In this latest instalment of Black Inc.’s ‘Writers on Writers’ series, we have the intriguing prospect of Tony Birch reflecting on the work of Kim Scott. While most of the previous twelve books in this series have featured a generational gap, Birch and Scott, both born in 1957, are almost exact contemporaries. This is also the first book in the series in which an Indigenous writer is considering the work of another Indigenous writer. It will not be giving too much away to say that Birch’s assessment of Scott’s oeuvre is based in admiration. There is no sting in the tail or smiling twist of the knife.

With these base enjoyments off the table, something more valuable does emerge, which is Tony Birch asking himself why Kim Scott’s writing has been important to him. Birch’s own novels, particularly his recent works The White Girl (2019) and Women & Children (2023), have been rightly lauded. They are written in an unadorned realism that is in contrast to the fabulist and satirical modes that mark the work of Alexis Wright, Melissa Lukashenko, and Kim Scott. But they have a spare beauty and quiet sincerity, grounded in the tough living of Birch’s childhood Fitzroy. Birch’s work seems closer in sensibility to the great realist writers and memoirists of the Aboriginal renaissance, particularly Jack Davis, Ruby Langford Ginibi, and Kevin Gilbert. Birch also reminds his readers that, though he became a creative writing academic, and now holds the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature, his training was in history. He completed his PhD in the History Department of the University of Melbourne in 2003.

Much of Birch’s book on Scott is devoted to Kim Scott’s breakout novel, Benang: From the heart (1999), the first Indigenous novel to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Birch’s training in history comes into view as he historicises Scott’s novel, showing how smartly it skewers the derangements of the ‘protection’ era in Western Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people. During this period, which stretched from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, Indigenous people, already robbed of their land and resources, were subject to an extraordinary degree of control, surveillance, and incarceration. As Birch notes, parallel policies, powered by eugenic fantasies, were pursued in all states and territories.

While the rehearsal of this history is useful, what really makes the book come alive is the way that Birch brings Benang into a more recent and intimate history, which is the history of Birch’s own intellectual formation. As Birch explains, his PhD was written at the height of the ‘history wars’, when the Australian prime minister, John Howard, reprimanded historians for focusing too much on the critique of Australia’s settler history and not enough on celebrating the positive achievements of the nation. The cynical dimension of these ‘history wars’ and the strange way that they mobilised righteousness in the warring parties left Birch disillusioned and questioning the efficacy of his discipline. In the midst of this dismay, Birch read Scott’s Benang, published while Birch was researching his doctorate at the University of Melbourne. Reading Benang was an epiphany for Birch; it showed exactly what the ‘history wars’ were not able to do, which was to deal effectively with complexity, responsibility.

Benang, written in the teeth of assimilation, focuses on three generations of men caught up in Western Australia’s governance of Aboriginal people. It is a teasing and complex novel. The characters swim a little and feel at times interchangeable. The perspective and time periods skip about dizzyingly. The anti-hero, Harley, famously finds himself levitating above the mess, floating off like Mr Squiggle, unable to ground himself in a discourse that has removed his Indigenous substance. There is an unnerving sense of humour that continuously highlights the hypocrisy of the situation in which the policies notionally aimed at protecting Aboriginal people were in every respect premised on the eradication of Aboriginality.

As Birch observes, in Benang the characters do not fall readily into the oppressors and the oppressed. The novel does not deliver a satisfying take-down or institute a narrative restitution. By withholding these balms, Benang captures the insidious mixture of motives and complicities that the ‘history wars’ could only pantomime as cartooned extremes. Most particularly, what Birch saw in Scott’s writing was a revolutionary approach to the colonial archive:

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. Rather than regard it as a set of neutral and objective facts, Scott knew that paper, ink and the written word produced highly selective and subjective stories of Australia’s past.

In recent years, the Indigenous artist, poet, and academic Natalie Harkin has searchingly theorised the ‘archival poetics’ of Indigenous reclamation. The reclamation, often painful and bewildering, of records held by Australian governments, churches, and missions has been a critical part of Indigenous reconnection to stolen pasts. Archival poetics generates a secondary archive – the black archive – from the banal violence of the colonial archive. The black archive is the colonial archive reclaimed by the Indigenous present.

Archival poetics is visible in the work of Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) and Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). Scott’s own archival poetics in Benang – and then again in That Deadman Dance (2010) – brought in the sly civility of postcolonial magical realism. New forms of archival poetics can be seen in the work of Harkin herself, and it inflects the works of key contemporary Indigenous authors – Jeanine Leane, Elfie Shiosaki, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Alison Whittaker, Sharlene Allsopp, Evelyn Araluen, and Claire G. Coleman. It is probably fair to say that archival poetics is the major literary project of the current generation of Indigenous writers.

But the concept was in its infancy when Scott published Benang in 1999. As Birch understood from his training as an Aboriginal historian, Scott’s attention to the archive was meticulous. Archival poetics depends on the historicity of the archive. Were these archives not capable of truth, there would be no reason to consult them. But rather than the muddled literalism that dragged the ‘history wars’ into its mire, Scott’s archival poetics insisted that the archive needed to be read – that is to say, subjected to a hermeneutic process. This is what Birch isolates as the key achievement of Benang and of Scott’s fiction more generally: ‘There is nothing contradictory in working with fiction rather than choosing the “facts” of history, as there are few facts that can be relied upon when it comes to interrogating white Australia’s myths about its colonial past.’

Because it is a sustained consideration of a leading Indigenous author by another from the same generation, this book represents something of an inflexion point in Indigenous letters. It models an Indigenous critique that seeks to seize the elements of form in Indigenous writing that offer guidance to other Indigenous writers.