Past Event

Launch of MATESHIP WITH BIRDS by Carrie Tiffany

2nd Feb 2012

Presenter: Pan Macmillan Australia
Website: http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/
Event Duration: 120 minutes

Rural Victoria, post-WWII, and Harry, a lonely farmer is training his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in the tree near his house. Harry observes the birds through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war romance and song. Harry’s next-door neighbour, Betty, who works at the town’s nursing home, also has a pair of binoculars, trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children, Michael and Little Hazel. When Michael wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door, Betty is pleased. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite sex, perilous boundaries are crossed.

Mateship with Birds follows the lives of Harry and Betty, set against the backdrop of the seasons and the rough environmental conditions of rural Australia. Harry watches and lusts after Betty while at the same time, attempting to offer her son the sex education that he himself lacked, and when these two worlds collide, their quiet country lives are rocked.

“…a splendidly poised and wryly funny novel: human nature and relationships are as beautifully observed as the rich, circadian rhythms of country life. It is clever, original and richly rewarding.” (Australian Bookseller & Publisher Magazine, Dec 2011)

Mateship with Birds combines Carrie’s two passions – the land and writing. It is a hymn to the rhythm of country life – to vicious birds, virginal cows, adored dogs and ill-used sheep. On one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, a collection of misfits question the nature of what a family can be.

Carrie’s first novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, published in 2005, featured agricultural scientists and idealism set on the state government’s Better Farming Train as it chugged along the Victorian countryside in the 1930s. This first novel was shortlisted for various awards including the Orange Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Carrie Tiffany was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. She spent her early twenties working as a park ranger in central Australia and now lives in Melbourne, where she works as an agricultural journalist.