'The White Girl': Australian fiction

Tony Birch's novel explores the oppressive history of Aboriginal-white relations.

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For this week’s Substack, I’ve taken my global literature tour to Australia. Poking around in my local library’s catalog, I found “The White Girl,” a novel by Australian writer Tony Birch about the traumatic oppression experienced by Aboriginal people under white rule.

Published in 2019, “The White Girl” centers on Odette Brown, an Aboriginal woman who lives with her 12-year-old granddaughter, Sissy, in a modest hut outside the fictional rural town of Deane. It’s the 1960s. Sissy is the offspring of Odette’s only child, Lila, and a man she’s never identified but who was obviously white; Sissy herself can pass for white. Pregnant at 16, Lila stole away from home at 17 and hasn’t been seen since.

With no parents to speak for her, Sissy was in danger of being removed from her grandmother’s care. From that time on, Odette had no choice but to engage in a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the Welfare authorities.

In fact, Odette’s whole life has been a game of cat and mouse. She was born at the local mission and then taken to be raised by white missionaries who let her see her father once a week. She and other Aboriginal people are allowed to enter town only during certain hours; if she crosses Deane’s Line, which separates Aboriginal and white residents, she does so at personal risk. She once worked for one of those white residents, caring for his children after their mother’s death, but didn’t dare say anything about the bruises she found while bathing them in his home.

She makes a living by selling painted note cards to a white store owner. She can’t open a bank account because she’s not a citizen, so she hides her earnings in her pantry. The woman who buys her art wants to know her tribal heritage, to use it in promoting the note cards: “It adds to the value of the work, you see?”

It never failed to surprise Odette how white people were always going on about uplifting Aboriginal people, yet they would demand information about the old ways when it suited them. She looked over to the honey jar sitting on the bread board and read the label to herself. It sounded tribal enough. “We’re the Bilga people,” she explained. “That’s my tribe. The Bilga.”

The woman lifted her head and looked toward an imaginary and distant landscape. “The Bilga people. Of course.” She smiled as though she’d had actual contact with the tribe.

Odette hasn’t been feeling well and finally visits the town doctor, who recommends an exam at a big-city hospital. She has the money for the trip but can’t get a travel permit from Deane’s new police officer, who’s decided that “the Blacks” have had it easy in recent years and vows to impose proper order, including guardians for Aboriginal children. Behind his back, Odette prevails upon the outgoing police officer, a former schoolmate and childhood friend, to grant the permit. The doctor’s referral is her chance to get Sissy out of town before her former employer’s older son, now an angry and dangerous adult, acts on his interest in her.

Birch’s writing is, as one review put it, “deceptively simple”; it feels to me like a deliberate contrast to the complicated history he recounts. Odette’s act of resistance is similarly deceptively simple: to do what she can to protect her granddaughter and break the cycle of oppression.