Repentance by Alison Gibbs review – hippies and loggers collide in 1970s outback
It’s estimated that each year more than 15bn trees are cut down – with only 5bn replanted annually. Ecological care has been a point of contention throughout Australia’s colonial history, with the forestry wars – a series of skirmishes between the timber industry and environmental conservationists – at their apex throughout the late 20th century. In Alison Gibbs’ debut novel, Repentance, this period serves as the backdrop to a tale of warring ideologies in an outback Australian town.
Gibbs was a recipient of the 2017 Varuna Scholarship, during which this novel was her work-in-progress. She is no stranger to fiction, having penned short stories for the last 30 years with many set in northern New South Wales where she grew up. Repentance follows suit: it’s 1976, and the fictional town of Repentance, tucked away “at the edge of the earth” in the Great Dividing Range, is in the midst of change. The region’s old families have been employed for generations by the local sawmill, but a welter of newly settled “hippies” oppose the logging. Debate ensues, protests ignite and enmity foments between the townsfolk.
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Repentance is a panoptic novel stitched together from varying points of view. There’s a litany of characters – among them Joanne, a young teenager grappling with adolescence amid her mother’s slow death to cancer; Linda and Melanie, a hippy mother and daughter who have drifted into town; Gerard, Linda’s irascible ex and leader of the anti-logging protests; Sandy, the local sawmill manager who finds himself suddenly villainised by the local tree-huggers. Gibbs’ characters quickly draw you in, authentically rendered with their own history, tribulations and prejudices, and each with differing perspectives of their place among the natural order of things.
Much like the interconnected root system under a forest floor, Repentance is rhizomic – its narrative threads entangle, offering a gestalt of a town in conflict. This bucolic drama takes place amid a vivid landscape, with Gibbs’ prose lush with “sherbet clusters of lantana flowers”, “billowing camphor laurel trees”, and “frothy white crofton weed”. Particular images linger too: incinerator smoke hangs in the air like “a rag in the sky”; swallow poo drips down a wall “like icing”.
Yet for a book centring Australian land-use, ecology, and white settler descendants lamenting environmental destruction (as well as unwanted intruders wreaking change), there is an absent Indigenous parallel. Gibbs attempts a contrast, briefly introducing Joanne and Melanie to an Aboriginal family living on the town’s outskirts – a group organised to “perform” for a TV crew, by the same white activists who have been swimming in a culturally significant spot they had been asked not to use – but their inclusion lacks substance and agency. The only Indigenous character who actually speaks is an unnamed man, who at the novel’s end says, “This here. Right across here. All of this, country. My people, we care for country.” A sincere consultation with a First Nations perspective, however, is missing.
Repentance is at its most engaging when it touches on its more abstract subjects: the nature of change, of memory and belonging, of death and its effect on perception. When Joanne’s mother dies early in the novel, Joanne begins to reflect on time’s elasticity, “how it raced and slowed, how some things felt like yesterday and others months ago”. Deftly, Gibbs then lifts us above the narrative, drawing attention to the forest’s own diurnal rhythms – “the steady rise of nutrients, the slow descent of sugars”. Time appears in context, and people are but a blip.
This oscillation between the micro and macro recurs throughout, notably in the brief intermezzi Gibbs intersperses between chapters that shift our attention to the natural world. Ants scuttle towards suppurating tree sap, beetles rain on the town like “bits of unpopped corn”, and we are lightly thrown from the story into the ecological realm. It’s an intriguing structural choice, but these moments are frustratingly brief to the point of feeling underdeveloped, leaving you yearning for a deeper ecocentric perspective.
Repentance is a quaint story, one offering a look into a pivotal time of Australian history. The tension between environmental protection and logging is ongoing, both here and overseas – and there is much in Gibbs’ debut novel that resonates amid our current climate crisis. It insightfully illustrates the real-world impacts of ecological debate and is a sensorial evocation of the Australian landscape. The novel has its flaws, but it is hard to not be lulled by the “dee-dee-ah-wit of a golden whistler, the curling mewls of catbirds, the rattle of a Lewin’s honeyeater ricocheting through the trees”.
• Repentance by Alison Gibbs is out now through Scribe