Charlotte McConaghy calls for climate change action in new novel Wild Dark Shore
Australian author Charlotte McConaghy's third novel, Wild Dark Shore, opens with a woman washing up on a remote island halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.
Who she is and why she's there is the mystery that propels the narrative.
Claire Nichols, host of ABC Radio National's The Book Show, says it's a great read — but McConaghy found Wild Dark Shore her hardest novel to write.
"I wrote the first 25,000 words four times and deleted them four times. I couldn't work out whose story it was, whose point of view it would be told in, what tense it would be in," she tells The Book Show.
"It took a lot more planning than I'm used to doing … It needed to have a propulsive mystery storyline that would get you to want to turn the pages, but it also needed to have a depth of emotion and a sense of place that was vivid and compelling."
It also took a research trip to a subantarctic island located halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, accessible only by a two-week ocean voyage, to remove McConaghy's writing block.
"The story was falling short," she says. "I knew that I had to get to this island."
Her plan worked: Wild Dark Shore quickly became a New York Times bestseller when it was published earlier this year.
As Nichols writes in her review of the novel: "Once you pick this book up, it's going to be very hard to put it down."
At first, the idea of travelling to Macquarie Island — a subantarctic island governed by Tasmania, located around 1,500 kilometres north of Antarctica — seemed impossible.
"There's one boat that goes at one time of year, so I had to be on that boat, or it wouldn't be happening for me," McConaghy says.
And there was another problem — she couldn't leave her 16-month-old baby behind.
To her surprise, the travel company gave them both the green light to travel.
McConaghy travelled to the southern tip of New Zealand, where she boarded the boat with her son, clad in a huge life vest. Once on board, she approached the staff member in charge.
"She took one look at me and said, 'Oh God, we told them not to let you come,'" McConaghy recalls.
"That was really, really scary. [It was] a terrible start to the journey."
Fortunately, the seas were unusually calm, and they made it to Macquarie Island in one piece.
The moment McConaghy arrived, she was greeted by "unbelievably dramatic landscape, mountainous, green and rich". And she knew she'd made the right decision.
"I just remember being hit by a wall of sound. It was extraordinary. All the seabirds, millions of penguins, hundreds of seals, they're all around you, waddling up to say hello. It has this impossibly untouched feel; it's so wild," she says.
But she sensed a darkness on the island, too.
Dotting the landscape were large, rusting metal barrels, relics of the oil-extraction trade that began in the late 19th century, when penguins were killed and boiled down for their oil.
"You can feel the blood spilt on this island and the terrible destruction of wildlife," McConaghy says.
"It really affected me and made me realise that, in fact, this place is haunted."
McConaghy's time on Macquarie Island gave her the inspiration for Wild Dark Shore's setting, an isolated outpost called Shearwater Island populated with a lighthouse, a few huts and an abandoned research station.
Shearwater has become uninhabitable, under siege from rising sea levels and violent weather. "The beaches are crumbling away into the ocean," McConaghy says.
It's also the site of a seed vault, which McConaghy modelled on the real-life Global Seed Vault in Svalbard in northern Norway.
Built in the Arctic ice, the vault was designed to preserve 930,000 seeds from around the world from extinction.
"The whole idea of this vault is that it should withstand anything and last well into the future. But the insane thing is that they did not predict the rise in temperatures that would lead to melting permafrost, and [in 2017] the vault flooded," McConaghy says.
"They salvaged all the seeds — it was OK — but when I read about the story, it piqued my fascination. I was interested in the question of what we would choose to save if we had the chance."
It's a question the island's last remaining residents, the Salt family — Dominic, a caretaker employed by Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, and his three children, Raff, Fen and Orly — must address head on.
Tasked with overseeing the seed vault and its irreplaceable treasure, they must choose which seeds to save and which to sacrifice as the vault begins to flood.
"They're in a race against time," McConaghy says. "The water is coming in through the walls, and they don't have anywhere to store all these precious things, so they have to make difficult decisions."
Dom and his kids have lived in the lighthouse on Shearwater Island for eight years, since the death of his wife, Claire.
"A big part of him fleeing to this isolated place is a way of coping with his grief — or escaping it really," McConaghy says.
Raff, the eldest child, is beset by deep rage at losing his mother. His 17-year-old sister Fen has abandoned the lighthouse and now spends her days among the seals on the black sand beach, swimming with them in the ocean.
"She's a wild creature," McConaghy says, acknowledging Fen's similarity to the selkies — creatures that shapeshift between human and seal form — of Celtic mythology.
The youngest is Orly, a "precociously clever" nine-year-old.
Passionate about the vault's mission, Orly brings to life the seeds' stories.
"But he's also haunted, too; he hears the voices of all the creatures that have died on this island. He hears them in the wind," McConaghy says.
Into this unusual situation arrives Rowan, the woman who Fen rescues from the ocean during a huge storm that knocks out the island's power supply.
"The family are completely baffled by her arrival and cannot fathom how she's come to be there, unless perhaps she was on her way there, which is another mystery in itself, because no boats go there. Why would anyone show up to this place? The scientists are all gone," McConaghy says.
"There's a lot of suspicion around why she's there and … she's not particularly up-front about it either. She's holding her cards very close initially, because … she has a mission that she's on, and she quickly discovers that this family are not being entirely truthful with her as well."
It's a pacy novel with plenty of action scenes, aided by McConaghy's background in screenwriting.
"You have to be extremely clear with screenwriting about what you're seeing, what's happening on screen, what the characters are doing," she says.
"I like to make my internal emotional descriptions poetic and lyrical, but I like to keep the action simple."
McConaghy's past three novels are set in wild locations under threat from climate change: the Arctic in Migrations (2020), the Alaskan wilderness in Once There Were Wolves (2021), and the subantarctic island of Wild Dark Shore.
It's a pattern McConaghy suspects is borne from her desire to connect with nature.
But she realised she couldn't write about the natural world without addressing climate change as well.
"It opened up this whole very passionate venture for me, which is to try and render the beautiful wild creatures and spaces that we still have left and inspire people to treasure those things."
In this way, her books can be interpreted as calls to action to address the climate crisis.
"I'm hoping that people, first of all, feel moved, and then it would be incredible if they felt moved to action," McConaghy says.
"We're at a crucial point in time right now, and it's very easy to feel overwhelmed by what's happening in the natural world with the climate catastrophe.
"It's also easy to become apathetic because it's very difficult to know what to do, but sometimes intimate, human stories are the things that can make us feel the most and provide us with the most hope."
Charlotte McConaghy is a guest at Sydney Writers Festival, which runs from May 20-25.
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