Slick: Australia’s toxic relationship with Big Oil (Royce Kurmelovs, UQP)

As citizens of the global West, we are learning that sitting with discomfort is necessary to create change. Slick, by journalist Royce Kurmelovs (Just Money, The Death of Holden), is a welcome guide for dealing with this unease as Australia struggles to release its death grip on fossil fuels. Kurmelovs details how the Australian (and global) oil and gas lobby—fuelled by government and assisted by media and academia—denied, gaslit and groomed Australia into avoiding climate action. He uses the familiar Big Tobacco example and shows how the oil and gas lobby replicated it. He deep dives into the documents and finds which chapters on climate were underlined or crossed out, from which government document, why, by whom, and with which biro. The book takes us into the first confrontation between the petroleum industry and an Indigenous community—the Yungngora; we witness the Lismore floods; and we see climate protesters meeting the brick wall of state justice. Slick is clinical but fun (‘if pumping carbon into the atmosphere could be compared to pissing in a swimming pool…’), and Kurmelovs strikes the right balance between a journalistic and conversational tone. We may be at a tipping point: the next generation—whose future the lobbyists sold—is learning to mobilise, and shareholders are voting down weak climate transition plans. For readers interested in how the system hinders change, this is a timely book.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Becca Whitehead is a features and content writer based in Naarm-Melbourne. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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