INGA SIMPSON Once We Were Wildlife. Reviewed by Ann Skea

These stories from the author of The Thinning and Understory are driven by human interactions with nature – and nature’s response to us.

More meltwater, more bright machines grinding back and forth, marking snow. There is panic in their colony, like the penguins. They curse the cold, their tools, their others, the melt. Their thoughts are loud but inwards, when all around them answers. Only when alone does the truth seep out.

The land itself voices these observations in the short story ‘The Melt’, and the truth is that in spite of human intervention ‘the world shifts and turns, forms and reforms’. This truth applies, too, in the human relationships that are the focus of most of the other stories in Once We Were Wildlife, although at times the people involved cannot see that.

In ‘Quartz’, an ill-assorted group of activists are camping out in old goldmining tunnels, intent on stopping mining operations in the area. Toxic metals are poisoning the environment, destroying the ecological balance:

Craig had brought in Marg, another local landholder with a mining operation on her property, which had polluted her creek and groundwater. Her husband, like so many others, had chosen a self-inflicted gunshot to the head as the way out.

The activists had started small, ‘planting sedges and reeds in creek beds to absorb heavy metals and toxins’; and they had disabled some back-up batteries and managed to cut local power with a small lump of explosive. Now there are security guards, drones, fences and cameras to evade, and the mining company is closing in on them.

Craig, who is a local and whose great-great-great-grandfather had been a gold trader, tells them old tales of bushrangers and the loot from a final robbery that has never been found. They make their way through unmapped tunnels where the lost loot may have been stashed, but would finding it change the dynamics of the group, some of whom have shady backgrounds? The story plays out in rich countryside where there are koala scratches on tree trunks, bird cries, and the prints of ‘wombats, koalas, kangaroos, wallabies – and horses – in the soft soil’, but it is told though the changing dynamics and personal responses of the group.

We, too, are wildlife, part of the natural world around us, but stirred by conflicted emotions, passions, ambition, joy and grief. Most of the stories in Once We Were Wildlife focus on time and change in human lives. Simpson’s people seek out, explore and immerse themselves in nature, and it does, in some cases literally, change them.

In ‘Waves’, Marlen has been a surfer from her earliest days, when her father would take her bodysurfing in even the most dangerous conditions. She sees her life and her failing relationship with Gail in surfing terms:

After living life so deeply, gulping it from dawn to dusk, chasing down every wave, the biggest waves, the best waves, now they were caught in the wash. They steered clear of the subject but were drifting towards the rocks all the same.

In a weekend at the coast, trying to shed her urban self, she chooses to surf in a dangerous sea. Simpson’s description of what happens is real and frightening. Marlen is dumped by big waves, held under by the heavy water, then trapped in a churning ‘dead zone’. Every surfer knows the power of the sea and will recognise her helplessness. What happens next does change her.

In ‘Poached’, an ex-soldier, fascinated by tigers, manages to get taken on as a ranger in an Indian wildlife reserve plagued by poachers.

The traffickers wanted all of her: teeth, claws, skin, meat, to grind her bones into powder. Even her beautiful whiskers for acupuncture needles. The thought of it, taking a creature so alive, made him wild.

He, like Marlen, experiences the dangerous, untamed power of nature, but also of mankind, when he leaves his tent, unarmed, to take ‘a piss’.

He smells her … A shift in the shadow. But musk catches in his nostrils, his throat ….

It is her, striped pelt gleaming in the dark, all muscle and power, magnificent in the tree-filtered moonlight.

Then he sees the poachers, and ‘in those seconds, it is as if he is the tiger’.

Human life and wildlife are inextricably entangled in all these stories, sometimes for good, sometimes not, and sometimes the result is left open for the reader to imagine.

The longest story, which gives the book its title, I found the least satisfying. It charts the shifting dynamics of a relationship between two mature women. Frankie and Marie first meet on a 16-day guided walk in Country where ‘twisted trees grow out of red rock, deep gorges hide lush waterholes, and ancient stories swirl around’. They are strongly drawn to each other and stay in touch after the walk, planning and taking more long treks. Eventually they spend the summer together.

