The White Girl

The White Girl is a novel by the Australian author Tony Birch, published in 2019. It is set in the 1960s in Deane, a fictional country town in Australia.

Odette Brown is Aboriginal, and she is raising her granddaughter, Sissy. Sissy was conceived after Odette's daughter Lily was raped by a local white pastoralist called Joe Kane, and Lily has since left Deane for the big city.

With Lily away, Odette has to keep Sissy with her, and the obstacle is the new local policeman, Sergeant Lowe, who intends to take the girl from her care. Sissy is the white girl of the title, which is the fact that makes her worth taking. The policy behind the attempt was not personal, which is part of what makes it so hard to argue with.

The novel is about a grandmother trying to hold on to a child against a system that has decided the child belongs somewhere else, and it is set in a period of Australian history when that decision was made as a matter of policy.