New writing from Tony Birch

Tony Birch’s latest work is spoken in a vernacular of casual dispossession and strung out on the bones of a country dealing with serious inequality.

The Promise presents a vision of Australia that is both recognizably familiar as well as overwhelmingly foreign. 

Though in urban settings at times, the stories are bound by an aesthetic of Australiana deeply rooted in the landscape of swimming holes, cattle dogs on sprawling farms and ramshackle country houses with a shotgun under a floorboard. 

The titular short story ‘The Promise’ is set in a starkly morose and desolate geography. Dr Birch narrates: “The biggest business in town was grog. Always had been. Closely followed by the church, and after that, since the government crackdown, came drug-and-alcohol counselling.”

The story is about an alcoholic man from an Indigenous community, whose wife has recently left him, taking their children. He forges a document saying he’s committed to sobriety and drives drunk to visit his wife, hoping to manipulate her to return to him. 

When she refuses, he burns down their family home and blusters suicidally along a highway.

The story presents this man’s relentless cruelty, yet holds its breath on judgment. Dr Birch invokes a Christian sense of redemption to conclude the tale of misery and tortured trauma.

This is one of the themes that bind many of the stories. Dr Birch presents a series of disappointing, disenfranchised men who are criminals, who stalk women, are poor fathers and who crumble when women refuse to support them through their dysfunction. 

Dr Birch’s narratives present these characters with their weaknesses so close to the surface that they’re inked with a sort of tender hopelessless. Dr Birch’s authorial tendency is of striking compassion and mercy.

This is, however, not the kind of bleak collection of stories that is without gratification. Dr Birch gives voice to characters often unheard. There is a triumph in the pages which shred glamour in favour of honesty.

Dr Birch pulls characters from the margins and the backwaters in a way that challenges ideas about what literature should be about.

This unearthing and fleshing of these characters reads as a kind of literary activism. 

The Promise is published by UQP.