Life with Birds

<h3><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>A luminous account of largely unrecognised experiences in the aftermath of war.</span></h3><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><em style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>Life with Birds</em><span style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1)> invests in the small scale the domestic and the ordinary as an overlooked part of Australian military history.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(51 51 51 1)>This is a poignant and compelling account of largely unrecognised experiences in the aftermath of war.</span></p>