Tony Birch meets me at the old Fitzroy Football Club grandstand on a Melbourne morning of biting wind and horizontal rain.
Birch grew up in and around Fitzroy, then a working-class suburb. The area forms the setting for his latest novel, Women & Children, which is about domestic violence, female resilience and children who witness too much.
A former Fitzroy supporter, Birch, who is of Aboriginal, Barbadian, Irish and Afghan heritage, gestures to the far side of the Brunswick Street Oval. “We always watched the games from over there in the outer. My old man liked to get amongst the opposition.”
We walk through the sodden Edinburgh Gardens into gentrified North Fitzroy. A path, glistening wet, traces the defunct rail line that brought coal to the Fitzroy Gasworks. The main characters in Women & Children – troublesome schoolboy Joe Cluny, sister Ruby, mum Marion, her battered sister Oona, their grandfather and dad, Charlie – lived in the shadows of the gasworks in 1965.
“Domestic violence is overwhelmingly a crime committed by men against women and children,” Birch says. “As a male survivor of domestic violence, you are one of the children but then you are also a man. So I wanted to convey all those hypocrisies and secrecies around the issue from when I was a kid.
“The lessons I got as a kid were always about how to defend yourself – if you get into a fight make sure you hurt the kid you’re fighting because even if they beat you they won’t come back.
“There’ve been very few men who’ve been a positive influence in my life as a child. As an adult, my male friendships are very close, they are very particular. I sort of have a Sydney Swans no dickheads policy.”
His childhood exceptions were his Afghan grandfather-by-marriage Bhouta Khan and great uncle and champion boxer Les “Ranji” Moodie. They inspired the novel’s sole redeeming adult male characters, Charlie and Ranji.
Birch is one of Australia’s most celebrated living literary writers. A recipient of the coveted Patrick White award, he has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award for his novels The White Girl and Blood. His novel Ghost River, set by the Yarra near where we walk, won the Victorian premier’s literary award for Indigenous writing in 2016.
Birch is also a long-distance runner. We follow about six kilometres of his frequent eight-kilometre running route: into North Fitzroy, along Merri Creek to Yarra Bend Park and Dights Falls, past Collingwood Football Club’s old ground, through Collingwood and back to Fitzroy.
Birch is fit and wiry, a magnetic raconteur and notoriously generous supporter of other writers. A doting grandad of four (he cares for a preschool grandson one day a week) and a father of five, he is earthy, warm and mischievously funny. Take his description of eventually supporting the AFL team Carlton after Fitzroy’s heartbreaking merger with the Brisbane Bears in 1996:
“It’s a bit like a divorce. You can’t just fucken’ re-marry next day. I thought about Carlton a lot. But I just couldn’t follow a club led by [Liberal businessman] John Elliott,” he says.
“But Elliott got the arse [in 2002]. Then I went to my first Carlton home game. And it felt right. Carlton were shithouse. It was just like following Fitzroy.”
Birch’s journey from schoolboy truant and street fighter (twice expelled, he left school at 14) to University of Melbourne professor (he has a PhD in history) and esteemed literary writer was an epic trek via Broadmeadows Tafe as a mature-age HSC student and jobs as a messenger, office boy and firefighter (a “claustrophobic reminder of what I didn’t like about men”).
He escaped malign paternal influence at 15 when his father entered psychiatric care. “It gave me such a sense of release, to be out of his control, because he never fully recovered and he never fully came back into our lives.”
Quitting cigarettes and booze after seriously taking up running in his 20s also changed the complexion of his masculinity as he reengaged with formal education and enrolled in university.
“I started drinking and smoking very young. I got expelled from school. I got into a lot of fights. I was a very good street boxer. I never lost a fight. And it was the one thing I was good at that my father valued,’’ he says.
“The part of me that might be in [Women & Children’s] Joe is almost the version of me I’d have liked to have been had I not been subject to my father’s violence. Up until 10 when I gave into him I was actually frightened … I knew I could become this other person I didn’t want to be.
“I do imagine if my dad hadn’t got sick and I’d continued on that path I would have had a very different outcome.’’
Birch’s elegant fiction is distinguished by his acute ear for vernacular, a great human tenderness and compassion for the marginalised, as well as his deeply flawed male characters and strong women – instructed by his mother, sisters and aunt (a first communion photograph of sister Debbie and godmother-aunt Maureen adorns the cover of Women & Children).
His novels are short, the latest barely 50,000 words. This brevity is powerful; an antipodean equivalent, perhaps, of Irish writer Claire Keegan’s beautiful short novels.
In my conversations with Birch over the years he’s invariably reiterated his affection for his dear mate, the Indigenous rights activist Gary Foley. Today’s no different. Our banter, meanwhile, covers more Australian rules football, dogs, grandparenting, our tragic maternal grandfathers and other Australian writers.
He praises the warm, vibrant communities of the much-maligned high-rise commission flats of his childhood and recalls exploring as a kid – “just like Tom Sawyer” – the wondrous Birrarung (Yarra) River.
As we cross busy Punt Road into Clifton Hill, Birch returns to trauma and self-reclamation.
“When I was young I never reflected on the violence I witnessed, was subject to and schooled in,” he says. “I absorbed it, and even though I moved away from it consciously I didn’t really question its impact on me. It didn’t hit me when I had my own kids, but [it did] when I had grandkids and in particular when I started to care for them.
“When I’m with [my grandson] Archie … and I think of the sort of violence I witnessed or was subject to at the age of four … I don’t remember being traumatised by it. But when I think of Archie I just can’t imagine him witnessing that and not being horribly traumatised.”
Nevertheless, Birch and his sisters ensured their father was cared for at the end of life.
As we near the tranquil Fitzroy home that Birch shares with his wife, Sara, he recounts the nursing home phone call almost two years ago saying his father was near death.
“But I have to be honest, Paul … I had to walk along Merri Creek to get there. And I didn’t rush.’’
The old man was dead when he arrived.
Women & Children by Tony Birch is out 31 October through UQP
In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
