Burns’ raw account of being passed between family and foster carers in the welfare-class neighbourhoods of Adelaide reveals a confronting truth
“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 brunt 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.
Childhood by Shannon Burns is published by Text ($29.99).
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