Despite recent decarbonisation policy decisions in Australia the nationalist narrative of environmental particularism and settler resilience still encourages exploitative attitudes to place. The difficulty for dissenting voices to make themselves heard in Western democracies in the current cultural climate, which has seen a marked erosion of the authority of traditional guarantors of knowledge and contributed to the rise of populism, is the tenor of Australian writer Madeleine Watts’s debut novel The Inland Sea (2020). After outlining some of the linguistic, philosophical and socio-political tensions that are encapsulated in the broad notion of post‑truth, the article explores how the disconnection of government and media from the Australian public’s lived experience of global warming affects the concept of place as “home” and the possibility of developing a grounded narrative. Finally, the question raised by Amitav Ghosh about the suitability of the novel genre to talk about climate change is used as a starting to point to discuss the moral, political and aesthetic responsibilities involved in writing Australian fiction in a post‑truth era.