Tony Birch wins Book of the Year for timely novel about one of Australia’s great challenges

The judges said Birch had imbued his characters “with great humanity and a dignity that belies the difficulties of their lives; it’s a book that will live with you”.

While the writing of Women & Children had not been driven by the issue of domestic violence, Birch said it was a good thing if it became part of “those necessary discussions”. He had recently been asked to talk to two family violence organisations because they considered men had to be part of this conversation.

“But I did want to write a book which conveyed the depth of love in a family, and clearly that was the motivation for writing about the relationship between Joe and Charlie,” he said.

Birch has four grandchildren and said he was a loving grandfather who did a full day of care each week. “That experience of spending so much time around my grandchildren had a real impact on how I wanted to write the book,” he said.

The theme of redemption has been at the heart of many of Birch’s short stories and novels, and while not so central to Women & Children, he said there was a sense in Charlie’s response to the violence meted out to his daughter of him being able to resist becoming a violent man again as he might have done when younger.

The judges said McMullin’s Life So Full of Promise was painstakingly researched and a profoundly empathetic micro-history “showing how the full human cost of war goes far beyond those lives lost in violent conflict and the people immediately affected who are closest to them ... in the hands of a leading historian, aspects of a nation’s history assumed to be familiar may yield new and deeper insights that help to explain the world we live in today.”

Life so Full of Promise: Further Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generations, a follow-on from McMullin’s earlier prize-winning collective biography, Farewell Dear People, examines the lives of three men – Brian Pockley, Norman Callaway and Murdoch Mackay – whose deaths meant their considerable potential on the cricket field and elsewhere went unfulfilled.

McMullin said for characters to get a guernsey in the book, their talent had to be spectacular. “There had to be a way of showing in the narratives that the loss was obviously shattering for the families, but at a national level, a loss as well because they had such rich potential.”

While Callaway had the talent to become a Test cricketer and Pockley’s death in New Guinea on September 11, 1914, was “mourned more deeply and widely” than any other Australian fatality during the war, it was Mackay who had all the attributes and “could have been prime minister”, McMullin reckoned.

“One aspect I’ve felt for a long time,” he said, “is that perceptions of Robert Menzies’ dominance of our national politics are shallow if they don’t acknowledge that at the same time that he was dominant, a significant number of potential rivals had been in Western Front graves for decades and Mackay was very possibly one.”

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.