Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany

From the book: ‘They are on some sort of vague world tour where they are much acclaimed for their talent and beauty. Harry imagines the cows as a troupe of dancers, and he their manager. The descriptions of the dairy farm and Harry milking his ‘girls’, with their unique personalities, are surprisingly beautiful.

The unabashed delight of books like this, Tiffany thought, can ‘actually bring you closer in some ways to nature than scientific knowledge, which is only held by a few people anyway’. Tiffany was also inspired by a poetic and unscientific old volume about birds she found in an op-shop, written by Alec Chisholm in 1922 (from which she also borrowed the book’s title).

I would drive around a lot and sometimes just sit in my car on the side of the road next to a paddock full of dairy cows and look at them and think about them.’ Michael, Betty’s eldest, is in the nascent stages of sexual awakening, and ‘Little Hazel’ is also learning some (welcome and unwelcome) facts about nature.Īs part of her research, Tiffany spent time at the local museum looking at photographs of people on dairy farms and in town in the 1950s. Tiffany narrowed her setting down, mainly, to two adjoining properties: Harry’s dairy farm and the house of Betty and her two children. There was ‘something about the place’, and she decided to write a story set there. With Mateship, set in the 1950s, Tiffany was doing some work around Cohuna, just south of the Murray River. He stops this huge grain train in the middle of the street, and goes to get a hamburger in the milkbar, and nobody can cross to the other side!’ The train does actually run down the main street and the whole town stops if the train driver decides he wants to have lunch. ‘With Everyman’s I was doing some work in the Mallee and there was just something about Wycheproof. ‘I just get these kind of passions for particular country towns,’ Tiffany tells me. She has set both her novels in Victorian country towns, in areas she visited through her work as an agricultural journalist.

There is a particular sense of place in the writing of Yorkshire-born, Melbourne-based Carrie Tiffany. Now, her second novel Mateship with Birds-a compelling and elegant meditation on family, desire and country life-confirms the author’s attraction to the past and the land. 399Ĭarrie Tiffany’s debut novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living was published in 2005 to high praise. A version of this article was published in The Big Issue No.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany