The Melbourne writer, activist and academic Tony Birch has a well-earned reputation as one Australia’s master craftsmen of fiction, in both the short story and novel form. Often with children protagonists, his narratives give us glimpses of life in the tougher neighbourhoods, inner-city suburbs such as (pre-gentrified) Collingwood, where he has set many of his short stories as well as his novel Ghost River, published in 2015.
Women & Children takes place in the mid-1960s and is again set in one of the less affluent inner-city pockets of Melbourne. The novel follows the adventures of Joe Cluny, “a wide-eyed eleven-year-old boy in year six”. Joe is in almost constant conflict with the sisters who run the local Catholic school: they’re all named Mary, and they all seem to have it in for him. His older sister Ruby, on the other hand, is a model child – she even wins a special trip to the country, awarded to the best student at the school. Joe’s mum, Marion, does her best to look after her two kids while working long shifts at the local dry cleaners and his grandfather, Charlie, has worked as a street-sweeper.
Charlie is now retired – he spends his time as a collector “of the goods that others discarded” – and is enlisted to supervise Joe during the Christmas holidays. Joe’s time with his grandfather is precious. Char (as Joe calls him) sets up a completely open and accepting dynamic with his grandson, and the innocent surface level of Joe’s life belies what is happening in the adjoining world of his mother and aunt Oona. As the novel progresses we become more immersed in the violence of Oona’s home life, a threat that could overshadow the whole family.
The tenderness and simplicity of the writing always strikes me when I read anything by Birch, and Women & Children reaches a new high. With young people often his central protagonists, the stories are told through a more intuitive perspective that’s limited by their smaller life experience – and he writes scenes of violence and suffering with an understated sensitivity that makes them all the more powerful.
There’s so much complexity and humanity in Birch’s characters, too. In a standout scene, Charlie and his old friend Ranji talk about their relationships with their fathers, a conversation that begins with Charlie asking Ranji about his Muslim faith. Both men feel distant from their fathers; Charlie thinks back to his own childhood, when he and his siblings would “sometimes walk the streets for hours” to avoid “nights when their father was at home railing against the world”, and wonders how this has shaped the kind of father he is for his own daughters. Following this moment, Birch writes a scene where Charlie tells Joe a family secret concerning Ada, Joe’s grandmother, who was an orphan. The subtext is that Ada is a member of the stolen generations, and the enormous strength of character and familial love we see in Birch’s novel becomes a direct and dynamic force working against a state that would remove children from their parents, or turn a blind eye to domestic violence.
Women & Children strikes an interesting tension between fiction and reality. Birch addresses this in the author’s note: “Women & Children is a work of fiction. It is not the story of my own family, but a story motivated by our family’s refusal to accept silence as an option in our lives,” he writes. “It is a story that witnesses both the trauma of violence and the freedom that comes with summary justice, even when satisfaction is a momentary experience.” For the Clunys, refusing to accept silence means helping Oona escape an abusive relationship – but Birch does not elaborate on exactly what it might mean for his own family.
Women & Children could be Birch’s most beautiful and forthright book yet, one that speaks to the power of family to stand together in face of adversity.
Women & Children by Tony Birch is published by UQP in Australia, $34.99
