Book: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Context

Macquaire Island, the real-life inspiration for Charlotte McConaghy’s book, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was designated as such for two main reasons. The first and most interesting one is that it is the only place on Earth where rocks from the Earth’s mantle are actively exposed above sea level, which provides a unique way to study the active tectonic processes of the Indo-Australian and the Pacific plates. The second is just the sheer amount of wildlife that congregates on the island.

In the image below, you can see an impressive number of Royal Penguins surrounding rusted and abandoned penguin digesters — vats where blubber merchant Joseph Hatch boiled approximately 3 million penguins for their oil.

By the time outrage and international pressure put an end to the decimation of the penguin population of Macquaire Island in 1919, there were only 4,000 penguins remaining. Today, the population has managed to recover and even regain some of the genetic diversity that is integral to the long term survival of a species. But at 500,000 — the population of royal penguins on the island are a shadow of what used to be.

This is the backdrop where Wild Dark Shore finds us.

About the Book

The Salt family, Dominic and his children Raff, Fen, and Orly are tasked with taking care of the island while the last of the former research base is picked up. The island has become uninhabitable, and the seed vault (which houses specimens of every plant on the planet) needs to be emptied before the last boat off the island arrives. After an unusually brutal storm, a mysterious woman washes ashore. Her arrival triggers an exploration of life’s purpose and our relationship to the planet and to each other. Secrets are uncovered and choices demand to be made.

McConaghy’s books tend to teeter on the brink of plain-old, depressing, no-solution-in-sight climate anxiety, but she always provides relief for those willing to embrace the nihilistic reality of our situation. If the Earth is inevitably burning, what will you do in the meantime? Will you add to the fire or care for those that have been burnt?

Wild Dark Shore, like McConaghy’s other books, was an instant favourite of mine. Something about her stories feel like they were written for me — giving voice to so many of the anxieties and preoccupations of our time.

Beyond the Book

The Commonwealth of Australia, former penal colony and losing party to the Emu War of 1932, was built over the course of a century. While the coast was charted by many different countries long before the establishment of the colony of New South Wales, it wasn’t until 1788 that the British sent their first fleet to what is now known as Sydney and established their new penal colony. The idea was to let convicts fend for themselves and free the British from the tax burden of housing and feeding criminals that they could no longer send to the New World.

For the next century, settlers explored the continent, spread disease, and established civil society.

That’s the Australia we know today. It's an Australia that tends to exclude the 75,000 years of history that came before Europeans set foot in the country.

Analysis of DNA that traced the human presence in Australia has shown that the Aboriginal1 people came from the first wave of humans to leave Africa, thousands of years before the wave that established the ancestors to modern Asians. As a result of colonization and the violent assimilation policies that led to the Stolen Generation2, finding DNA samples that weren’t mixed with European DNA was difficult. The sample studied came from hair that an Aboriginal man had as a keepsake from a distant relative.

These findings mean that Aboriginal Australians constitute one of the oldest continuous cultures in the world outside of Africa. Aboriginal communities thrived for millennia before European colonization and knowledge of their land will play an integral role in finding ways to live in harmony with nature.

Quotes

“Where men go there is harm.”

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”

“But the dandelion—this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures—is considered a weed.”

“That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.”

“What I miss is having someone to look at in moments like these, someone who understands not just the talent or cleverness of our children but the wisdom, the immensity of feeling they hold within. Instead I marvel at them alone.”

Read if you like: Read Migrations!!!!!!!!!!!!!