Review | Book review: Tony Birch’s Ghost River probes the ways poverty and violence can shape a life

Ghost River by Tony Birch (Penguin) 

Tony Birch is fascinated by the stories of society’s fringe dwellers. It’s not surprising, given he grew up in the slums of Melbourne’s Fitzroy in a one-bedroom terraced house, the son of an Irish Catholic mother and a father whose ancestry includes a Jamaican convict and a strong Aboriginal line that can be traced back to Tasmania.

Though his short-story collections, Shadowboxing and Father’s Day, set him on the radar as a writer to watch, it was the shortlisting of his novel Blood for the Miles Franklin award in 2012 that cemented his position as a chronicler of life on the margins.

Birch describes his childhood memories of the Yarra as central to his imaginative thinking and says he longed to write a novel about his beloved river. Ghost River began as a short story that focused on the river men – the homeless alcoholics who lived on the banks of the Yarra behind the factories of Fitzroy.

In the novel, the river men are important but are secondary to the narrative. This is the story of two 13-year-old boys, Charlie “Ren” Renwick and his neighbour Sonny Brewer, who discover friendship in the slums of Collingwood and freedom by the Yarra’s polluted banks.