Tony Birch is fascinated by the stories of society’s fringe dwellers. It’s not surprising, given he grew up in the slums of Melbourne’s Fitzroy in a one-bedroom terrace, the son of an Irish Catholic mother and a father whose ancestry includes a Jamaican convict and a strong Aboriginal line that can be traced back to Tasmania.
Though his short-story collections, Shadowboxing and Father’s Day, set him on the radar as a writer to watch, it was the shortlisting of his novel Blood for the Miles Franklin award in 2012 that cemented his position as a chronicler of life on the margins.
Birch describes his childhood memories of the Yarra as central to his imaginative thinking and says he longed to write a novel about his beloved river. Ghost River began as a short story that focused on the river men — the homeless alcoholics who lived on the banks of the Yarra behind the factories of Fitzroy.
In the novel, the river men are important but are secondary to the narrative. This is the story of two 13-year-old boys, Charlie “Ren” Renwick and his neighbour Sonny Brewer, who discover friendship in the slums of Collingwood and freedom by the Yarra’s polluted banks.
It is the summer of 1968. Until he meets Sonny, Ren spends his days at the library researching birds and sketching their likenesses for hours. For Sonny, Ren’s companionship is an escape from his unpredictable and violent father. The river is neutral territory. Here they are free to swim in its dubious waters, challenge their nascent manhood by taking dangerous dives from its bridges, smoke cigarettes in car wrecks or sit around the river men’s campfire and listen to their tall tales.
Sonny’s difficult family life has made him resilient. It’s a theme Birch has tackled before in many of his short stories and again in Blood. How does a dysfunctional childhood affect the adult you become? How does domestic violence, or even the ever-present potential threat of violence, shape your person and world view? In Blood, it is Jesse who is in many ways the old man, despite being a teenager.
Ren lacks Sonny’s confidence and fearlessness. This difference in maturity is illustrated by Sonny’s paper run. He is driven to work hard to save money to make good his escape from his father, from the slums and from poverty. Ren saves his cut from the takings to buy a decent camera to photograph birds.
Birch’s writing is often described as bleak. Telling tales about the people who live in the gritty corners of society is bound to make a writer vulnerable to such a description. And, in parts, Ghost River is a story of loss. Developers move into the old river area to build a freeway and the 13-year-old boys can do little to stand in the way of progress. Sonny becomes victim to the standover tactics of the local gangster.
Birch also tackles loss of innocence, particularly in the minor character of Della, who has a fire-and-brimstone preacher father. If there is one criticism to be made of Ghost River, it is that Della is a character who has the potential to play a much bigger role in the story than Birch ever allows her.
But the overriding mood is one of joy and hope. The title nods to the idea that beneath the Yarra lies a ghost river that takes good souls to its heart and spits out the bad.
There are the small joys found in days spent by a filthy river, the joy of friendship and hope born of resilience. As the novel closes, Ren remembers a story one of the river men, Tallboy Garrett, told him about a tomcat tied in a sack and thrown into the river to die.
When Ren questions what the story means, Tallboy replies: “It means plenty. You find yourself down at the bottom of the river, for some it’s time to give in to her. But other times, young fellas like you two, you got to fight your way back. Show the river you got courage and is ready to live. She needs to see that. Or she’ll take you. That’s the most important story of all.”
What shines through Birch’s writing is his love for the river and the carefree summer days of his childhood. Birch’s nostalgia for his formative years in the Fitzroy slums and the housing estates of Richmond overrides the bleakness of the environment and circumstances in which Ren and Sonny live.
That sentimentality also means Birch balances the opposing forces in Sonny and Ren’s lives and lands on the side of hope. It’s tempting to conclude this is as much a comment on his own story as a championing of triumph being available to all. From the small-time gangsters to the river men themselves, Birch’s writing feels authentic. This is what life is really like living on the edges — it’s not all bleakness and despair. If anything, Ghost River is a love story.
• Ghost River is published by the University of Queensland Press and distributed by Penguin
