True grit: Tony Birch’s short stories are tough stuff
Tony Birch is one of our leading writers and a master of the short story, as this new collection proves.
Over the course of four critically acclaimed novels, four short story collections and two volumes of poetry, Indigenous Melbourne writer, academic, historian and activist Tony Birch has rightly earned himself a reputation as one of Australia’s finest writers.
Last year his novel Women & Children won The Age Fiction Book of the Year and he has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Now UQP has published Pictures of You: Collected Stories, a handsome hardcover collection of short fiction drawn from across Birch’s prolific career.
To read Birch’s short fiction is to be initiated into the genre at its very best and this collection will appeal to both long-time readers of his work, for the way in which it cherry picks his very best pieces, and new readers, for its clever introduction to his oeuvre.
Birch is, above all else, a writer with a profound and unassailable gift for language and human and emotional insight. He has long expressed his commitment to, and preference for, writing stories about the working class and the marginalised. To that end, many of the stories collected here address the problems encountered by those living precariously, resigned and consigned to living by their wits on the margins of social acceptability.
Many of Birch’s short narratives unfold in the cracks and crevices that exist within broader society. They interrogate situations of violence, trauma and addiction with both tender insight and rawness, his first-person narration always ensuring that his characters are not mere victims of circumstance but rather flawed human beings for whom the possibility of something better is always in existence. Most of his characters are working class and indigenous people who, in his own words, “don’t really interact with people outside of their class or their social structure”.
His first collection of short stories, Shadowboxing, published in 2006, was composed of semi-autobiographical stories that were all narrated in the first person by a character named Michael. That collection drew on his 1960s childhood in Melbourne’s working-class Fitzroy and included stories of brutal domestic violence and the often-harsh parenting methods of Michael’s father, as well as the institutional violence that included the bulldozing of community housing to make way for “urban development”.
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Conversely, his most recent collections of short fiction, Common People (2017) and Dark as Last Night (2021) are less overtly gritty than his earliest work and more varied, ranging across narrators, ethnic and racial identities and situations.
For Birch, this thematic and narrative shift does not so much indicate any degree of personal emotional or broader social repair but, rather, what he has called a “resignation and acceptance”. This change is perhaps best exemplified by two of the stories included in Pictures of You – Paper Moon, which is narrated in the voice of a young girl and rewrites the final story from Shadowboxing; and The Haircut, both stories engaging fictionally with Birch’s own fractious relationship with his father.
Reading the 22 stories comprising this anthology, one thing that is striking about Birch’s style is his fierce economy with both language and imagery. Often his images suggest emotions, and vice versa, and similarly striking is his obvious affection for his characters.
Birch is masterful at both unfurling and peering into the souls of his protagonists
In Bicycle Thieves he writes with obvious emotion and empathy for his main character, Thommy, who is given a rusted old bike by a local man. The bike allows him to bond with his brother and, seeing their shared love for it, his mother in turn gifts him a shiny red Dragster for his birthday, which is later vandalised by some local louts. When violence ensues, no judgements are made and no blame cast. Likewise, The Ghost Train captures the grim desperation of workers who take on the bloody and risky work of the illegal meat-packing industry. The voices of its two main narrators, Lydia and Marian, are vulgar, larger-than-life and good-humoured, despite their circumstances.
While it is clear that they are being exploited and that the industry, which includes the illegal use of greyhounds for meat, thrives on its workers’ desperate need for cash payment, it is ultimately the women’s solidarity and emotional bond on which the story focuses.
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Birch is masterful at both unfurling and peering into the souls of his protagonists and this is especially evident in Paper Moon, which focuses on 10-year-old Carol as she goes to visit her father in a psychiatric institution. The story ranges over a number of incidents where her father helps her to overcome her fear or tiredness, beginning with his making her a paper moon in order to allay her anxiety that the setting moon would never rise again.
Carol’s sense of dread about the moon’s disappearance is beautifully echoed in Birch’s evocation of her father’s disappearance to hospital and his subsequent failure to return home, her mother “unwilling or unable to explain where he’d gone to”.
Carol’s mother gives in to her request and takes her to visit her father at the institution, where she encounters other disturbed patients, including a man whose repetitive behaviour makes him appear, to her, to “be stuck in a place he would never be free of”. When her father repeatedly tells her that he wants to go home, Carol helps him to “escape” by bus while her mother is talking to the doctors, and is overwhelmed with joy that he recalls the time he carried her on his back during a long walk.
Their close relationship, and yet the unresolved nature of their futures, is exquisitely captured in the final image of the story, as they sit on the bus, awaiting its departure, she: “slipped her arm through her father’s and held on tight. He looked anxiously out of the window. They waited.”
While the closeness of the father-daughter relationship in this story provides a less confrontational version of family life than that depicted in The Haircut, the precarity of the father’s mental health remains a source of anxiety, as does the subtle suggestion that Carol herself may have inherited this “sensitivity”.
Precarity haunts many of Birch’s short stories and his prose is perpetually clear-eyed, purposeful and deeply stirring. He evokes place and time through his vivid use of details and imagery, writing characters whose lives are relatable and imaginable to the reader. His are stories that focus on the common humanity of his protagonists despite their precarious lives and, sometimes, the immense weight of a traumatic history still bearing down on them.
The tone is never condescending or judgemental, even while the themes – of hard lives, racism, addiction, family violence, mental illness and life on the streets, among others – are weighty.
As critic Kerryn Goldsworthy has suggested of the short stories of another Indigenous writer, Tara June Winch, and can equally apply to Birch: “behind these tales of individual lives the reader can always sense the politics of race, of class, of gender, and can sense behind these things the massive forces of history, ruthlessly shoving these characters around.”
At the same time, as the stories so perfectly chosen for Pictures of You showcase, Birch maintains a strong sense of his characters’ agency, of resilience in the face of hardship and, perhaps above all, an empathy for and understanding of the precarious lives that his stories elicit both through his characters and the reading process itself.
Pictures of You: Collected Stories by Tony Birch, UQP, $45 (hardback).