The desperate life of the family is in sharp contrast to the shifting economic boom of the town more generally. Despite his youthful age Kenno has left school and is holding down two jobs in a determined effort to support the struggling family. He not only works in a shop during the day, but also helps his alcoholic and depressed father in his cleaning business.
Progressive culture since 1954
Author: Tony Birch
Tony Birch is the author of Blood and Shadowboxing. His short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction have appeared in literary journals in Australia and internationally and been anthologised widely. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne.
Blogs
Review
‘Not quite broken’
The ensemble cast of Harmless includes Dave, a career criminal and all round desperado, who we meet at the beginning a long prison sentence for armed robbery; his young daughter, Amanda, a girl we both fear and admire for her sense of street-wise resilience (who uses wonderfully economical language, including the much neglected ‘fuck-knuckle’); Sua, Dave’s girlfriend, who is escaping a troubled past in her homeland, Thailand, and the dark secret she carries with her; and her father, Rattuwat, a man burdened by a sense of failure as a father, who has arrived in Australia under tragic circumstances.
Review
The relationships between human and non-human animals
When I was a teenage boy I often skipped school on a Friday and picked up casual work at the local slaughter yard, so I could make some spending money for the weekend. While working there I saw animals treated with systematic cruelty. The distressed cries of pigs, herded into pens, waiting to have their throats cut, was a sound so shocking that it gave me nightmares.
Continue reading 'The relationships between human and non-human animals' 2
Review
The colour of kerosene
I read this collection, cover to cover, on the Australia Day holiday. It happens to also be the birthday of my grandmother, Alma, and my son, Drew. So, like it or not, I did have something to celebrate.
Review
Best of 2012: My house is a very bleak house
Last weekend’s newspapers, both local and international, were full of their ‘best of’ reading recommendations for 2012. It seems wherever we were we read pretty much the same books, and we’ll read them again next year just to show how much we enjoyed them.
Continue reading 'Best of 2012: My house is a very bleak house' 1
Review
Fiction: This is how you lose her
In 1996 Junot Diaz released his first book of fiction, the linked short story collection, Drown. I had not heard of him or the book, and bought it on impulse, seduced by the cover – black and white photograph of a teenage boy, porkpie hat resting on his head, standing in the door of a heavily tagged train. The image reeked of urban grit and attitude. I took it home with the greatest of expectations.
Review
‘Never Short of Class’
How short (or long) can a short story be? The length of a literary piece of string, perhaps? Definitions of the short story are as varied as those of the genre itself. We have often heard the comment that we sometimes enter a short story after the first act and leave before ‘The End’.
Review
Fiction: Darkness on the edge of town
The novel begins with a car crash, a dramatic device I warn my writing students to avoid. I also tell them that a good writer breaks the rules and produces good, even great writing.
Review
Fiction: The Cove
Historical fiction often excites Australian readers. It also creates heightened anxiety, particularly amongst those who covet the intellectual and political turf of the past. (The hysterical wash-up of Kate Grenville’s Secret River is a recent telling example). Nothing gets a history professor hotter under the collar than an Australian novel set in our colonial past that fails the empirical test of ‘accuracy’.