Tony Birch is the author of three
novels: the bestselling The White Girl, winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s
Award for Indigenous Writing and
shortlisted for the 2020 Miles
Franklin Literary Award; Ghost River, winner of the Victorian Premier’s
Literary Award for Indigenous
Writing; and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2012. He is also the author of Shadowboxing and three short story col ections: Father’s Day, The Promise and Common People. His first col ection of poetry, Broken Teeth, was published in 2016. In 2017 he was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award for his contribution to Australian literature.
Tony Birch is also an activist, historian and essayist.
www.tony-birch.com
Also by Tony Birch
Shadowboxing
Father’s Day
Blood
The Promise
Ghost River
Common People
Broken Teeth
The White Girl
First published 2021 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
uqp.com.au
reception@uqp.uq.edu.au
Copyright © Tony Birch 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover design by Jenna Lee
Typeset in 11.5/14 pt Adobe Garamond by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group University of Queensland Press is assisted by the Australian Government through
the Australia Council, its arts funding
and advisory body.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
ISBN 978 0 7022 6327 9 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 6507 5 (epdf)
University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
For Wayne Birch
25 July 1961 – 26 March 2019
Contents
Introduction – Anne-Marie Te Whiu xiii
BLOOD
Little Man 5
Dragster 6
Fading Light 7
TKO 10
Isabel 11
Women 12
Away 13
Sacred Heart 14
Finding You Outside Kyoto 15
Matinee 16
A Father Brushes His Daughter’s Hair
on the First Day of School 17
‘Trouble Trouble Trouble’: Probation File 29/1957 18
Stillborn 20
Archie 22
4 am the Window 23
Cathedral 24
Leaving 25
SKIN
The Eight Truths of Khan 31
The Silence 42
Forebearer 43
A Matter of Lives 44
Waiting for a Train with Thelma Plum 45
Hygiene for a Nation’s Soul 46
A Native Surgeon’s Duties 47
The Oath of a White Man 49
Razor-wire Nation 50
Race War 51
Gallows – near La Trobe Street 52
Tunnerminnerwait 55
WATER
How Water Works 61
Black Ophelia 63
Companions in Death 64
Birrarung Billabong 66
At the Creek 67
The Arteries 69
Swimming Whole 70
Water 71
Gunnamatta 72
Beneath the Bridge 74
Desecrate 76
The Great Flood of 1971 78
Acknowledgements 81
Introduction
1986 our neighbourhood
out on the street at 3 am
pyjamas and anticipation
my eyes to the sky
poised ready to spot the tail
blazing between gathered stars
Halley’s comet was ours
and mine all at once
This is the awe I feel when reading
Tony Birch’s Whisper Songs
his words are constellations of memories
his heart beats across hemispheres and time as though his resistance is charged by the Earth’s magnetic field
blacker the better holds the light
mercury rising
blood
moon wears
skin
meteor showers
water
—Anne-Marie Te Whiu
xiii
BLOOD
Tony and Brian Birch,
Fitzroy, 1963
Little Man
searched for you at night
old haunts street corners
back lanes dressed in rain
big sky darkness
spoke soft words
calling your name
echoes to glimpsed light
fell with a dying moon
our whispered songs for you
face hidden you refused us
mute silent brother
we marked you lost
our hidden faces
mourning mourning
until you appeared
brown pools honey locks
in one hand a guitar
in the other a book
words of gold
music ever true
a song of promise
you sang sweet –
I will be with you
5
Dragster
red bicycles ring tandem
slalom empty streets
chrome
on morning sunlight
tyres
on crumbling bitumen
floating air
on air
we rode the world together
fearless 501s barefoot
no shirts no hands
cigarettes
reckless
bodies battling
we were
born to pain
6
Fading Light
in 1940 my grandfather
Austin ‘Snowy’ Corcoran
was discharged from the air force
saved by colour blindness
his war effort was fought
on the assembly line
a night-shift boilermaker at
General Motors–Holden
he was a man busy building
the all-Australian car
in 1953 he came home
a warm early morning to
the narrow two-storey terrace
slipping in the back door while
my grandmother five children
slept in oblivion upstairs
ever the organised man
he placed hat and coat on hook
neatly folded working clothes
stripped to white underwear
walked into a tiled bathroom
snapping the brass lock behind him
my mother a girl of twelve
found his soulless body
slumped across the bathtub
he left her no story
and the coroner gave little away:
7
well-built man
aged forty-seven
came home from work
took carving knife
cut his throat
in the hospital’s tiled theatre
a future grandfather’s life
was pronounced extinct
this large and powerful man
lay unshaven of pallid skin
carrying a heart of twelve ounces
across a life of separation
my blood wearing his own
I study my mother’s mantle
take an engraved pre-war
football trophy in my hands and
examine a handpainted photograph
hammered with a rusting nail
my grandfather is in uniform
forever waiting to be called
on a chilling winter afternoon
we visit Melbourne General
Nanna Alma and me
she weeds her own plot
we change murky water
and arrange fresh flowers
8
it would be his birthday
she sings songs for him and
cries forty years of loss for
Austin Patrick Corcoran
who lies buried in solid clay
below his youngest son
Michael John Anthony
died tragical y ‘murder’
28th day of July 1962
9
TKO
and something less for us
ever becoming the middleweight
pound-for-pound undefeated
a contender in a man’s own home
we were relegated
punching bags
sparring partners and patsies
for the feigned left hook
awkward footwork the duck
and weave followed
wait for it
by a straight right from the shoulder
putting her to the canvas
down
down and out for the count
