Contemporary Australian Fiction About Climate Refugees

When you stand on a beach watching the tide creep higher than it did in your childhood, or notice the empty riverbeds where water once flowed, you're witnessing the quiet opening chapters of a story already being written across Australia. The question isn't whether climate change will reshape our continent—it's how we'll tell the stories of those who must leave everything behind when home becomes uninhabitable. Contemporary Australian fiction has begun grappling with this future-present reality through narratives that are both deeply personal and sweepingly prophetic, creating a new literary landscape as transformed as the physical one they describe.

These eight remarkable books approach the climate refugee experience from angles as varied as the Australian terrain itself. Alexis Wright's "The Swan Book" offers perhaps the most mythologically rich vision, following Oblivia Ethelyne, an Aboriginal girl discovered in the hollow of a gum tree, navigating a world where ancient stories collide with environmental collapse. Wright's cacophonous prose mirrors the chaos of displacement while grounding readers in Indigenous knowledge systems that have survived far longer than any Western civilization. This collision of timescales finds a powerful echo in Claire G. Coleman's "Terra Nullius," which uses the devastating sleight of hand of science fiction to comment on both historical and future dispossessions, creating a narrative that speaks to climate refugees while never forgetting the original theft of Indigenous lands.

Jane Harper's crime novels "The Dry" and "Force of Nature" might seem like outliers in this collection, but they capture something essential about how environmental extremes reshape human behavior. Set in drought-stricken rural communities, Harper's mysteries use the landscape itself as both character and weapon, showing how resource scarcity transforms neighbors into strangers and revealing the violence that simmers when water runs out. These aren't explicitly about refugees, but they're about what happens in the spaces people flee from—the communities hollowed out by environmental collapse.

The collection takes on global dimensions through works that remind us climate change knows no borders. Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven" uses pandemic rather than climate as its catalyst, but its exploration of nomadic theater troupes moving between settlements speaks directly to how culture and community persist through displacement. Charlotte McConaghy's "The Last Migration" follows the last Arctic terns on their final journey, with protagonist Franny chasing them across the globe in a desperate bid to find meaning in a world of cascading extinctions. Richard Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Overstory" weaves together the stories of people drawn to defend trees, showing how environmental destruction creates refugees of conscience—those who cannot stay silent while their world burns.

Jeff Goodell's "The Water Will Come" grounds these fictional explorations in sobering reportage, taking readers from Miami to Lagos to Venice to show how rising seas are already creating the first wave of climate refugees. His work provides the factual foundation that makes the other books in this collection feel less like speculation and more like preview.

What binds these books together isn't just their environmental themes but their insistence on human resilience in the face of unimaginable change. They show us people creating new forms of community in transit camps and abandoned towns, preserving culture through storytelling and performance, finding hope in the migration patterns of birds and the secret networks of trees. These aren't disaster narratives reveling in collapse but stories about what we carry with us when we must leave everything behind.

As you explore this collection, you'll find yourself considering questions that feel both ancient and urgently contemporary. How do we maintain our humanity when fighting for scarce resources? What stories will we tell our children about the places we've lost? How do we create home in a world where nowhere feels permanent? These books don't offer easy answers, but they do something perhaps more valuable—they help us imagine ourselves into a future that's already arriving, teaching us to see climate refugees not as statistics or abstractions but as fully realized humans navigating an transformed world with courage, creativity, and determination. In reading these stories now, we prepare ourselves for the conversations and choices that lie ahead, armed with empathy and understanding for those who must move to survive.