Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Once We Were wildlife
By Inga Simpson
Hachette
Paperback, March 2026, ISBN: 9780733651014, rrp $A29.99
Almost everything I read (and write) these days is focused on ecology in one form or another. It isn’t surprising given the rapidly advancing crisis unfolding in front of us, from global heating to ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss. Inga Simpson has always written into this space, regardless of the genre of her work. She may be one of the most knowledgable writers in Australia on nature writing given she has a PhD on the subject. Once We Were Wildlife is a collection that explores the human/natural world connection, moving beyond the standard character arc into metamorphosis. The characters are not so much in nature as they are discovering their essential selves as nature. Simpson handles the transformation subtly but the writing is so resonant that the reader cannot help but rethink their own sense of self.
The pieces, eleven stories and one poem, are distinct but also overlap, with characters and settings reappearing, themes recurring, and progressions in time nad space that echo from one story to the next. All of the pieces involving humans pivot around a longing for connection:
For that was the nature of longing; there would always be another wave, another project—perfect in the imagining – just over the horizon. (“The Wash”)
The world of the more-than-human has an almost magical feel, shimmering and sensual, from the the bright red flash of a fox to the ghostly remnants of a drowned stand of Huon pine:
The trees’ twisted, tumbledown shapes are familiar and yet strange, like they have rearranged themselves through the year. The fagus are retreating upslope. The pines, too. Behind the camera, it’s as if she can slow the turning of the earth. But there is no stopping it. Or their slow deterioration: a branch fallen here, a crown contracted there, another trunk cracking and crumbling. And underfoot, their ever-more-tangled roots. (“Tanglefoot”)
These relationships could lead to life or death, a moment’s connection, a drowning or fall. Marlen is drawn into dangerous surf, Tone, a photographer, falls off a cliff after making contact with an eagle, Sally, a lonely widow, develops a relationship with a heron, and the same Marlen we met earlier finds herself following a Sea Wolf through the mist. The connection outside of the human awakens something both dangerous and redemptive, like the Damian and the Bengal tiger in “Poached”:
God, those eyes. The little flecks of fire in them. She was beautiful. So beautiful that tears blurred the detail of her patterning and whiskers. But he knew anger when he saw it, pain. (“Poached”)
Even when things go badly, the end feels like some kind of return, a homecoming. There is consolation in tree roots and fungal networks, or the “greying tangle of patient pines”.
Hiking is a key part of many of these stories. Both “The Great Walk” and the title story, “Once We Were Wildlife” contain the rituals of multi-day hikers, from the preparation to physicality of the hike itself, forest changing under foot. “The Great Walk” is a moving story about a couple who spent their lives hiking together. This story is poignant and a little sad but it also feels transcendent. In the end, the division between the human and natural worlds unravel. There are many multi-day hikes in the title story. “Once We Were Wildlife,” which, at 80 pages, is long enough to be a novella, The story explores desire and longing against a backdrop of alpine valleys, ‘bluebird skies’, orchids and robins. The love between Frankie and Marie mirrors the dissolution of the others stories in the collection, including the ending which hits like an epiphany. The inclusion of Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound is perfect preparation for “Tarn”, the tarn-shaped poem that follows Frankie’s jump into a tarn, “shedding layers like some alpine animal, changing her colours.”
Down to cool dim. Slowing down. Shifting stones, shifting stones, sediment cloud, Stop.
Many of the stories that follow take sentience to its limits, going beyond anthropomorphism into the perspective of a she-wolf, a tree, a colony of birds, penguins, and even a melting iceberg, each with its own distinct way of inhabiting the world, often at timescales that are vastly different to the human:
We cannot stop time. The world shifts and turns, forms and re-forms. We were land once, and we will be land again. Forgetting ice. Forgetting ships. Forgetting them. We cannot hold back the weight of all this water. (“The Melt”)
As the human perspective recedes the narrative becomes more poetic and less abstract, rooted in sensation, progression and motion. The final story, “Out of the Forest”, is set well into the future, narrated by a tree collective. I won’t say more about this story other than that Simpson’s depiction of a post-apocalyptic future is masterful, providing a view of the Symbiocene that is oddly optimistic:
So we sang sun into sap, as we always have, to hold ourselves together, new songs forming as we went.
The stories (and poem) in Once We Were Wildlife are beautifully written and consistently engaging, underpinned by a deep empathy for all living things. Taken collectively, the stories create a picture of how we might evolve, even in the midst of our inevitable self-destruction. Once We Were Wildlife is an important book and one that succeeds in the difficult task of showing us who and what we truly are.