Anthony Goodwin
Exploring memory, masculinity, and silence.
A Melbourne-based writer exploring the quiet forces that shape human relationships, and the ways in which social and cultural contexts shape experience and memory.
About
Anthony Goodwin holds a PhD in social science and has spent many years working in teaching and youth development in Australia. He has also lived and worked in Burma for more than twenty years, where he continues to support education initiatives serving vulnerable students through monastic schools.
His professional work has focused on young people, institutional cultures, and the ethical responsibilities of care, and he has published academic articles and international studies in these fields.
Drawing on his experience of Australian schooling in the 1970s, his fiction explores masculinity, moral ambiguity, intergenerational silence, and the pressures placed on boys within changing social landscapes.
He lives in Melbourne with his wife. They have two grown sons.
Where Silence Falls is his debut novel.
Where Silence Falls
Set in Melbourne in the early 1970s, the novel follows fourteen-year-old Adam Townsend as he navigates a new school and a home shaped by the detached authority of his war-scarred father.
Drawn into the orbit of a charismatic teacher who offers him a rare sense of recognition, Adam becomes entangled in a relationship that unsettles his understanding of trust and responsibility. At the same time, a more tentative and reciprocal connection emerges with a school friend, offering the possibility of intimacy without imbalance.
As these relationships unfold in parallel, Adam is left to interpret their meaning largely on his own, in a world where the language for such experiences has yet to emerge.
The novel explores how masculinity, desire, and silence shape a young person’s sense of self.