James Bradley at his home in Sydney.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
When I started reading James Bradley’s new book about the ocean, I didn’t anticipate coming away pondering whether I could still eat fish.
In one chapter, Bradley spends time with Australian behavioural ecologist Dr Culum Brown, a leading researcher in the field of fish cognition, whose research has shown that fish are capable of learning, adhering to a social hierarchy and having their own cultural “traditions”, and can even retain memories.
Bradley, too, was affected. “I basically don’t eat fish any more because of that chapter, and … the stuff about the way fishing works and how the fish dies, I found it very difficult to go back to eating fish,” he says.
Bradley is best known for his award-winning novels including Clade and 2020’s Ghost Species (which is being developed into a feature film), but bubbling away in the background all this time, he’s been working on a monumental non-fiction book. Deep Water: The World in the Ocean, has taken more than 20 years to come together.
“In the current form, I’ve been working on it for about five years,” Bradley says of the book, which encompasses an extraordinary amount of research, travel, interviews and reading. Deep Water melds nature writing, history and personal anecdotes to create a portrait of not just the world’s oceans but of humanity’s connection to and reliance on them.
Bradley, who lives in Sydney’s inner west with his wife, novelist Mardi McConnochie, and their two children, grew up in Glenelg in South Australia, two streets back from the beach. He grew up spending his time swimming, hand-surfing and snorkelling with his brother and his mates, and fishing with his grandfather.
“It was a big part of my childhood. As I got older I used to spend a lot of time on the beach on my own; I always found it very calming,” he says. “I love that sense of the changeability of it and that sense that when you’re on the beach, you’re always aware of larger … space. That kind of physical space, but also, the sense that it’s always in flux; things wash up, one day it’s black, the next it’s not. That sense of change.”
But it’s another type of change that has long concerned Bradley and that pervades his writing (both his novels and his non-fiction essays) – that of the changing planet amid a looming climate catastrophe. Deep Water is a journey across, and into the depths of the world’s oceans and their interconnectedness with terrestrial life.
James Bradley has been working on Deep Water for the past 20 years.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
It’s full of astonishing facts about the myriad forms of life beneath the surface, but also about the damage brought about by humans. There are many bittersweet moments: the fact the oceans allowed humankind to explore the world, expanding literal horizons, which in turn led to colonisation and exploitation (of both people and their lands’ resources); that the startling display of bioluminescent Noctiluca, microscopic organisms that feed on plankton, algae and fish eggs, that Bradley and his family saw at a Jervis Bay beach a few years ago were in fact “a harbinger of accelerating environmental devastation”, despite their beauty.
“I went into the book thinking it was just about the ocean,” says Bradley, “but it’s not - that was just a way in because that’s the connection between everything. I use the ocean as a lens to think about a whole series of things because it seems to me that we’re in this … moment where I guess the questions that we’re all grappling with, and the problems that we’re all grappling with, are so big and so interconnected, and so complex that you kind of can’t hold them in your head.”
Bioluminescent algae in Jervis Bay; beautiful, but a harbinger of climate change damage.Credit: DEE KRAMER
But everyone, he says, can relate to the ocean.
Bradley struggled with how to bring together the amount of information he had gathered -- and with convincing himself he “had the authority to write about such things; even at the end I worried about that a lot” – given it’s such a different task from writing a novel.
In his novels, he has only his own words to contend with; in Deep Water he has dozens of interviews with scientists, marine biologists, historians and engineers, quotes from philosophers and journal entries from explorers.
There is a lot of information, and as Bradley says, “much of it quite divergent and diverse”.
“It was a real learning curve for me because I’m not a journalist, I’m not a scientist, I’m a novelist – and the process of trying to get to grips with that was pretty demanding.”
Deep Water is fact-heavy, but it’s certainly not an academic-style slog; Bradley brings his novelist’s prose to everything from the surprising life of krill to Indigenous memory of landscapes that were submerged as far back as 10,000 years ago.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JAMES BRADLEY
- Worst habit? Starting new projects when I already have too much on.
- Greatest fear? That I’ll run out of time to write the things I want to write.
- The line that stayed with you? Can I pick two? Not long before she died, Ursula Le Guin gave a speech in which she said: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” That belief that transformative change is possible, especially when we take a longer view, is both profound and deeply necessary, especially now. And in his glorious In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje wrote: “The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.” It was that book which inspired me to become a writer, and that idea – of the complex and often unpredictable ways that meaning emerges from a set of ideas or events – is one I’ve cleaved to in my own work over many years.
- Biggest regret? I wish I’d learned to play a musical instrument.
- Favourite room? Any room that’s full of the people I love.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? That depends what day you ask me! I’ve been listening to a lot of Bowie recently, so perhaps Teenage Wildlife, one of the great songs about disillusionment and the need to keep evolving.
- If you could solve one thing… The climate crisis. Not just because if we don’t, we don’t have any chance of solving the other problems, but because the world we have to build in order to solve it will be a better, cleaner, fairer one.
Opening with the Big Bang and current (ever-changing) theories on how the oceans were created, the book traverses the evolution of man, the surprising cultural histories of swimming, extraordinary fish migrations, life in the ocean’s hadal zone (the deepest regions of the ocean, from six to 11 kilometres below sea level), global shipping, the effects of man-made noise on the sonar communication of whales, and the bleaching of coral reefs.
There are historical anecdotes, personal stories and insights into how different parts of the world have viewed and interacted with the ocean. “The ocean is a cultural space as well as the physical space, which means it becomes understood culturally in different and interesting ways,” Bradley says. “If you look at European culture, the ocean was understood as a kind of barrier and something you had to get through or across - there wasn’t much romanticisation of it, and our kind of understanding of it is, in fact, very influenced by kind of romantic thinking.”
The ocean became a symbol of wildness and immensity, when, Bradley says, it’s not. “It’s huge, certainly, but that idea of the ocean is something immense and trackless is a kind of cultural creation,” he says. “It’s one of the things the book tries quite hard to break through because that is actually something that licences a lot of the destructive behaviours – the idea that we can dump whatever we want into it.”
A chapter in which Bradley participates in a scientific survey in the Cocos Islands off the coast of Western Australia, which has become home to more than 400 million pieces of rubbish, much of it single-use plastic, is not easy reading, and Bradley says seeing it first-hand drove it home for him.
There were several things that shocked him during his research, particularly, he says, his chapter on Antarctica, and “how much sea-level rise is now inevitable”, but the most confronting thing was writing about coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef.
“That was quite … emotionally difficult to write,” he says. “But it’s really important that we don’t look away from it, that we somehow take the horror of what’s happening and convert it into political action.”
But it’s not all gloom in Deep Water. “I don’t think it is a depressing book,” Bradley says, and in the final chapter he writes, “despair is a form of turning away”, and that bearing witness is an act of hope.
“The thing I came away with was not just the sense of scale of the dislocation and the damage that’s taking place around us, but also a sense of wonder,” he says. “There are so many amazing things in the world. There’s all these amazing animals, you know, there’s this extraordinary environment, this extraordinary interconnected system. I kept coming back to my amazement.”
Deep Water: The World in the Ocean by James Bradley (Penguin) is out now. Bradley is a guest at Sydney Writers’ Festival. swf.org.au.