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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Notes
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Dedication: For my children.
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Epigraph: It's a great life - if you don't weaken. (Alma Maree May Corcoran)
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Speaking to Romona Koval on the ABC's The Book Show on 7 March 2006, Birch indicated that Shadow Boxing was autobiographical in a 'psychological', but not a 'realist' sense.
Contents
- The Red House, single work short story (p. 1-19)
- The Lesson, single work short story (p. 21-39)
- The Butcher's Wife, single work short story (p. 41-57)
- A Disposable Good, single work short story (p. 59-73)
- The Bulldozer, single work short story (p. 75-87)
- The Return, single work short story (p. 89-104)
- Sea of Tranquillity, single work short story (p. 105-122)
- Ashes, single work short story (p. 123-141)
- Redemption, single work short story (p. 143-159)
- The Haircut, single work short story (p. 161-178)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
-
Stories for Hyperlinked Times : The Short Story Cycle and Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking Dogs
2019
single work
column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 9 October 2019;'We live hyperlinked lives, expected to be switched on and logged in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Time is a dwindling resource, multitasking is our default setting. We’re constantly reading: online articles, emails, social media posts. But for many of us, this dip-in, dip-out reading feels dissatisfying. We crave deeper engagement.' (Introduction)
-
Crafting “Literary Sense of Place” : the Generative Work of Literary Place-making
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 18 2018;'This paper examines the how of literary wheres. As makers of literary works, creative writers are tasked with evoking place on the page. While the nexus of place and literature is increasingly recognised as fertile scholarly ground, the specifics of how writers actually “make” literary places remain opaque and under-researched. I seek to address this gap by exploring how literary place is constituted through creative practice. Focusing on the work of Australian writer Tony Birch, I document a range of generative tools creative writers may use to produce what I call “literary sense of place”. Drawing on interview-based case studies and key concepts from human geography, I analyse how these practitioners harness various “off-page” modes of enquiry to evoke place compellingly in textual form. While my main focus is creative practice, I also examine the resultant literary texts to help illuminate how process manifests in content. By profiling a range of “place-oriented experiential techniques (POETs)” – including site visits, memory, direct encounters, sensory attentiveness, “vicarious emplacement”, socio-cultural understandings, and happenstance – I present a fine-grained account of literary place-making from a practitioners’ perspective. I conclude that producing literary place is a generative, cumulative and associative process, in which writers mobilise a rich array of lived sensations, emotions, memories, understandings and actions. In foregrounding these “backstage” modes of creative labour, this paper helps clarify how writers deploy both personal and shared experiences to render literary place in resonant ways.' (Publication abstract)
-
‘You’ll Be Great, but Only If You Work Your Arse off.’ An Interview with Tony Birch
Adelle Sefton-Rowston
(interviewer),
2017
single work
interview
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , March 2017; 'Dr Tony Birch was a guest presenter at the Darwin Writers Festival in 2016 and, along with facilitating a writing workshop for the NT Writers’ Centre, he agreed to this interview before returning to Melbourne, where he is a research fellow at Victoria University. If you’re not familiar with Birch’s work, he has published a number of books, including Shadowboxing (2006), Blood (2011) and a recent book of poetry, Broken Teeth (2016). His novel Ghost River (2015) won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous writing in 2016, and tells of a growing connection between two boys and a river, that does not solely belong to their experiences. Birch’s story takes (back) place in a setting inspired by Dight Falls in Collingwood, Victoria. The river directs themes of belonging to place beyond racial and experiential parameters.' (Introduction) -
Place, History and Story: Tony Birch and the Yarra River
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 2016 vol. 31 no. 2 2016; 'This essay examines the three Yarra River stories in Tony Birch’s short fiction collections. ‘The Sea of Tranquillity’ ‘The Chocolate Empire’ and ‘The Toecutters’ all question the historical inscription of the Yarra that favours the culturally dominant account by placing it in relation to alternative stories. The torsion engendered by this questioning is apparent in the stories themselves. They are simultaneously discussions of class-based social exclusion and counter-stories of settlement; settled places are re-inscribed with meanings and histories obscured by the dominant account of ‘settlement’, which it thus critiques. The structure of the contemporary short story, to reveal a truth buried under the mundane details of life, aids Birch’s purpose. The form enacts a propensity to doubling, twinning and contrasting the familiar and the strange, or being at once in the dominant reality of the settler-colonial culture and, by social imposition, in the situation of the other. Hence, Birch’s stories open into narratives drawn from a number of socially marginalised groups, according to class, gender, geography or age. In Birch’s own account of his disillusionment with the institutionally-based academic writing of the post-history wars environment he speaks of embarking on an alternative project to ‘put meat on the bones of history’, a project which involves turning from the Historian’s history to ‘the way that fiction deals with the past and its role in documenting history’: to bring history and story together (‘Trouble’ 235, 241). This essay traces that process in the three Yarra stories.' (Abstract) -
Tony Birch : 'Too Many Australians Remain Ignorant of Aboriginal Writing'
2013
single work
column
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 31 August 2013;'I discovered the post-national novel on Melbourne's North Richmond railway station in 1971 when I was 15 years old. I had been expelled from school after falling through a shop window in a fight with another boy. I was slightly built but never bullied, as my father had taught me to box above my weight. Although I learned little in high school, I was a voracious reader. I'd held a public library card from the age of five, and picked up secondhand paperbacks whenever I could. My train was cancelled that day and I had a further half hour to wait. I retrieved a novel from my bag that I had borrowed from the library.' (Introduction)
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[Review] Shadow Boxing
2006
single work
review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , February vol. 85 no. 7 2006; (p. 49)