10
Isabel
beautifully stubborn
four years and rising
deep frown eyes fierce
limbs of courage
a girl holding ground
bone and memory
of women reaching back
meeting deep time then
cartwheeling forward
armour for her courage
she is the circle we gather
11
Women
for Nina
they boss street corners
floral dresses cleavage lips
child-bearing swaying hips
we watch from safety
outside touching distance
barely teenage boys
with nothing to show
for a wild imagination
but school shorts and
hairless milk-white skin
early paper round a woman naked
in a window still Sunday morning
she turns to me and waves
smiles at me hair thinning
eyes hazel naked open
wounds in place of breasts
Nanna lifted her skirt for me
varicose legs of factory standing shifts
she forced my hand to a jagged scar
a braille story on a woman’s skin
the mark of men destroying love
12
Away
warmed hollow
of a shared bed
a place where you
once rested is –
away
your breath singing
rising through morning air
to fill the rooms of houses
the life of you –
away
fingerprints marking time
on a kitchen table
scars on a doorframe
a bicycle wheel creaking
its windmill in the yard
a mother’s hands sweeping
though locks of hair to
untangle and savour –
away
and along a dusty road
running away from home
to where secrets are held
in ghosting whispers
your crying feet
leave no dance –
away
13
Sacred Heart
schoolyard of scattered gusts
littered with frenzied tags
marks of soft-skinned boys
fine hair delicate fingers
lives of labelled comfort
this their only rebellion
the pigeons no longer bother
shitting on the slate church spire
beside the nuns’ bathroom
a peppercorn tree climbed
to view the all-holy arse
of a vicious headmistress
long dead long gone
the flag of a diseased nation
hangs limply above tales of abuse
Stations of the Cross witness to
touching here probing there
cloaked acts in the name of God
this concrete yard was once ours
lanes streets crumbling houses
gutters to rusting rooftops now
unwanted unloved even by lovers
of coffeed corners steaming
and houses sparse and heartless
14
Finding You Outside Kyoto stone cats in red knits
line a narrow canal
sweetened water swirls
pots of fallen leaves
tannin-stained hands
awaiting winters soon born
in the hills above the city
mist and mystery settle
climbing with you weightless
in the small of my back
sweat trickles to skin
my heart suddenly shifts
like a runaway clock
on the summit snatching chilled breaths
I settle on rock and wait for you
my body sways stops dead
away from the home I anchor to
fear escaped me – finally
on a ridge of solid stone
you held me you covered me
we lay together on ground
15
Matinee
in the moulding gloom
of the old Victory pictures
carpets swirled and stained
in the back stalls of lust
where wild girls kissed girls
we rode chariots in the cheap seats
of a suburban colosseum along with
the oiled biceps of Charlton Heston
he left his guns at home
and found Jesus in technicolour
ate ice-cream fondled thighs
and blew cigarette smoke-rings
watching Tony Curtis in tights
our swashbuckling prince
four nil and counting
John Wayne the self-righteous cowboy
waged a war on a veneer frontier
each Saturday at two o’clock sharp
we were forever the circling Indians
content with our savagery
16
A Father Brushes His Daughter’s Hair on the First Day of School
for Grace
new year shoes and blisters
your growing pains a curse
eyes deep with worry
watching our hands dance
‘don’t worry,’ I whisper
‘you will be magnificent’
you ask for a poem
a story of hair
you carry a field
of light and care
tenderly touched
by this morning sun
17
‘Trouble Trouble Trouble’: Probation File 29/1957
juvenile a child in manner
deceptively dangerously alluring
stained in dusky skin
eyes big dark doe-like arresting
charm the mask of chaos
first blush perhaps a girl child?
our desire to save quickens the heart
light limbs soft voice pursed lips sweet
honey-blond hair as fine as, yes, silk
but he is not to be mistaken for innocence on 30 September 1970 in the Year of Our Lord evidenced in Her Majesty’s Children’s Court Batman Avenue the juvenile acting with ‘malice aforethought’
confronted an Officer of the Crown (page 7 para. 1) with violence previously unwitnessed by said Officer pages, entries, words contained within evidence a sorry tale inevitable fall from grace –
troubled infancy, troubled schooling
trouble trouble trouble – triplicate
in bold in red underlined asterisked accordingly 18
a predicted story of woe (page 22 para. 3) the child was ‘beaten repeatedly & severely’
aged 10 years 7 months 12 days
with metal bar trouser belt and fists
by ‘person or persons’ of child’s own blood the boy himself becomes that which he fears violence courses his veins and therefore –
therefore he must become the protected one by us for us and himself and for the country this the only Nation girt by sea
19
Stillborn
pathway to the children’s burial ground
wreckage of broken tablets collapsed
testimonials weed-infested plots and
Margaret – who toppled to her end in her sixty-fist year eventually
followed by a marble tribute
memorialising her good Christian name
she lies one grass lane from James McNay aged 74 years died at Moonee Ponds
who left a scriptured legacy:
they shall walk with me in
white for they are worthy
at the site of the common grave
he carries the face of my brother
catches the wind in infant hands
soft unmarked unscarred loving
a soul resting here with the many
born on Good Friday and gone
before the sun went down
he smiles marvels briefly
reaching for toy cars and dolls
memento mori to those
a day hours minutes old
pausing he frowns my way
sensing sadness living here
we sit together and watch
20
a whirligig spinning madly stops reverses runs escapes
slows to a final gasp before
airlessness ends its charge