Quiet Work

Part of the force of Tony Birch’s latest novel Women and Children is its concerted quietness. I don’t mean meekness, or a lack of vision or commitment – this is a novel about male responsibility in the face of domestic violence, and the roles family and friends play as the abuse escalates. But it is also a novel about race, theology, and labour. As big and as loud as these topics are, Birch’s storytelling allows him to address them carefully, slowly, and cumulatively. In a moment when domestic violence rates are increasing, when violent acts against women and children are being nearly constantly reported in the news, Birch asks his readers patiently to observe contexts of family violence, and the institutions and ideologies that enable it to flourish. While these topics have appeared in Birch’s fiction since Shadow Boxing (2006), Women and Children is his first novel to cohere around the problem of domestic violence, placing it at the centre of the reader’s attention.

Published less than a year after Women and Children, Birch’s On Kim Scott provides a guide to reading the Wilomin Noongar author’s formidable works. Birch draws on his two decades-long engagement with Scott’s writing, offering an exploration of the latter’s novels, with a particular focus on Benang: From the Heart, recently reissued in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Birch also situates Scott’s writing within the Wilomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, a program that Lilly Brown has described as part of an ‘urgent promotion of regional Australian languages emergent from place in the ongoing process of regeneration and healing’. Birch stresses that Scott’s writing is not a simple rewriting of narratives of Australian triumphalism, nor is it assimilable to post-colonial narratives of ‘answering back’ the coloniser; rather, Noongar stories are ‘autonomous and independent, and precede the myths that were invented to displace them’. On Kim Scott asks the reader to learn a new way of reading Aboriginal literature, one that recognises Aboriginal being itself as a ‘quiet moment of triumph’.

Open Women and Children and you can hear nuns yelling at children, mothers smashing plates, children teasing one another, and the thud of a woman falling to the ground after a bout of male rage. Set in 1960s Fitzroy, the novel tells the story of a family becoming enmeshed in escalating domestic violence. Oona, the glamorous aunt, arrives at the front door of her sister Marion’s house, seeking shelter from her boyfriend. The reader witnesses the violence enacted on Oona’s person not directly, but rather through the reactions of each family member to the signs of her abuse.

To say that domestic violence affects the entire family in Women and Children would be an understatement. The shielding of children from witnessing violence is simply not a luxury that this family enjoys. Birch is particularly interested in childhood attempts to comprehend violence. When Oona arrives at her sister’s house bearing the signs of an assault, the entire family is drawn into her predicament:

Birch’s talent is that he doesn’t moralise. While it is easy to have sympathy for Oona’s not wanting to discuss her abuse, her use of Joe’s presence to this end is far less straightforward. As Oona struggles to conceal her injuries and pain, Joe spots a ‘single tear hanging from an eyelash’. Joe’s acute awareness of the magnitude of the scene is expressed as a curious and aesthetic interest in the signs of Oona’s distress. By switching between Marion’s position, divided between her loyalty to her sister and her protectiveness towards her son, Oona’s desperate desire to avoid facing her situation, and Joe’s aesthetic curiosity, Birch provides the reader with a virtual access to the complexities of sheltering family members in the aftermath of domestic violence.

Despite the clamour of violence, there is a quietness threaded through the novel. The title, Women and Children, is at once small and grand. We can hear within it echoes of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the book that Birch’s character Ruby choses to read aloud to her wounded aunt. It is also possible to hear Edmund Gosse’s Fathers and Sons and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. However, the work that the title does is not purely in its literary allusions, but rather in the attention it draws to the unnamed members of the family: the men. As Birch creates stinging representations of Oona’s violent boyfriend and her sister’s shady ex-husband, the grandfather emerges as a figure who can play a vital role in the lives of his grandchildren.

Charlie – or Char, as he is referred to by his grandson – is not a patriarch in any traditional sense. As a retired street sweeper who rents his own home, he has no property for his daughter and grandchildren to inherit, nor would it be traditional for his last name to be passed down to Charlie, his daughter’s son. Charlie’s relationship with Joe is thus cultivated in the absence of the conventional markers of lineage and connection. During the school holidays, Charlie is tasked with looking after his grandson while his daughter Marion works at a drycleaner. Joe resists being sent to his grandfather’s house initially, but becomes charmed by Charlie as he assists his grandfather in the seemingly endless task of sorting out the piles of scrap metal and various items amassed in the latter’s backyard. Charlie is slow, methodical, and patient. He provides his grandson with the opportunity to narrate the harassment and abuse he has experienced at school, at the hands of both the nuns and the other children. Charlie’s outrage cuts through an institutional world of normalised violence: ‘I thought the days of whipping had ended.’ While the whole family can see that water torture is an unacceptable school punishment, it’s only Charlie who is able to draw out the racialised context of this punishment, and thus the meaning behind his grandson’s seemingly ‘bad behavior’.

