*****

Tony Birch, the author of Ghost River, is fascinated by stories of society’s fringe dwellers. He grew up in the slums of Fitzroy in Victoria in a one-bedroom terrace house, the son of an Irish Catholic mother and a father whose ancestry includes a strong Aboriginal line that can be traced back to Tasmania. He describes childhood memories of his beloved Yarra river in Melbourne as central to his imaginative thinking and for me this was evident throughout his beautifully written novel Ghost River.  As I turned the pages of the book, I couldn’t help wondering about the two adolescent boys who became soul mates by chance and circumstance, and whether their story is in fact more memoir than fiction. The enduring pathos, grips the reader from the first page to the last, intertwined as it is with the love and respect that grows between the boys and the homeless, alcoholic men who live on the polluted banks of the river, behind the factories of Fitzroy.

The boys,  Ren and Sonny, each with his own separate life dramas and hardships, seem to have an acute understanding of life and the valuable lessons they can learn from each other. They help and comfort the homeless men as much as they are able, despite their youth and maybe because of their own loneliness.

Set in the slums of Collingwood, the boys cherish their escape route to freedom along a secret, tangled trail  to the Yarra in the summers of late 1960s and early 1970s. Birch’s nostalgia for his formative years in the slums and the housing estates of Richmond somehow shines through the bleakness of the environment and the circumstances in which Ren and Sonny live. Theirs is a world in which a disadvantaged boy lives by his wits, constantly on edge while on the run from neighbourhood thugs, a dangerous, crooked policeman, weird next door neighbours, and obligations no young lad should have to fret about.

The friendship between Ren and Sonny sustains them both, with a little help from Ren’s mother, especially when the violence at home becomes intolerable for Sonny.  But the overriding mood throughout the book is one of hope for a better future. The title alludes to the idea that beneath the Yarra lies a ghost river that takes good souls down to its peaceful depths, the ‘resting place’ that the homeless men yearn for at the end of their pitiful lives. However, the men caution the boys that the Yarra rejects the bad souls whose bodies it leaves to float around or wash up on its banks.

As fate would have it, all is eventually threatened by destructive excavations along the river which the boys learn is in preparation for the planned South Eastern Freeway.  The heartbroken boys try desperately to save their homeless friends but time is running out for the men and the Yarra as they know it, and one by one the homeless men succumb to what they believe is inevitable.  The question is, will Ren and Sonny survive the upheaval?

-Anne Frandi-Coory.  17 March 2020