Title: The white girl
Author: Tony Birch
Published: June 2019 Publisher: UQP
Category: Fiction
The White Girl is a memorable story about Odette, a grandma, and her granddaughter Sissy. Set in the 1960s, these characters are strong, loving, feisty––they’re also Aboriginal women subject to the Aborigines Protection Act 1909. This Act makes Sissy a ward of the state and pushes Odette beyond that law to protect Sissy. The story offers a remarkable portrait of First Nation communities where connection means strength
The story also shows white men’s ways of exercising power over Aboriginal people through the Act and directly through their relationships. The Act restricted movement and removed children from families. Travel depended on a police permit, which is why Odette came to the attention of Sergeant Lowe, even though she was trying to protect Sissy from the unwelcome attention of white men who benefitted from the Act.
The white male characters show how the logic of protection endorsed through the Act encouraged different masculine tendencies. Overzealous Sergeant Lowe acted out state authority in ways that were officious, brutal and possibly psychopathic towards anyone he saw as lesser than him. His arrival in town was the inciting incident that showed how lazy Officer Shea undercuts the state’s protective logic. The white farmer Kane and his first son saw women as servants to their own needs and treated vulnerability as weakness. These different ways of exercising power show how the Settler culture works through individualised hierarchies. It's where top dogs kick lesser dogs, whatever their race; it becomes an invasive system as thoughtless authority degenerates into banal routines that sustain evil.
But Odette shows an alternative to these ugly masculinities, a way of living her power through the presence and persistence of First Nation Australian’s connections to country, community and ancestors. Where Sissy and Odette are vulnerable under the Act, Odette’s daughter Lily show us the dangers and destructiveness of this white patriarchal Australia. But Odette and Sissy meet other people through their travels who show how Indigenous Australians sustain community and are sometimes helped, in small ways, by sensitive or sympathetic white people.
Listening is a theme that runs through this novel. Odette is a very good listener, auditory in a wide and deep way. She listens for noises, footsteps on the porch, and to the noise of birds, the wind and her own body. This listening is partly a protective strategy to avoid danger and safeguard Sissy. The Aboriginal Protection Act invades these women personally, removing their rights, reducing their safety and compromising their opportunity to live the life they might choose.
But Odette is also proactive in her listening because she is connected and gains energy and guidance through her country and ancestors. As Odette explains, white people tell ghost stories to make people scared of death, but they ‘know nothing about the good of a person’s spirit and how it comes forward after death.’ In conversation, Tony Birch explained, the dead and the living are all present. “They are there for us and we are there for them”.
This novel encouraged me listen to the complexities of Settler colonialism. The Kanes and Sergeant Lowe show us the classic colonial approach to First Nation peoples as either resources for use or as objects of control. Lowe sees Aboriginal people as irresponsible and childlike. It justifies the law’s protective logic, which allows him to exercise state power. He celebrates the police that, he says, limits the number of ‘half-caste children … roaming around’, and then generalises that control to all Aboriginal people ‘You people can’t look after yourselves and you know it.’ But there are other white men who become victims of this Settler mentality too.
Meanwhile, First Nation characters seem to see through this ugly game premised on white rules and behaviours. After all, 200 years of British settlement is a very ‘little now’ in civilisations sustained for over 600 centuries. As Jack says from his First Nation point of view, ‘White people aren’t ready for trust … but some days we don’t have a choice but to take a chance with them.’ It is this ‘where necessary’ response to Settler-Aboriginal trust that makes me feel as if the First Nation characters in this novel are humouring us white kids. Being blind to our destructive power, we seem ridiculous. Yet what we need to do is listen, like Odette, and grow up a bit.
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