Melbourne novelist and short story writer is a fearless examiner of injustice and inequity in modern Australia. His latest, Women and Children, tackles domestic violence in the working-class inner city of the 1960s. An eleven-year-old boy, kind-hearted and struggling with Catholicism, oscillating between his home and that of his retired street sweeper grandfather, struggles to understand the situation when his aunt arrives on his doorstep, battered and bruised. The boy finds a weapon by chance, a weapon that now becomes an object of tension as the aunt returns to her abuser. Birch writes unadorned prose that sapped (at least for this reader) some of the narrative momentum out of a dire setup, but as Women and Children winds up toward a climax that startles and shocks, even as it feels like the only way the novel could end. A fine, understated read.
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