The Trouble with Perfect Communities

There’s something wild and destabilising at the heart of The Endling, Keely Jobe’s debut novel, which imagines an isolated feminist collective pushed to its limits when every woman on the mountain falls mysteriously pregnant at once. Blending sharp humour with questions of ideology, community, and what it means to live alongside (and not above) the nonhuman world, the novel is as provocative as it is tender. I spoke with Keely about the real-life commune that inspired the book, the pull of curiosity in her writing, and how she approached telling a story where the boundaries between bodies, beliefs, and species begin to blur.

Hi Keely! How are you feeling now that The Endling is out in the world? 

I’m still getting used to the idea to be honest. It’s a pretty surreal experience having a debut novel come out. You spend so much time on your own with these imaginary characters, and you don’t really think the work will ever be published, that anyone will read it. I keep having moments of dissociation where I look at this beautiful object with my name on the front and I think, did I write that? Is that my name? But the book is getting a good response so far and that feels excellent.

Can you tell us a little about your journey from writing nonfiction to publishing your first novel?

I actually started with fiction. When I was in my twenties, my friend and I moved to the Blue Mountains and went on Centrelink so we could be artists. I wrote a whole novel back then. No idea what happened to it… I also tried writing short stories, but they were so bad no-one would publish them. They’re such a tricky form! And then my friend Erin Hortle suggested I try creative-nonfiction and it was a style that came very naturally to me, partly because I enjoy talking to experts in almost any field, and partly because nonfiction starts with curiosity. I love questions. I think I like questions more than I like answers. It’s where the game begins, if that makes sense, you’ve still got all the possibilities in your purse. When it came to writing this novel, which I did as a PhD, I realised curiosity again needed to be central to the process. Questions kicked it off. They were the driving force, right to the very end.

Tell us a little bit about the inspiration for this novel!

I spent a bit of time in a place that was once called Amazon Acres and is now just called The Mountain. It’s about a thousand acres of subtropical rainforest on top of a mountain in NSW. This might be the only remaining example of women’s land in Australia, and it was set up in the early seventies by a group of radical lesbian feminists, mostly hailing from Melbourne, who were looking for a place to feel safe and free. I didn’t know any of this when I first went there with my friend Blue; we just followed this lovely woman up who we’d met at a party in Sydney and then we were invited to stay for a while. We lived in a cabin for about 4 or 5 months with no electricity. If we wanted a coffee, we had to build a fire. If we wanted a shower, we stood under a watering can. It was one of the best experiences of my life. For large stretches of time we were up there alone, though occasionally women from the co-op would come for a week or two to get away, and it was through conversations with these women that we started to realise the significance of the place. At that point, it had been a refuge for women for almost 50 years.

What was the moment you realised your experience at the all-female commune could become a novel?

There were a couple of moments. Firstly, the policy of separatism was really interesting to me because I could see how fraught it could be and still was in many ways. We had questions regarding family, sexuality and gender identity, and how they fit into the separatist model, but the answers were different depending on the woman you spoke to. I got the sense the older generation, some of whom had been involved with the mountain for decades, were looking for younger women to take over the project, but from what I could see there wasn’t much interest, and I wondered if that was because the place was so remote or if it was the politics themselves that were off-putting. The built environment seemed to mirror this dwindling investment; some of the cabins had already been overtaken by the forest. There was a library in the communal house. I remember picking up this seminal second-wave feminist text and finding it had been turned into a mouse nest. That image – such an influential work so radically transformed but still nurturing in a way – was where the novel began. Later, I read that in the 80s, some of the mountain women were trying to get pregnant via parthenogenesis, and were even calling themselves lesbian lizards. That was the last piece of the puzzle. I started writing then.

Your book blends humour with serious ideas about gender, community, and species. How did you find that balance?

I’m one of those terrible people who always gets the giggles at the wrong time, like at funerals and in work meetings. I find the most serious situations the most ridiculous, and people funniest when they’re not meaning to be funny. The novel’s particular scenario – a group of passionate, traumatised individuals trying to find consensus on top of a mountain in extreme isolation when they’ve all fallen spontaneously pregnant – that’s bound to be kind of funny.

Writing from both human and nonhuman perspectives is fascinating. How did you approach that?

Again, I think it starts with curiosity. I know there’s a lot of discussion around the value or appropriateness of humans writing the nonhuman, but I love that this style of writing acknowledges the innumerable experiences of being in the world, that the human perspective is just one among many, and a limiting one at that. So I research other species to find out how they see and hear and smell and taste. I wonder what it would be like to taste with your feet, like a fly might, and then I play around with that, try to have fun with it. Decentring the human seemed a no-brainer when telling this story because the environment was too raucous, the perspectives too abundant, to narrate it from the human point of view alone. The humans are outnumbered after all! That the orchid, with its deep time perspective, steps in every now and then to question the significance of the women’s woes, is something I’ll always get a kick out of.

The story explores the tension between ideals and reality. Were any of the community dilemmas inspired by your own experiences?

For the most part it was a pretty quiet time, and the dilemmas included in the novel are lifted from research – a lot of oral histories came out of the women’s lands in Europe and North America – along with some anecdotes offered by the women who’d been involved with Amazon Acres. The famous ‘No men, no meat, no machines’ rule was definitely looser when I was there, at least in one regard: thank goodness we were allowed to use chainsaws! That said, there were some tough intergenerational conversations when I was up there, and they centred around who was included and excluded from visiting the place. I was much younger and didn’t have the language to make my position clear, but I knew I didn’t want to invest in a project that explicitly excluded trans people. At the time, that seemed to be the policy. I’m not sure if it’s changed since then. I remember finding those moments really hard because we all loved the place immensely and wanted to look after it – everyone had that in common. Maybe that’s why the project has lasted so long, because of that connection to place.

If readers take one thing away from The Endling, what would you hope it is? 

This story shows a community and a politics that’s stagnating. There is a biological adaptation occurring in this group, but the forces of social and political change are also troubling what they’ve built. When it comes to building community – something many of us are seeking at the moment – the concepts of evolution and adaption shouldn’t be discounted, they can be extremely generative. Don’t be scared of change!