Life with Birds [electronic resource] : : A Suburban Lyric

Bronwyn Rennex2022

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Summary

Life with Bird s is about suburbs, families, secrets, silence and birds. It’s also about war. Not a story of heroism or healing trauma; more the trying to fill in gaps in a family story and re-animate a father never really known. Bronwyn Rennex uses whatever material she could find: old photographs, army records, conversations and Google searches. Life with Birds invests in the small scale, the domestic and the ordinary as an essential and overlooked part of Australian military history as an investigation of the disjunction between public and private experiences of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. It is personal, angry, political and it’s also funny, balancing a desire for some sort of testimony alongside a commitment to question how we talk about war. Told in fragments, it contains a mix of speculation, imagination and guesswork. The reader fills in gaps just as the author has had to. Rather than describing her mother’s grief at her father’s death, Rennex uses her ...