One creature to another
April 2013
Carrie Tiffany
Mateship With Birds / Picador
Carrie Tiffany has at least two languages for the observation of birds.
The first she describes to me, half-disparagingly, as ‘that Jonathan Franzen way of accumulating names and data and being competitive about it.’ Given Tiffany’s non-literary life as a farming journalist, and her involvement in the Victorian Landcare movement, it’s a language she’s very familiar with.
But in simply ‘knowing the names for everything’ something goes missing. It doesn’t get across what she calls the ‘honest human reaction of one creature to another.’
So too with farming. ‘Being a farmer,’ she says, ‘is about observation, about continually observing the landscape… I think that there’s a real similarity with writing. It requires this really, really close observation.’
That Tiffany has wanted to get at something more vital in the intersection between people, the land and animals was already clear in her first novel, 2005’s highly-lauded Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living whose characters were caged in relationships that were stuck in a tunnel of empiricism.
Enter language two: subjective, patient and intimate; the type of language Tiffany found when she chanced on a copy of nature writer Alec Chisholm’s 1922 book Mateship With Birds, the title of which she has affectionately purloined for her second novel.
‘He would see a little bird in a tree,’ Tiffany says of Chisholm, ‘and say isn’t she this, or isn’t she that. He would compare it to members of his family. He would assume the relationship that birds had with each other were similar to the relationships he had.’
In her own Mateship With Birds, set in the early 1950s around the northern Victorian township of Cohuna, Tiffany inhabits a subjective, experiential set of voices that she has drawn not only from Chisholm, but from Sigmund Freud’s and Havelock Ellis’ psychoanalytic case histories of desire and sexuality. In doing so, she reminds us of the of the deep link between science and story. Of the case histories that to her ‘read like little novellas.’
Given the genesis of the novel in places of intimacy and of carnal want, it should come as no surprise that its hook is to offer one (though I’m not saying which) of the classic romance trajectories. Its potential lovers might overcome the obstacles set before them, but just the same they might have been delivered the stuff of their potential out of order, in a knot that cannot be undone.
Harry and Betty in Mateship With Birds clearly desire one another. Harry, a women’s journal-reading dairy farmer, is attuned to the sexual and familial life of birds – a family of kookaburras in particular – and is concerned to educate Betty’s adolescent son Michael into the sensitivities of a respectful erotic life. Betty, a nurse who tends her own herd – a ward full of ageing, dying men – has taken the fruits of her happy buckling to sexual desire, Michael and Little Hazel, and made an independent, single life for herself on the property adjacent to Harry’s.
Where the relatively simple binary of masculine scientism and feminine intuition became the insurmountable obstacle for Everyman’s Jean and Robert, in Mateship With Birds those walls are less gender-rigid. In their rural isolation, Betty and Harry are, surprisingly, more free to be what they want than their urban counterparts might. No one is really watching them. As such the barrier between them is made more of the stuff of conscious and unconscious repression. And it’s when Harry treats a matter of sexual taboo with his typically earnest, but gently euphemistic, matter-of-factness that the greatest obstacle to their relationship emerges.
Tiffany’s writing tends toward the tangible; it reflects her own listening, her own observation. The country ‘gets dark from the ground up’ it has ‘linen skies’ and Harry eats ‘a Sao dry just to put something in his mouth, just to hear the sound of it breaking rudely in his head – like kindling; like words.’
And, amid the subtlety and nuance, there’s the aforementioned matter-of-factness: Harry’s artificial insemination of heifers, Betty’s record of her children’s illnesses and accidents (from ‘constipation’ to ‘concussion in fall from railway bridge’ and ‘boys’ troubles’), and a lonely farmer who plays out his sexual fantasies with his favourite ewe – in a nightie.
A novel set on a dusty Australian farm, a romance which refuses to dwell in romance’s high emotional drama, risks a couple of things: either dullness, or being original. Because Tiffany begins with desire, with observing and measuring it in the bodies of all creatures, without alarm or judgement, because she recognises that it is what she calls ‘a major narrative drive in everybody’s lives,’ she manages to veer away from being predictable. In Mateship With Birds Tiffany brings imagination, intimacy, intellect and surprise to bear to the honest relationships between creatures. Alec Chisholm would, I suspect, approve.
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