The White Girl

Born in a working-class, predominantly Aboriginal suburb of Melbourne in 1957, Tony Birch did not expect to grow up to be a writer. Birch’s ancestors include Aboriginal Australians, British Empire convicts sent to Australia when it was still a penal colony, Irish people, and an Afghani man who immigrated in the late 19th century and worked as a cameleer driving caravans across Australia’s interior desert in the days before train or car travel. Birch’s childhood was characterized by poverty, violence, and disobedience. He was expelled from school twice before dropping out at the age of 15. After working as a firefighter for many years, Birch went to back to school in his 30s, attending the University of Melbourne, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history. Birch subsequently spent several years as a teacher and then went on to earn a PhD in Urban Cultures and Histories. Drawing on the rich storytelling culture of the Aboriginal community in which he was raised, Birch published his first short story collection, Shadowboxing, in 2006. Since then, he has published no fewer than five short story collections, two books of poetry, and four novels. He divides his time between his literary career, academic research on Indigenous topics, teaching, and activism.

The British established their first colony on the southeast coast of the continent now known as Australia in 1788. The rapid expansion of British colonies throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries brought settlers into conflict with the Aboriginal people who had lived on the land for tens of thousands of years. During the 19th century, each Australian state created laws and organizations designed to control Aboriginal people. These so-called “Protection Acts” and “Welfare Boards” deprived Aboriginal people of their land and legal rights while also underwriting efforts to force the assimilation of tens or hundreds of thousands of aboriginal children, all of whom were taken from their families by the government and government-affiliated organizations. For many decades, the only way for an Aboriginal person to escape this control was to successfully apply for an exemption from these oppressive laws, usually by proving that one was already living according to arbitrary European standards. By the middle of the century, however, an Aboriginal rights movement was beginning to coalesce across the country. The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders was founded in 1958 and a decade of organizing and advocacy by this organization and others contributed to a key victory in 1967, when an overwhelming majority of Australians voted yes on a referendum about including Aboriginal people in the census and giving the Commonwealth—rather than the states—the right to create legislation regarding Aboriginal people. Although the referendum itself didn’t improve the rights of Aboriginal people, it’s widely seen as a key step toward later victories, such as extending voting rights to Aboriginal people, expanding land rights, and subsequent efforts to protect and preserve Aboriginal heritage.

Many of Tony Birch’s other works deal with similar themes to The White Girl, including resilience, human dignity, and women’s strength. His 2023 novel Women and Children, also set in the mid-1960s, follows adult sisters Marion and Oona as they navigate the domestic violence of Oona’s boyfriend, and his earlier works Blood (2011) and Ghost River (2015) both explore the dignity and resilience of people living on the fringes of Australian society. Of course, the fact that Odette and Sissy are Aboriginal people plays a large role in their story. Many other novels and works of nonfiction have been written in Australia about the painful and fraught history of oppression and racism, particularly the residential school system which took thousands of children from the “lost generation” from their families. Readers interested in this history can look to Sally Morgan’s autobiographical My Place (1994), a book that describes the author’s surprise discovery of Aboriginal ancestors and retells some of their stories, or Mary R. Terszak’s 2008 Orphaned by the Color of My Skin, the memoir of an Aboriginal woman taken from her family at the age of two and forced to assimilate to White culture. Other novels that consider the fraught relationship between European colonizers and Aboriginal people include Kim Scott’s 2010 That Deadman’s Dance, which is set during the early years of the colonization of western Australia, as well as her  book Taboo, which explores the past through the lens of modern-day Aboriginal characters.