While undertaking menial tasks, Charlie, Joe and Ranji Khan (Charlie’s friend) converse at length about the Stolen Generation, the malleability of childhood memory, Islam in Australia, and the shortcomings in the practice of Christian theology. As Charlie and Joe take a break from working in the yard and discuss labour relations over a cup of tea, Joe is provided with an opportunity to question his grandfather about the theology he is being taught at school:

The casualness of Charlie and Joe’s exchanges allows Birch to add subtly to the critique of Christianity that has run through Aboriginal writing since at least Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s ‘Colour Bar’, an activist poem which dismisses the racism within the Church as both Medieval and ungodly. Charlie stops short of renouncing Christianity, instead refusing to accept the practice of tormenting children with the promises of punishment in hell.

Birch’s anti-clerical critique sits somewhere between an Aboriginal activist mode of writing and the theological conversations in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance. In a parallel moment in Scott’s novel, which is set in nineteenth-century Albany, Noongar leader Wunyeran converses with Dr Cross, one of the new settlers, about their theological convictions. Wunyeran assents to aspects of Cross’s portrayal of Christianity, yet when it comes to the questions of heaven and hell, he pushes back:

Responding in Aboriginal English, Wunyeran refutes the depiction of suffering in hell as a valid representation of the afterlife. He mixes Noongar syntax with English words, and specifically uses the image of a port, one of the signs of colonial warfare and trade, to warn about the dangers of Christianity. Wunyeran’s enigmatic statement suggests that if a different port, or alternative theological structure, had been chosen by settlers at King George Sound, something other than the series of massacres and attempts to erase Noongar people and their culture may have resulted. While Scott’s novel isn’t structured around a series of theological propositions, Wunyeran does provide an unequivocal warning about Christian depictions of the afterlife being used to justify violence. Charlie and Joe propose a similar set of reforms to Christian eschatology, albeit in the language of 1960s Fitzroy. Charlie’s critique of the nun’s use of hell to terrify children allows both he and his grandson to participate in an ongoing Aboriginal conversation regarding Church reform. Birch’s inclusion of children within these theological discussions – and the seriousness of the grandfather’s engagement with his grandchildren – is also vital to the overarching structure of the novel.

In Women and Children, the grandfather’s role in the family is defined by the labour of childcare, and the possibilities for conversation that emerge while engaging in collaborative, repetitive tasks. Just as Scott’s fiction does not aim to provide solutions to political problems, Birch’s novel does not issue a program for dealing with domestic violence in Australia; rather it draws the reader’s attention to the contexts, institutions, and ideologies which sustain this form of violence. What the narrative of Women and Children offers is an alternative to domestic violence: male domestic labour, and the possibilities for quiet discussion that come with this work.

Not all forms of quietness in Women and Children, though, are positive. When Oona first arrives at Marion’s front door, her speech evaporates. As she attempts to ask her sister for shelter while keeping her injuries concealed, we hear that ‘Oona’s free hand was shaking, and her mouth was slightly open. It was as if she wanted to speak but was unable to do so’. In Women and Children, women do not have to speak loudly to be heard. In the wake of the first round of Oona’s abuse, the family, the church, and the society are calmly interrogated by Birch for their complicity in her situation. Birch does not demand that Oona’s silence be turned into articulate speech. By focusing on critiquing the institutions that fail to acknowledge domestic abuse, Birch offers a framework for rethinking familial structures in terms of domestic labour and the ongoing conversations which can hold families together.

Lynda Ng has argued that Women and Children is not a work of nostalgia – Birch uses 1960s Fitzroy to address the present. ‘Domestic violence’ does not come into common parlance until the 1970s, and while there is little consensus between our legal system and women’s rights organisations about what is encompassed by the term and how to prevent it, the problem of violence against women by their partners is escalating. The new coercive control laws in New South Wales criminalise behaviours such as verbal and financial abuse, which have long been understood to be not only indictors of worse crimes, but also some of the most damaging experiences for victims. However, there is also evidence that increased legislation does not decrease violence. In Australia, a woman is killed by her husband, boyfriend or ex-partner every week; last year the average was slightly higher. Research suggests that climate change is likely to increase rates of domestic violence: in periods of uncertainty and economic depression, women are not only more likely to be harmed, but the society is also less willing to hold their perpetrators accountable. Aboriginal women are thirty-two times more likely to be targeted. As Birch reminds us in his 2023 essay on Alexis Wright for The Monthly:

