Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany

Michael Cathcart: Yes, you're not on the edge of your seat thinking, 'oh my God, what's going to happen now, how's she going to get out of this', that never happens. But I do write in a kind of collage fashion where it's about accumulation and observation rather than plot or narrative or those sorts of things. I'm not sure how I ended up writing this, I started writing a number of other books and got well advanced on them before I pieced this together. The cows in some parts look like they're floating on the landscape because they are near the Gunbarrel Creek, and there's something a bit shimmering and strange about it and I was very taken with it and wanted to write something set there. It's on an anabranch of the Murray River, the Gunbarrel Creek, and so that bush is very much in the town. It's a little community that I visited quite a lot some years ago as part of my work, I work as a farming journalist, and I visited some dairy farms around there that were having tough times due to saline soils, they have terrible troubles with saline soils.

Michael Cathcart: Okay, but I am right, the rest of us call it Cohuna, don't we.Ĭarrie Tiffany: Yes. Tell us about this world.Ĭarrie Tiffany: For a start it is Cohuna, Michael, the locals say Cohuna of course in their Aussie twang. Michael Cathcart: It's just a lovely book, it's a very still book and it really isn't driven by plot, you just like to dwell with exquisite or painful or sensual incidents. Betty and Harry watch each other and look out for each other, and daily life keeps them both very occupied.

Harry lives alone on a little dairy farm next door. Betty, who is 45, works as an aide at the Acacia Court Home for the Aged, she has two children and the father is off the scene. It's a very gentle and private story about intersecting lives in this country town. This time we're in Cohuna in 1953, in Victoria near the Murray, it's about 40 minutes drive from Echuca I suppose, and about an hour from Deniliquin over the border in New South Wales. Like the first book, it takes us into a small Australian farming community. Now she's back with a new novel, Mateship with Birds. It was a publishing sensation and was on the shortlist for just about every prize going, including the Miles Franklin, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the 2006 Orange Prize. Michael Cathcart: Carrie Tiffany's debut novel was Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany