'Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. After her daughter disappeared and left her with her granddaughter Sissy to raise on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families. When a new policeman arrives in town, determined to enforce the law, Odette must risk everything to save Sissy and protect everything she loves.
'In The White Girl, Miles-Franklin-shortlisted author Tony Birch shines a spotlight on the 1960s and the devastating government policy of taking Indigenous children from their families.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: For Archie James (Born 4 August 2018)
Only women know
'What might thinking with specific waters, and particular watery forms, bring to our understandings of how literature comes to mean? Taking cues from recent work in both the Blue Humanities – inspired by Pacific scholars – and the posthumanities, this article considers examples of recent writing in order to explore what is revealed when focus shifts to the aqueous. What ‘transversal alliances’ (Braidotti) and concomitant limitations are highlighted in writings and readings that take account of water? Thinking with a peculiarly Australian form of fluvial geomorphology – the chain of ponds – I consider four recent texts: John Kinsella’s 'Cellnight'; Natalie Harkin’s ‘Cultural Precinct’; Tony Birch’s The White Girl, and Christos Tsiolkas’s 7½. Thinking with the chain of ponds reveals aspects of ‘hydrocolonialisms’ (Hofmeyr) and immersive ontologies. While all waters are revealed to be operating within the multiple restrictions of the nation state together with anthropogenic climate emergency, a focus on waters reveals possibilities of renewal as well as human and more-than-human connections. Taking this beyond the island continent to trans-Pacific links, I also consider the ways such connections are joyfully celebrated in Lisa Reihana’s indigifuturist video work Groundloop.' (Publication abstract)
'Stories of trauma — personal, communal and national — dominate the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize, in its 63rd year.'
'As some recently published works have shown, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytellers are continuing to embrace fiction-writing as a vessel for speaking truth to power. Constantly branching out into new genres—experimenting, fusing, transforming—there’s a noticeable increase in First Peoples speculative fiction being published in Australia.
With each line across the page, the colonial grip on the continent loosens. Fingers unclasp, story by story. Not all of these stories are from deep time—some are reimagined or even newly born—but they all carry power. Story-trails weave across paper and screen towards a common destination: truth-telling.' (Introduction)
'Torpid beneath an inevitable sun, its dray-wide streets a study in shadow and glare, the country town of Deane — primary setting of Tony Birch’s new novel The White Girl, his fourth in a dozen years — is vividly rendered for a place that does not really exist. This is probably because some version of it has sprung up in so many parts of this country that only a generic instance is big enough to contain them all.'(Introduction)
'Birch’s new novel is an allegory of good, evil and the legacy of Australia’s colonial past – with strong black women at its core.'
Tony Birch : On 'The White Girl'
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2019
16811431
2019
single work
interview
podcast
'Tony Birch has appeared on The Garret before, and in this episode we are going to do something a little different. Our host Astrid Edwards had the honour of reading The White Girl (2019) before publication, and this interview represents Tony's first in-depth public discussion of the work.
'Tony is an acclaimed writer. His short story collection Common People (2017) was shortlisted for both the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Indigenous Writers Prize in the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Ghost River (2015) won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Blood (2011) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
'Tony is a frequent contributor to ABC local and national radio. He taught creative writing at Melbourne University for many years and was the inaugural Bruce McGuinness Research Fellow within the Moondani Balluk Centre at Victoria University.'
Source: Garret website.
'In critical appraisals of Tony Birch’s fiction, certain adjectives appear again and again. Of the prose: “spare”, “concise”, “uncluttered”; the characters “vivid” and rendered with “compassion”. Perhaps it is true that good novels, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are all alike, yet it could just as easily be true that critics, by and large, tend to repeat themselves. Or perhaps, as I suspect, there’s an element to Birch’s writing that makes him both readable and difficult to define.' (Introduction)
