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On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite sex, perilous boundaries are crossed.
Mateship with Birds is a novel about young lust and mature love. 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.
About The Author
Carrie Tiffany was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. She spent her early twenties working as a park ranger in the Red Centre and now lives in Melbourne, where she works as an agricultural journalist. Her first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living (2005) was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Orange Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and won the Dobbie Award for Best First Book (2006) and the 2006 Western Australian Premier's Award for Fiction. Mateship with Birds is her second novel.
Reviewed By Toni Whitmont, Booktopia Buzz Editor
To read more reviews by Toni Whitmont, click here to visit the Booktopia Newsletter Archive.
Carrie Tiffany's luminous Mateship with Birds which strips Australian rural life of pastiche and sentimentality, leaving us with something that is beautiful and raw with its own living, breathing energy.
It is the kind of book that you just don't want to end. I was left with a feeling of great sadness and loss - not because of the way the story finished, but because I was suddenly cast out of the world into which she transported me. I simply didn't want to be cut adrift from the gentle dairy farmer, Harry, the purposeful single woman next door Betty, with her two children Michael, on the brink of sexual awakening, and Little Hazel the younger sister dealing with her own initiation into the world of nature.
Tiffany sets her novel in the sexually repressed 1950s of Victoria but her story has a universality about it that transcends time and place. It is a story about love, lust, loneliness, family, animals and the rhythms of nature. She writes with lucid clarity, bringing as much beauty to descriptions of the daily ministrations to lactating cows, to those of Harry's observations of the viciousness of the birds that patrol the boundaries of his paddock, to the surprising and unexpected yearnings of the human heart. And let's not forget that despite the strictures of society at the time, growing up in the country meant be surrounded by fecundity and a lot of rutting - the cycle of sex, birth, decay, death is simply an observable fact.
This is a particularly sensual novel....
ISBN: 9781742610764
ISBN-10: 1742610765
Number Of Pages: 224
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia Pty, Limited
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Dimensions (cm): 21.0 x 13.4
x 1.6
Weight (kg): 0.232
Audience:
General
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