Books

Tony Birch
Pictures of You

“The gap between our feelings and our social observation,” wrote Raymond Williams, “is dangerously wide.” Here the great Welsh cultural critic noted the tension between inner life (our feelings or subjective states) and external conditions – those larger structures within which our lives unfold.

Reading Tony Birch’s Pictures of You: Collected Stories – an attractive hardback volume by the University of Queensland Press – I often thought of Williams, a critic who had a sharp yet sympathetic eye for the peculiar challenges faced by working-class artists trying to describe their reality within structures designed by others to speak of theirs.

In the collection’s opening story, “Pictures of You”, the narrator, a keen and disciplined runner, recalls the brutal and regimented training regime his now-dead father embarked upon after his own mother’s death in his teens – a program of bodybuilding that initially involved a barbell constructed of two paint tins filled with cement, held together with an iron bar:

“My father trained religiously each weeknight after he’d finished work for the day, sculpting his body until it resembled a marble statue. He was a menacing presence, and although he never raised his voice at me, or struck me, I was always afraid of him.”

The narrator then relays another story about his father – this time sourced from his great-aunt and told at the funeral of a cousin who had drowned in the Yarra, perhaps a suicide. She speaks of his dad as a sweet, gentle teenager who slept beside the corpse of his mother on the night after her death, utterly bereft – and of an even smaller boy who, in the days and weeks after his own deadbeat father abandoned the family, sat on the front step of their house awaiting his return.

She prefaces these tales with an assertion: that all the men in the family are “certifiably insane – your father included, of course”. To which the narrator adds, plainly, that his father was at that time “a resident of a psychiatric home in the northern suburbs”. Yet the great-aunt’s dismissal is belied by other information we readers have to hand. We are privileged to understand the fuller arc of this character’s transformation. His growing hardness and eventual madness at once reflect a determination to transcend a situation imposed at birth and the impossibility of doing so.

This is the dangerous gap in which Tony Birch’s stories unfold. They describe addiction, violence and trauma that cascades through the generations. There are so many fathers and so many sons here, most of them flawed. But the stories can also be sites of humour and human warmth. In “China”, from 2014’s collection The Promise, the narrator is a small-town tearaway whose teenage relationship with a beautiful local girl he calls China is ended when he lands in prison and she skips town. The narrator never achieves the same escape velocity: he’s in and out of jail over the coming years and currently reduced to living in his mother’s garage and working in a sawmill.

Yet there is an indomitable quality about him. His humour is like a candle lit in the darkest of places. When he learns that China may still be living nearby, he immediately steals a car to go in search of her. Their brief encounter is all the more powerful for the restraint of Birch’s handling of it. No Gatsby ever watched the green light at the end of his lover’s jetty quite like our narrator, gunning his battered Ford towards a local radio tower and away from the woman he once loved, now naked by the mirror in the bedroom of her husband’s home.

Throughout the collection and common to all the stories, whether dark or light, is this quality of authorial tenderness and restraint. The first-person perspective Birch prefers is an ideal vehicle for illuminating the potential for characters to be more than the roles allotted them by life. On the evidence of this selection, the author’s ability to cast them in this more subtle and winning light has only increased over time.

One of my durable favourites among Birch’s later stories is “Bicycle Thieves”, from 2021’s Dark as Last Night. A young man named Thommy is given a rusted old bike by a local man. This gift is a boon to Thom and Pat, his slight, loving and evidently neurodiverse brother, who becomes obsessed by riding too. When their single mother stretches on Pat’s birthday to a red Dragster, he’s delirious with happiness – until a group of local boys attack Pat and vandalise his bike.

Thom’s response to this crime is not addressed directly. But as readers we recognise a certain toughness and nobility combined in Thom that will be expressed in righteous violence. It’s a suburban Western and a grand morality play, told through sensibilities whose moral capacity is larger than a capacity to enunciate that moral code. This time it is a kind of modest grandeur that Birch shapes in the gap between internal state and external conditions.

It is clear now, if it were not already, that Tony Birch is one of the finest practitioners of the Australian short story. He has taken the kitchen sink realism of Raymond Williams’s generations of British working-class thinkers and artists and infused it with a distinctly local register and accent. Williams believed that to be truly radical “is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable”. Birch’s fiction should be regarded as a corollary to that claim – narratives radical in their granting of dignity, decency and courage to those from whom such graces are traditionally withheld.

UQP, 384pp, $45 (hardback)

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 25, 2025 as "Pictures of You".

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