Set in 1934, it follows an eccentric group of experts on the Better Farming Train that took the latest scientific methods to farmers in Victoria's wheat country. Go no further than Tiffany's first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, published seven years ago. Plenty of other outstanding examples, as recent as last year's Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears, prove readers will follow a talented writer into the bush. She cites Roger McDonald's Miles Franklin Award winner, The Ballad of Desmond Kale, as ''a fantastic novel about sheep''. She hates the notion that because Australians live mainly on the coast we are no longer interested in country life and that Henry Lawson is considered ridiculous. A whole genre of popular fiction has emerged recently, known in the trade as ''farm lit'' or ''rural romance'', mostly written by women for women and seething with farm animals.īut Tiffany belongs to a more literary tradition. But years later her anger, overlaid with laughter, is still emphatic. The characters are human this is not Animal Farm. She was working on her second novel at the time and Mateship with Birds is, in fact, a story about cows and birds - and one tragic sheep. Carrie Tiffany is ''not interested in novels set in coffee shops''.
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