Domestic violence has long been an important theme in the history of Aboriginal women’s writing, from Sally Morgan to Alexis Wright, and more recently Melissa Lucashenko’s Miles Franklin Award-winning novel, Too Much Lip (2018). Women and Children makes the case that the responsibility for addressing domestic violence cannot be the sole responsibility of women. Men’s intellectual, social, and domestic labour must also be enlisted.

Women and Children offers a politics of attention, with Birch asking the reader to sit with the difficulty and prevalence of domestic violence not as a passing ‘issue’ or news item, but one that structures the lives of women and children. While Birch doesn’t narrate Joe’s trajectory into adulthood, the events of the novel suggest that his experience of violence at school and in the home as well as the attention afforded him by his grandfather affect his conscience irrevocably. Under Charlie’s care, Joe becomes capable of comprehending and speaking about the violence of his context.

Birch’s politics of attention is also at the centre of his critical work on Aboriginal literature, which asks the public to engage with the difficulty of listening to Aboriginal voices. Since becoming the third Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne (a position previously occupied by Richard Flanagan and Alexis Wright) in 2022, Birch has renewed his case for literature’s significance as a means of amplifying Aboriginal voices. Birch’s choice to commit his time to writing about contemporary Aboriginal literature is not part of his institutional role, but rather a longstanding commitment. In 1994, Birch began teaching Aboriginal Writing at Melbourne University with the late Destiny Deacon, and he has since persisted with teaching Aboriginal works, mentoring Aboriginal authors and endorsing their works.

On Kim Scott is the thirteenth title in Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series and the first instalment to pair two Indigenous authors. While truth-telling has become a loud demand placed on Aboriginal people, Aboriginal writing remains a powerful way of ‘address[ing] truths of the past that some would prefer we left silent and undocumented’, as Birch puts it in On Kim Scott. Quiet speech is certainly not silence.

In his essay on the importance of Wright’s non-fiction, Birch calls on Aboriginal and settler audiences to carefully and wholeheartedly engage with Wright’s writing:

Birch doesn’t leave us hanging after reissuing Wright’s provocation that many readers do not seek more than a cursory engagement with the Aboriginal novels they read. He maps out how we might carefully consider Wright: by thinking about the questions that she proposes rather than jumping immediately to provide answers. For instance:

Whether Wright’s question is to be taken as one of spirituality or one of cultural memory, it’s profound in its request that Australia be reimagined as an Aboriginal space besieged by a nation of migrants carrying with them their own multitude of lineages. In a characteristically slow style, Birch asks the reader to go back to Wright’s work and participate in the collective labour of thinking though Australia’s spiritual and cultural constitution. In neither Wright’s or Birch’s comments is there a rejection of settler Australia, but rather a come-hither – an invitation to readers not only to listen more attentively to Aboriginal stories, but also to comprehend how these narratives affect the reader’s understanding of lineage and self.

On Kim Scott is structured around two ‘meetings’ between Birch and Scott: one ‘in person’ at a workshop convened by Rachel Perkins at the ‘Sails in the Desert Hotel’ near Uluru; and the other during an entertaining and mocking portrait of Australian scholars with wine-stained clothing rolling into Birch’s lecture on Benang at Harvard. While Birch acknowledges having met Scott and admired his ‘cheeky’ character in person, the more significant meeting between these two authors was in Birch’s act of reading Benang both alone and aloud to an expat audience at Harvard:

By ‘channeling’ Harley’s voice through Scott’s writing, Birch creates an accumulation of Aboriginal voices, speaking what is unspeakable to a group of Australian dignitaries: that sexual violence, at the level of the family, plays an integral part in the ongoing process of settler colonialism in Australia. Scat ‘fucks’ his family in ways both physical and ideological – raping multiple generations of his Aboriginal offspring, and justifying this with the West Australian government policy of ‘breeding out the colour’. It is hard to imagine anything more serious than acknowledging the pivotal role of sexual violence in settler colonialism, yet there is a lightness to Birch’s tone. The audience’s privileging of national propriety over the historical narrative that Birch presents through Scott’s work reads as a caricature of settler Australia’s refusal to acknowledge the ongoing realities of colonial violence. However, what is important in this scene is that Harley’s words, and the discomfort that they elicit, have been reissued by Birch, who forms a kind of community with Scott by voicing his ’poetic statement’. On Kim Scott registers the perversity of this scene, yet Birch refuses to argue with the men who emptied the cellars at the Harvard Club of Australian wines and gets back to the work of reading Scott’s novels.

