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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Lifestyle
Paul Daley

Tony Birch: ‘I got into a lot of fights. I was a very good street boxer’

Tony Birch at the Merri Creek trail.
From schoolboy truant to award-winning author and academic: Tony Birch at the Merri Creek trail. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian

Tony Birch meets me at the old Fitzroy Football Club grandstand on a Melbourne morning of biting wind and horizontal rain.

Birch grew up in and around Fitzroy, then a working-class suburb. The area forms the setting for his latest novel, Women & Children, which is about domestic violence, female resilience and children who witness too much.

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