“They are his family. He is their creation. And how do you escape from yourself?” Shannon Burns’ haunting memoir Childhood is, in some ways, a response to its own question. It seemingly unravels a sequence of traumatic familial relationships and events of a sequestered, stunted boyhood in the welfare-class neighbourhoods of Adelaide. But Burns’ powerful voice pierces swiftly beyond a mere recollection of domestic hardships into a confronting truth distilled from a violent and impoverished Australian upbringing.
It does not lend itself to an idyllic Sunday read. The suffering and visceral torment of an unloved child caught in the bottom rungs of a dysfunctional system, making sense of his condition, is all too real. It is a state of being that, as Burns acknowledges in the beginning, is unimaginable for many who are privileged enough to have the means to buy his book. Yet, together the blunt vignettes of Childhood speak a quiet confession; about the way we see ourselves and our place in the world, what it means to survive, to love and to desire love and emerge from its darkest depths.
The memoir begins self-consciously on a retrospective note from Burns, now an educated middle-class academic. It focalises quickly into a memory of a child bloodied by a raging mother; the intricacies of a Greek Anglo family; an inheritance of love, precarity and becoming in 1980s Adelaide.
As we read, we are fed raw glimpses of this inheritance. The child is thrust into deciphering the violence, sexual trauma and racism of his world that lies on the fringe of society. It fuels and moulds him in unsightly ways, equips him with the necessary tools to maintain his existence. But this sequence of events, this childhood, is strung coetaneously through relationships that are intimate and genuine, though short-lived. There is no straw man here, no effigy of sins to be crucified, no big bad wolf to lock up. This is his place in the world, and he is implicit in it. As alien as it may seem to some of us, Burns’ world is painted with a childlike frankness that compels us to swallow its complexities.
In the process of his systemic abandonment, the child travels from mother to father, to Greek family to foster care, to shelters and occasionally the wilderness of the suburbs. “I’ve discovered an important truth,” Burns writes, “and it’s all I care about, all I can depend on, the only thing that means anything, the one sure thing that will help me survive. No one can be trusted. I am on my own.”
The second half of the book opens in the third person, where “the boy”, refusing the humiliating process of proving he qualifies for Centrelink payments, manages to find a temporary sanctuary at a friend’s house. He leaves school to be a full-time labourer at a recycling factory and begins an affair with his friend’s mother. He is 16.
The boy eventually finds solace in the act of reading; authors will never abandon him, unlike the people around him. What begins as a coping mechanism makes way for an obsession, one that he quickly realises is at odds with the acceptable mannerisms of his class. It is through dead authors that the boy transfigures meaning as he enters adulthood. Childhood becomes distinct, another period of time, never complete or bygone, but an elliptical point of reference to the present moment.
The work shines because of its tone, which always avoids the sentiment of commiseration. It is perhaps more successful in the first half, where it is focalised through the boy’s diminishing innocence. Just like the boy, the narrative evolves and collides with itself in interesting ways, Burns’ voice carrying it through to fruition.
For him, reading became its own form of intimate human connection. To the boy, it was a sacred encounter, an unknown person and an unknowable author forming a bond as authentic as any tribe or community. To read Childhood is to experience something similar: a furrow into the inner life and legacies of neglect; a testament to being and becoming, in all its desires and cruelties. And after we’ve read enough, we too emerge.
Childhood by Shannon Burns is published by Text ($29.99).
