By Jane Gleeson-White
LITERATURE
On Kim Scott
Tony Birch
Black Inc., $22.99
One of the many pleasures of the Writers on Writers series is the fascinating variety of responses to the brief, which invites a distinguished Australian author to reflect on a fellow writer who has intrigued and inspired them. The effect of personalising this engagement is thrilling: each book is an idiosyncratic distillation of the literary concerns and qualities of both writers; and serves as a lively, accessible introduction to their work.
True to this alchemy, in this latest book of the series Tony Birch brings his own experience and preoccupations to his discussion of Kim Scott. There are also many common threads, one of which is the insistent interrogation of the idea of Australia.
Kim Scott is a novelist who draws deeply on the oral histories of his Wirlomin Noongar people of the south-east coast of Western Australia to challenge the colonial archive. Credit: Eddie Jim
Birch centres this by opening his essay with a crystallising moment at an Australian Studies conference. He is presenting a paper at Harvard University about the stolen generations and the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, and draws on Scott’s award-winning second novel, Benang: From the Heart (1999).
Birch reads from Benang a passage about the narrator Harley’s white eugenicist father: “Ern Solomon Scat f---s chooks … f---ed all his family before him.” The moment is shocking – in Scott’s original and at the conference. Birch conveys his listeners’ response with characteristic understatement: “The poetic statement was not well received by some in the audience.” It is almost funny – but you feel his outrage simmering. He has already been questioned at the door to the illustrious Harvard Club the night before, almost refused entry.
Tony Birch brings his own experience and preoccupations to his discussion of Kim Scott.
This is terrain both writers share: these zones of exclusion; this slow-burning rage at the violence and erasures wreaked on Aboriginal bodies, communities and stories; the daring to voice historical silences and omissions; the accretion of loaded detail to explode the fallacies of official histories; the levity of humour.
The criticism that follows Birch’s paper focuses on his “perceived disrespect for Australia”. He’s told that Harvard is not the place to discuss the “internal politics” of his country. Suddenly the urgency of Scott’s writing becomes blindingly clear to him: it is “the very antithesis of a shallow flag-waving exercise”. It is here in Boston, physically and culturally far from home, that Birch is “first struck by the power of Kim Scott’s writing” and its necessity for Australia.
Scott is a novelist who draws deeply on the oral histories of his Wirlomin Noongar people of the south-east coast of Western Australia to challenge the colonial archive. The Bringing Them Home report was published while he was writing Benang, which is his first novel to wrestle explicitly with these dissonant histories, one recorded in ancient traditions of oral storytelling; the other in ink and paper.
Birch has a PhD in history and has taught Australian and Aboriginal history. He turned to other forms of storytelling after becoming disenchanted with his discipline during the “history wars” of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2006 he published his first work of fiction, Shadowboxing, interlinked stories inspired by his childhood in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, and has since continued to write and publish fiction.
So author and subject are well-matched: Birch a historian turned fiction writer; Scott a novelist engrossed by history. This makes Birch particularly sensitive to the complexities and nuances of Scott’s reworking of the novel form to contest received national truths.
He makes this clear in his introduction: “I was attracted to Kim Scott’s writing not only for its rich approach to storytelling, but also for the way he understood the power of the colonial archive. … He also realised that if he were to extract a counter-narrative from the archive, to force it to confess truths camouflaged by bureaucratic language, he could use fiction to great effect.”
As a result, most of Birch’s essay is devoted to reading Benang alongside the histories of the stolen generations, including the Aborigines Acts of Western Australia and Victoria, and the fallout on subsequent generations. Two brief chapters on Scott’s subsequent novels, That Deadman Dance (2010) and Taboo (2017), conclude the book.
What Birch exposes is a still hidden “national history of caste legislation in this country”. It feels important at this moment, in the aftermath of the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum, that the history underlying Scott’s novels is told alongside them. In doing so, Birch has produced a valuable introduction to Scott’s work.
Launched in 2017 as a collaboration between Black Inc., the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne, the Writers on Writers series initially envisaged six books. Birch’s essay on Scott is the 13th. It is a timely and welcome addition to the list.
Tony Birch won The Age Fiction Book of the Year award this week. He is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au) and Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au). The Age is a partner of MWF.
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