‘I think you’ve found your person,’ Frankie’s friend Mish tells her. Frankie agrees wholeheartedly and is totally committed to the relationship, but she is confused by Marie’s fluctuating responses. When they are together, Marie is affectionate and says ‘this is so good’, but she is reluctant to agree to living together permanently, her job seems to take up more and more of her time, and she seems to forget things they once enjoyed together.

Marie watches a wattle bird in the branch above. ‘I was thinking. What if I take it [a small studio she knows is about to be rented out] and we catch up on the weekends?’

‘Catch up? What about cooking and walking and swimming. And living together.’

‘We can still do those things.’ She puts her hand hard across Frankie’s chest. ‘This is home. You. Us. I just need a space of my own.’

When Frankie confides in friends, one comments ‘it sounds like she desperately wants to keep you. But …’ and the other adds ‘Yeah. As a pet.’ This situation, as in real life, takes time to be resolved, and I (like Frankie) did not enjoy this.

The poem that follows this long story is a beautiful puzzle told by a creature swimming in the waters of a tarn:

Surface by bank, breathe

Ears and eyes, smell. Safe. Swim to sun.

When it meets

Another. Male.

Watch Him. Strong swimming thick rich pelt, warm.

These are air-breathing creatures, totally at home in the water. They have a ‘bill’ and ‘tail’, like the Australian platypus, but their identity is not spelled out.

We meet Marlen again. This time filming a pack of sea wolves:

The next morning, right at dawn, they came out of the spruce. And Marlen was waiting. The wolves loped along the sand with that mesmerising long-legged gait, the blue-green sea behind them. The alpha female came so close to the hide that Marlen could see every detail of her whiskers, the russet fur on her muzzle, ears and forelegs. She stared right into the lens, the depth of her amber eyes stealing Marlen’s breath.

So close does Marlen become with these creatures, and so accepted by them, that when the Zodiac craft comes to take her back to the mainland what she does is half-expected, but also strange and surprising.

In ‘Blue Crane’, the unusual ending left me smiling. There, Sally, an elderly woman whose husband has recently died, buys a beachside property in a place she remembers from childhood holidays. ‘Anonymity, a fresh start, was a relief’, but the other residents already know each other and socialise together, so it is rather lonely.

She becomes fascinated by a heron that she sees wading in the rockpools and she starts to follow its footprints and feel ‘a little flat’ on the days when she does not see him. She does up the house, reads her mother’s book about birds, neglects to retrieve messages from her son on the answer machine he had bought her, and lets mail pile up ‘next to the laptop her daughter had sent, still in its box’. The heron gets used to her presence and

The morning the heron floated in to land outside her bedroom window, Sally could only blink. She had been awake since dawn, but the division between wakefulness and dream was becoming less distinct, no matter the time of day.

She sees it transformed into its summer plumage, and as she follows it along the beach and watches as it lift ‘into the blue’ and fly out to sea, her link with the heron is almost complete.

‘First, be a good animal’, as Waldo Emerson wrote, and Simpson has chosen this for her opening epigraph. Then, in the final three chapters of the book, she adopts the voices of a migratory bird, of the land, and of the forests, telling, in sometimes strange language, of their fight against the depredation caused by humans, and of their survival beyond the human era.

 The forests know that

Despite their clever hands and fingers, their elaborate root systems trapped inside thick skulls, humans struggle most with the warming.

And the melting ice knows that

We were land once, and we will be again. Forgetting ice. Forgetting ships. Forgetting them.

This is not a good prospect for us, but ‘There have always been some who could open themselves to envelop another being,’ and some, like a few of Inga Simpson’s characters, who find a way of becoming one with nature.

Inga Simpson Once We Were Wildlife Hachette 2026 PB 256pp $29.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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