Birch has a PhD in history and has taught Australian and Aboriginal history. He turned to other forms of storytelling after becoming disenchanted with his discipline during the “history wars” of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2006 he published his first work of fiction, Shadowboxing, interlinked stories inspired by his childhood in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, and has since continued to write and publish fiction.

So author and subject are well-matched: Birch a historian turned fiction writer; Scott a novelist engrossed by history. This makes Birch particularly sensitive to the complexities and nuances of Scott’s reworking of the novel form to contest received national truths.

He makes this clear in his introduction: “I was attracted to Kim Scott’s writing not only for its rich approach to storytelling, but also for the way he understood the power of the colonial archive. … He also realised that if he were to extract a counter-narrative from the archive, to force it to confess truths camouflaged by bureaucratic language, he could use fiction to great effect.”

As a result, most of Birch’s essay is devoted to reading Benang alongside the histories of the stolen generations, including the Aborigines Acts of Western Australia and Victoria, and the fallout on subsequent generations. Two brief chapters on Scott’s subsequent novels, That Deadman Dance (2010) and Taboo (2017), conclude the book.

What Birch exposes is a still hidden “national history of caste legislation in this country”. It feels important at this moment, in the aftermath of the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum, that the history underlying Scott’s novels is told alongside them. In doing so, Birch has produced a valuable introduction to Scott’s work.

Launched in 2017 as a collaboration between Black Inc., the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne, the Writers on Writers series initially envisaged six books. Birch’s essay on Scott is the 13th. It is a timely and welcome addition to the list.

Tony Birch won The Age Fiction Book of the Year award this week. He is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au) and Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au). The Age is a partner of MWF.

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