On Kim Scott answers the often-repeated question: why are Scott’s novels so hard to read? It would have been easy enough for Birch to dismiss this question as another version of readers’ complaints about the difficulty of Wright’s prose, but once again he assists the reader in confronting this feeling. Birch acknowledges that neither the content nor the form of Scott’s novels is simple to digest. He faces up to the difficulty of Scott’s writing and the necessity of persisting:

By tracing his own steps, Birch shows us that immersion in Scott’s story is a pedagogical experience, one that teaches us how to read it as we read and the subtle satisfactions that come with the kinds of conclusions that it offers. A new mode of feeling, desiring, and being becomes possible, one that asks the reader to shift their expectations, both formally and politically, to an understanding of the power of Aboriginal survival and its articulation in words. Compared to Scott’s, Birch’s prose is straightforward, but both authors are asking for considerable engagement from their readers, something much more profound than what Wright identified as a ‘tour’. They are challenging readers to suspend their fascination with the climactic and linear narratives that underpin settler colonialism, and instead cultivate a capacity to listen to the quiet and accumulative structure of Aboriginal storytelling.

Part of what readers perceive as Scott’s difficulty can be found in his dual use of Wilomin Noongar and English language. This extends beyond his novels to his collaborative non-fiction work with Hazel Brown in Kayang and Me, which utilises ‘oral storytelling and Noongar language systems’, to the Wilomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, which ‘reclaim[s] Wilomin stories and dialect, in support of the maintenance of Noongar language’ within the community, and to a series of bi-lingual works published by UWAP. Birch reads Scott’s work with Noongar language as intertwined with his distinctive use of English: ‘Whichever genre Scott works in’, writes Birch, ‘Noongar language is at the heart of his writing, as is a critical engagement with written and spoken English, a language that was customarily used to stifle the voices of Aboriginal people’.

Scott’s collaborative works in Noongar and English were published after Benang, yet they have explanatory power in thinking about Scott’s first novels. As Harley is searching through the colonial archive for the story of his grandmother in Benang, he finds her Aboriginal name written with multiple spellings, including ‘a Nyoongar word, sometimes spelt, benang, which means tomorrow’. In the final line of the novel, Harley narrates his choice to spell his grandmother’s name ‘Benang’, and in doing so revive the Noongar word for tomorrow. When Birch reissues this line, he guides the reader to focus on Scott’s critical use of English:

For Birch, the final line of Benang is concerned with not only expressing the specificities of Wilomin Noongar language and existence, but also an Aboriginal ontology more broadly. Scott’s writing articulates Aboriginal being as unconstrained by the linear narratives and language invented to erase it. Twenty-five years after it was first published, the final line of Benang has become one of the most important lines in the history of Aboriginal writing because of its utilisation of Wilomin Noongar and English language to express the ‘quiet triumph’ of Aboriginal being.

Birch has not solely focused his public labours on inviting us to read and comprehend the most celebrated First Nations authors. Walk into any bookshop and the front covers of new works by emergent authors are emblazoned with Birch’s words. Birch has been busy writing endorsements for the next generation of Aboriginal and settler authors: Tara June Winch, Evelyn Araluen, Jazz Money, George Haddad, and John Morrissey. Just as the quietness of the grandfather Charlie’s mode in Women and Children allows him to give the time and space necessary to hear the reasons for his grandson’s actions, so Birch is carefully listening to these new cohorts. Women and Children suggests that this is not a one-way street for Birch, especially when it comes to stylistics. His description of Money’s how to make a basket (UQP 2021) is evocative and telling:

Birch uses the space of the blurb to declare that he has learned from Money’s labour, her lines which utter forth ‘sometimes quietly’, but always with vigour. Perhaps, Birch also learned from how to make a basket the distinctive capacity to modulate sound that we also find in his new novel. Women and Children is the product not only of a career as a solitary writer, but also of a critic carefully attending to the work of other authors. If On Kim Scott offers encouragement and a method for reading the complexities of Aboriginal literature, and Women and Children models a mode of intergenerational labour, attention, and exchange, the importance of Birch’s writing is clear: it creates an opportunity for the reader to practice the quiet work of reading and listening to Aboriginal voices.