Shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award for Australian Literature and Winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Prize for Indigenous Writing The White Girl follows the fortunes of two Aboriginal women, Odette Brown and her granddaughter Sissy, as they flee their country town for the city to find Sissy’s mother and escape the threat of Sissy’s removal.
The action takes place in a nameless Australian state in the years before the 1967 referendum which conferred citizenship to Indigenous Australians. Up to that time and beyond, Aboriginal children, especially those with fairer skin, were in danger of being taken from their families.
Sissy is the white girl of the title, her skin fair enough to pass for a white. In the small country town where she lives with her grandmother, puberty brings her to the attention of several white men, particularly the new policeman in town, Constable Lowe, who is determined to ‘protect’ the girl by handing her over to the welfare system.
Tony Birch has written The White Girl with a straightforward chronology and plot and in an accessible style, a deliberate decision to make his book readable for as wide an audience as possible (Tony Birch discusses this on YouTube as part of the Yarra Valley Writers Festival. See YVWF Book Club | The White Girl with author Tony Birch).
In the opening chapters, Birch shows, through an accumulation of domestic detail, the close bond between Odette and Sissy. The scene in which Odette washes her granddaughter’s hair in their outdoor bath is a beautiful example of this. Throughout the book, dressing, bathing, unpacking a suitcase, buying a train ticket, drinking a cup of tea, and ordering a meal all provide a reassuring anchor of care for Sissy from her grandmother despite the uncertainties they face as they travel together.
This is a heart-warming story with an edge. As Sissy grows up, her grandmother’s role includes educating her about how to survive as an Aboriginal girl in a largely hostile white-dominated society. Through their experiences together, Odette teaches Sissy about the unfairness of the system for Aboriginal people. At the same time, the two protagonists encounter other Aboriginal characters who assist and nurture them.
Help also comes from a departing white policeman in their town and from a white school friend of Odette’s, an outsider due to a head injury suffered in his childhood. The other white characters in the book are less well-developed, with Constable Lowe’s villainy his main characteristic and The Kane father and elder son presented as unrelentingly violent and ill-intentioned.
I recommend this novel for its compelling central characters and story, and for the insight it gives into the intergenerational trauma and daily racism suffered by Indigenous people in this country.
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