Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Mateship with Birds is an account of the shy, cautious courtship between Harry, a lonely dairy farmer, and Betty, a bruised single mother with two children. Harry and Betty live in a country town where human beings and animals share the same space; Harry knows a great deal more about the sex lives of his dairy cows than he knows about women.

The down-to-earth picture of rural life — realistic in its wealth of detail and without sentimentality — is infused with subdued humour and rendered in plain but graceful prose which occasionally ascends to poetry. Mateship with Birds is a beautifully crafted book and a joy to read.

In this wonderfully lyrical book, Tiffany evokes the breadth of a rural landscape through her moving story of two wary people who each lack the confidence to believe they could be loved by the other. The simplicity of Tiffany’s language and the gentleness of her narrative give to the story a poetical brilliance that is at once energetic and serene. With an eye for detail and a willingness to confront topics more easily left untouched, Tiffany has created in Mateship with Birds a memorable work of gentle beauty, wry humour and delicate but earthy imagery.