Title: Once We Were Wildlife: Stories
Author: Inga Simpson
Publisher: Hachette; RRP: $29.99
Reviewed by: Jason Nahrung, Ballarat Writers Inc. book review group
The review copy of Once We Were Wildlife arrived just as I was catching up with Simpson’s The Thinning, (Hachette, 2024; paperback out now) in which the New South Wales-based writer posits a world of crashing human fertility alongside ecological collapse. It sets up the scenario of a remote outpost of astronomers on the run from government enforcers, the pursuit of two teens serving as a veritable tour of the Warrumbungles and neighbouring environs.
Once We Were Wildlife is, as the name suggests, a different beast, just as saturated in wilderness but with a broader focus on the human relationship with it, and especially its creatures. It’s Simpson’s first collection, following six novels starting with 2013’s Mr Wigg, one work of non-fiction (with a second due out this November), and two books for children. While the subject matter varies, a fairly common theme across the catalogue is the environment.
Once We Were Wildlife comprises 11 short stories (four previously published) – the title story likely edging into novella terrain at 80 pages – and one cannily shaped poem, looking like a top as it spins what I take to be the tale of a platypus. The writing is spare, particularly well suited to both arid landscapes and the aloneness of many of the characters.
The stories are, in the main, slices of life – a near-death ocean swim sparking a quiet epiphany about a relationship, a veteran finding solace in a jungle, a wildlife photographer embracing belonging in an island wilderness. For all their quietness (the characters are hikers and ramblers, not sprinters), the stories skip along, some a mere dozen or so pages long and broken up into scenes. Even the novella, which gives the collection its title, doesn’t dwell in the moment, recounting the relationship of a writer and a tour guide from their meeting to peak to parting via a series of stepping stones rather than a trail. (I suspect the comma after Once in the story’s title was dropped from the cover for artistic purposes, but I prefer the clearer context that the comma affords.)
These are exercises in control and restraint, with each finely drawn character charting their (mostly brief) course with minimum meandering. And through them all flows the natural world, Simpson’s love for it evident, her fears for it as equally apparent in the shadows. For example, in ‘Tanglefoot’, about eco-campaigners in Tasmania, she writes:
The trees’ twisted, tumbledown shapes are familiar and yet strange, like they have rearranged themselves through the year. The fagus are retreating upslope. The pines, too. Behind the camera, it’s as if she can slow the turning of the earth. But there is no stopping it. Or their slow deterioration: a branch fallen here, a crown contracted there, another trunk cracking and crumbling. And underfoot, their ever-more-tangled roots.
The yearning for nature manifests in two stories of transformation that, perhaps in a collection of this size is one too many, with a further dip into the fantastical with a ghost story that holds it pathos for all its overtness. And then a step further, with the platypus poem (‘Tarn’) and ‘Colony’, a story from the view of a migratory bird, perforce coming across as a translation because what do birds call seals? And then further still, with the view of the world from a glacier (‘The Melt’), trying to evoke that sense of deep time against which we try to measure our brief but eventful span, and similarly in the closing story, ‘Out of the Forest’, past, present and future seen through the long-lived experience of trees able to uproot in search of the altitude they need to survive in a climate-changed world.
Given that most of the stories end in separation, death or transition, the resilience seen in the closing stories of ice and trees especially provide a sense of solace if not hope, the world continuing on in whatever form, with or without humans. Which is fitting, because if there is a common current in the collection, it is of the comfort to be found in nature and, in turn, the imperative that if we wish to be around to enjoy it, we better shift our thinking. Books like this may be a part of the mechanism for doing just that.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
