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

Life could have turned out very differently for Birch, who was twice expelled from school as a boy. The celebrated author reflects on masculinity, AFL and surviving domestic violence

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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