— Review of Shadowboxing 2006 selected work short story -
It's Grim Down South, Amid the Claustrophobia of the Fitzroy Slums
2006
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 11-12 March 2006; (p. 12-13)
— Review of Shadowboxing 2006 selected work short story -
Streetfighting Man
2006
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 11-12 March 2006; (p. 20-21)
— Review of Shadowboxing 2006 selected work short story -
Fighting off Stereotypes and Quelling Old Pains
2006
single work
review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 1 April 2006; (p. 17)
— Review of Shadowboxing 2006 selected work short story -
In Brief : Fiction
2006
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 280 2006; (p. 61)
— Review of Shadowboxing 2006 selected work short story -
Place, History and Story: Tony Birch and the Yarra River
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 2016 vol. 31 no. 2 2016; 'This essay examines the three Yarra River stories in Tony Birch’s short fiction collections. ‘The Sea of Tranquillity’ ‘The Chocolate Empire’ and ‘The Toecutters’ all question the historical inscription of the Yarra that favours the culturally dominant account by placing it in relation to alternative stories. The torsion engendered by this questioning is apparent in the stories themselves. They are simultaneously discussions of class-based social exclusion and counter-stories of settlement; settled places are re-inscribed with meanings and histories obscured by the dominant account of ‘settlement’, which it thus critiques. The structure of the contemporary short story, to reveal a truth buried under the mundane details of life, aids Birch’s purpose. The form enacts a propensity to doubling, twinning and contrasting the familiar and the strange, or being at once in the dominant reality of the settler-colonial culture and, by social imposition, in the situation of the other. Hence, Birch’s stories open into narratives drawn from a number of socially marginalised groups, according to class, gender, geography or age. In Birch’s own account of his disillusionment with the institutionally-based academic writing of the post-history wars environment he speaks of embarking on an alternative project to ‘put meat on the bones of history’, a project which involves turning from the Historian’s history to ‘the way that fiction deals with the past and its role in documenting history’: to bring history and story together (‘Trouble’ 235, 241). This essay traces that process in the three Yarra stories.' (Abstract) -
‘You’ll Be Great, but Only If You Work Your Arse off.’ An Interview with Tony Birch
Adelle Sefton-Rowston
(interviewer),
2017
single work
interview
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , March 2017; 'Dr Tony Birch was a guest presenter at the Darwin Writers Festival in 2016 and, along with facilitating a writing workshop for the NT Writers’ Centre, he agreed to this interview before returning to Melbourne, where he is a research fellow at Victoria University. If you’re not familiar with Birch’s work, he has published a number of books, including Shadowboxing (2006), Blood (2011) and a recent book of poetry, Broken Teeth (2016). His novel Ghost River (2015) won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous writing in 2016, and tells of a growing connection between two boys and a river, that does not solely belong to their experiences. Birch’s story takes (back) place in a setting inspired by Dight Falls in Collingwood, Victoria. The river directs themes of belonging to place beyond racial and experiential parameters.' (Introduction) -
Crafting “Literary Sense of Place” : the Generative Work of Literary Place-making
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 18 2018;'This paper examines the how of literary wheres. As makers of literary works, creative writers are tasked with evoking place on the page. While the nexus of place and literature is increasingly recognised as fertile scholarly ground, the specifics of how writers actually “make” literary places remain opaque and under-researched. I seek to address this gap by exploring how literary place is constituted through creative practice. Focusing on the work of Australian writer Tony Birch, I document a range of generative tools creative writers may use to produce what I call “literary sense of place”. Drawing on interview-based case studies and key concepts from human geography, I analyse how these practitioners harness various “off-page” modes of enquiry to evoke place compellingly in textual form. While my main focus is creative practice, I also examine the resultant literary texts to help illuminate how process manifests in content. By profiling a range of “place-oriented experiential techniques (POETs)” – including site visits, memory, direct encounters, sensory attentiveness, “vicarious emplacement”, socio-cultural understandings, and happenstance – I present a fine-grained account of literary place-making from a practitioners’ perspective. I conclude that producing literary place is a generative, cumulative and associative process, in which writers mobilise a rich array of lived sensations, emotions, memories, understandings and actions. In foregrounding these “backstage” modes of creative labour, this paper helps clarify how writers deploy both personal and shared experiences to render literary place in resonant ways.' (Publication abstract)
-
Tony Birch : 'Too Many Australians Remain Ignorant of Aboriginal Writing'
2013
single work
column
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 31 August 2013;'I discovered the post-national novel on Melbourne's North Richmond railway station in 1971 when I was 15 years old. I had been expelled from school after falling through a shop window in a fight with another boy. I was slightly built but never bullied, as my father had taught me to box above my weight. Although I learned little in high school, I was a voracious reader. I'd held a public library card from the age of five, and picked up secondhand paperbacks whenever I could. My train was cancelled that day and I had a further half hour to wait. I retrieved a novel from my bag that I had borrowed from the library.' (Introduction)
-
Stories for Hyperlinked Times : The Short Story Cycle and Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking Dogs
2019
single work
column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 9 October 2019;'We live hyperlinked lives, expected to be switched on and logged in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Time is a dwindling resource, multitasking is our default setting. We’re constantly reading: online articles, emails, social media posts. But for many of us, this dip-in, dip-out reading feels dissatisfying. We crave deeper engagement.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2011 Commended Australian Centre Literary Awards — The Kate Challis RAKA Award
- 2006 shortlisted Queensland Premier's Literary Awards — Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Australian Short Story Award This award was known as the Steele Rudd Australian Short Story Award from 1988-2007.
- Fitzroy, Fitzroy - Collingwood area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,
- 1960s