things return to something much better than what was once considered normal.
The other main character is a young man called Jagger. He blows the whistle on the corrupt businesses run by his father’s associates. He fears for his life at the hands of his father’s minions, but dares not go to the police because he has signed, without scrutiny, many documents he believes will prove his complicity in his father’s wrongdoing. His whistleblowing is at least partially prompted by disillusionment when he finds out what the woman he loved has done.
Jagger and Nia meet in a well-concealed cave in a national park not too far from Sydney. He is on the run looking for a safe place to hide; she is engaged in some mysterious activity and the cave is her temporary home.
The novel traces the next few days as the pair are pursued by Jagger’s father’s murderous henchmen and Nia follows her own agenda. They survive an encounter with his father’s gangsters and withstand one disaster almost to be engulfed by another. And as they make their way north to Queensland in an old truck that runs on biofuel, they get to know each other better and develop a complex relationship. In the process, Jagger’s motives (somewhat unconvincingly) morph from the self-interested to the reluctantly heroic, and Nia’s special mission is revealed.
At one level, this novel is an exciting adventure story that takes place in present day Australia. It has all the required elements: a chase, dangers overcome or avoided, the weak outwitting the strong, good triumphing over evil. Very satisfying stuff.
At another level, Donna M Cameron has taken this novel further by using it to give voice to those who warn of the dire consequences of our pollution of the planet. ‘Humans are bloody stupid,’ says Nia. ‘There’s people around the world already suffering, climate refugees already on the move. It’s easy to be positive if you’re ignorant and privileged.’ She foresees a future replete with ‘Super-storms, megafires… Killer virus, system collapse, hungry people with guns.’
Read: Book review: One Another, Gail Jones
There is no doubt that the effects of climate change are already showing themselves in Australia and throughout the world. There is also no doubt that collectively we have been, and still are, much too slow to start doing what we should to avoid a disaster even greater than the wars and threats of war that pervade our information channels. So this contribution to the climate debate, however palatably delivered in novel form, is a welcome addition to the voices clamouring for reform.
The Rewilding, Donna M Cameron
Publisher: Transit Lounge
ISBN: 9781922790644
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320pp
Release date: 1 March 2024
RRP: $32.99
