Jane Rawson is the author of Human/Nature: On life in a wild world, as well as novels A History of Dreams, From the Wreck and A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, a novella, Formaldehyde, and, with James Whitmore, the non-fiction book The Handbook: Surviving & Living with Climate Change. You can read her essays in Living with the Anthropocene; Fire, Flood, Plague; and Reading Like an Australian Writer. She is the managing editor at Island magazine and lives in south-east Lutruwita/Tasmania, where she is studying a PhD in creative writing at UTAS.
1. Why do you tell stories?
I don’t think I’m the only one who has arguments with imaginary people while having a shower. For me, those shower arguments need to be well-referenced and compellingly laid out, and sometimes they expand into books. Human/Nature is what happens when the shower argument takes several years and covers a lot of different topics and keeps sending me back to the desk to read more from other writers and thinkers, and to write more so I can figure out what I think. I’m not sure that I’m committed to telling stories as such; it’s more that I think best on the page – whether what I’m thinking about is why we feel the way we do about introduced species, or whether there’s a way to create a magic that involves changing people’s dreams, or to add an alien octopus to a 19th century shipwreck tale – and that once I’m obsessed with an idea I have to see it to its end.
2. Describe Human/Nature in one or two sentences.
White Australians (including me) have a lot of unquestioned ideas about what nature is: many of those ideas are shaped by our history and culture, and many of them are making it hard for us to imagine and create a better future for animals, plants and ourselves. I wanted to figure out where my – and our – ideas about nature come from, why we’re the way we are, and how we might think differently. I also wanted to get less scared of the outdoors (that’s three sentences).
3. In many ways this book is the antithesis of nature writing because while it frankly and tenderly explores the interconnection between species, it also interrogates the harm we (humans) do in ‘service’ of nature. What did you want to challenge about the genre?
First, this is not one of those books were someone goes out for a walk and sees some incredible things and has some thoughts – I’m not really the kind of person who deliberately goes for a walk far away from houses, nor did I travel to Russia to see the tundra as mammoths would have experienced it, or to the Great Barrier Reef to interview a coral scientist. This is a book about nature written by someone who thinks the living world is incredibly important, who doesn’t think wilderness matters more than the birds that live in a city street, and who thinks we can all experience, ponder and have views on nature even if we never leave our home town. But most of all I wanted to try thinking about nature in a way that is more understanding of our failings and vulnerabilities as humans.
4. If anywhere was to be defined by its ‘nature’ it would be Tasmania. How has your move from the city to the Huon Valley shaped your relationship with your writing self? (Has it shaped your writing self?)
It has! There were a lot of reasons I moved from inner-city Melbourne to the Huon Valley – wanting quiet, wanting animals, wanting cooler summers – but one of them was a practical decision about how to make my life cheaper so I could spend more time writing. In Melbourne, I worked four or five days a week in a variety of communications jobs and squeezed writing in around that – that was what I had to do to pay my mortgage. Selling up in Melbourne and moving to a one-bedroom house in southern Tasmania got rid of the mortgage, so now I can spend a lot more time on my own writing and less on writing for money. This has given me time to think harder, to make more mistakes, to feel OK about pursuing ideas that may never turn into something concrete. And I think being away from the Melbourne writing scene has made me more comfortable with the slow progress of my writing career – I still worry about how popular I am, but much less than I used to. That’s more time for writing!
5. I love the way you interrogate the human tendency to value one species over another (native versus introduced, rare versus abundant etc). Jane, is it possible to love both the environment and your cat?
I’m doing it right now.
We all have biases about who and what we care about, what we’re prepared to give time and emotion and attention to, but we often see our choices as logical or evidence-based, and other people’s choices as irrational. I wanted to think harder about why I value the creatures and places that I do, and to raise some questions that might help other people to do the same. It’s easy to say that rabbits, for example, are bad because they’re introduced and to not care when they’re killed in their masses, but it’s interesting to think about which other introduced species we support, cherish and make space for – how do we decide who doesn’t deserve to live?
6. I imagine that you went down some fascinating rabbit holes when researching the six essays that comprise this book -- was there anything you discovered that particularly surprised you?
Let’s say I went down some fascinating wombat holes… I was fascinated to learn how little interest earlier naturalists had in diversity as a measure of whether nature was doing well, and how much our attitudes to extinction have changed in the last 50 years. I hadn’t realised how much of nature – in individuals, in species, and over time – is bacteria, and how miniscule we are compared to them (and to fungus, for that matter): thinking about how much of life is bacteria living way underground gives you a different perspective on what matters on Earth. I was also thrilled to learn about how some of us turn into soap mummies after we die.
7. What were you under the influence of (books, authors, ideas, art, or anything else) while writing this book?
The writing of Australian environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren really helped me think much harder about why we care about the creatures we do – his 2022 book, A world in a shell: Snail stories for a time of extinction is brilliant. You probably won’t find it on a bookshop shelf anywhere, but David Sepkoski’s history of thinking about extinction, Catastrophic thinking: Extinction and the value of diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene, is fascinating. Olivia Laing and Daisy Hildyard are two of my favourite contemporary writers: Laing’s Everybody: A book about freedom really helped me think about how to write about art and about nostalgia, and this book wouldn’t have even existed if I hadn’t read Hildyard’s essay-memoir, The second body.
8. Which adjectives by readers and reviewers used to describe your writing, most please you?
‘Original’ comes up a lot in reviews of my fiction, and I’m always happy with that; ‘weird’ gets a good running too. A recent review of Human/Nature said ‘subtlety’, ‘complexity’ and ‘undying curiosity’, and I’m pretty happy about all of those.
9. Tell us about your natural writing habitat.
Out the back of our house there’s a little shack. Between the house and the shack is an enclosed walkway/fernery/herb garden otherwise known as ‘the catio’, where the cat/s can sit and watch the wildlife go by, or rub their faces on the concrete, or do whatever it is cats do when you’re not watching. I mostly write in that shack, which – whenever the sun shines on it – smells strongly of bat piss from all the microbats that used to live in the wall. Sometimes I write on the back deck, and sometimes I write in bed.
10. What book are currently on your bedside table/TBR pile? OR What books could you not live without?
I’m reading Megan Clement’s incisive essay/memoir collection about migration and Australia’s obsession with its borders, Desire Paths, and I just reread Shannon Burns’ blistering memoir Childhood. Next up is Alex Cothren’s forthcoming short story collection, Playing Nice was Getting me Nowhere – I’m on a bit of a South Australian kick. And of course I’m always reading new Australian fiction and non-fiction for upcoming issues of Island magazine.