Life with Birds

by Bronwyn Rennex

A luminous account of largely unrecognised experiences in the aftermath of war.

This is not a war story about heroism or healing trauma, but an attempt to fill the gaps in a family story in the wake of the Vietnam War and re-animate a father never really known.

Life with Birds invests in the small scale, the domestic and the ordinary as an overlooked part of Australian military history.

Bronwyn Rennex has used whatever materials she could find in order to attempt to retrieve her father - family stories, love letters, legal documents, birds - and the gaps between these documents form perhaps the most important part of this story- a failure that describes a loss. Rather than describing her mother's grief at her father's death, Rennex uses love letters and her mother's written claim for a war widow's pension to map the shape of her mother's love and loss.

Told in fragments and mixing speculation, imagination and guesswork, the narrative is personal, angry, political and also funny, balancing a desire for some form of testimony with a commitment to questioning how we talk about war.

This is a poignant and compelling account of largely unrecognised experiences in the aftermath of war.

200 pages, Paperback

Published May 31, 2022

Reviews

[Anne Fenn]

A beautifully written book. The focus is on how we remember people, and how others affect our lives. In this case it’s the author Bronwyn Rennex’s reflections and investigations, mental and practical, of her parents’ lives. Her father remains hard to grasp. His Vietnam war experiences and possibly his own nature make him fairly closed to us. Her mother is much more real to us, given we follow her efforts with bureaucracy.
I really like the fragmentary style of writing used here, it makes you come at the story afresh every time. This is such a good book about family life after war experiences.

[Andrew]

There's something quietly familiar about Life with Birds, like someone trying to make sense of the world and the residue left by grief and the death of parents. Powerfully written and wryly observant, Life with Birds encourages a different perspective on life and living and the sum of it all.

After all, we're all just humans waiting to become a bird with a human spirit, existing to let our family know we're ok on the other side.

[MR DAVID Northmore]

What a thoroughly great read. An honest account of dealing with the ripple affects of a father change forever by war and the frustrating pursuit of the truth only held by the deceased or a beucrucracy designed to break you. Funny, sad and provoking.