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Observations of desire at Cohuna: Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds
Mateship with Birds is a reflection on the various tangled forms of desire, love, and lust. In a revealing passage towards the end of the novel, Tiffany writes of one of the protagonists’s understanding of sex, ‘At thirteen Harry knew nothing. None of what he had seen in the paddocks and the bush seemed applicable to men and women – or at least not the buttoned-up and smoothed-down men and women of his acquaintance.’ In this work, however, everything in the paddocks and the bush are applicable to men and women. Sex and desire are written as a biological impulse where the humans of the novel are no different to all the many other animals who populate the text.
Tiffany’s novel is set in 1950s rural Victoria in a town called Cohuna, and tracks the life of Betty, a single mother with two children – Michael and Little Hazel – and her relationship with a dairy farmer called Harry. It is the intersections of the life of this family of three with Harry that plots the course of the novel. In this work we are not shown the ‘buttoned-up and smoothed-down’ relationships of men and women. Instead, we are given all the intricate, inescapable, helpless and bewildering aspects of desire: the longing of Harry’s dog for him, ‘her whole existence, every sinewy fibre of her, is turned to the feel of Harry’s hand across the smooth cockpit of her skull’; the desire of the old men in the nursing home for the lost vitality of their youth; the adolescent desire of Betty’s teenage son Michael for his ‘study buddy’ Dora; and the slow burn of the resigned desire Harry and Betty have for one another: ‘Betty meanders within herself; she’s full of quiet pockets. The girl Dora might be water, but his Betty is oil. You can’t take oil lightly. It seeps into your skin. It marks you.’
There is much that Tiffany does beautifully: such as her evocative portrait of rural Australia, ‘The eucalypts’ thin leaves are painterly on the background of mauve sky – like black lace on pale skin,’ and the tenderly drawn, though restrained, relationship between Betty and Harry. Yet, there were, I felt, problems here and in order to explain them I need to refer to some of the key plot points in the work – which is why I offered the spoiler alert at the beginning, turn away now if you don’t want to know what happens – and they are primarily to do with the character Mues.
Mues is a one-dimensional villain. His first appearance in the novel – at exactly ten pages in – is to expose himself to a young girl:
She is trying to look around him, into the corner, when he turns, his trousers slide slowly down his legs, the end of his belt curves around his ankles like a tail and she sees that he is not wearing underpants. That he is holding his shirt up on purpose to reveal his dick, all raw and swollen pink.His next appearance is to cruelly and mercilessly shoot two cockatoos, watching as one mourns the loss of its mate; he then slaughters a sheep, not even waiting until it is completely dead before skinning it; and in the final appearance, is caught in the act of raping a sheep which he has kept for that purpose for several years:
They both stood for several seconds adjusting to the dim light inside the shed. They saw the sheep lying on its side in the straw, its legs hobbled with a pair of reins and Mues behind it on his knees with his overalls down, the shoulder straps splayed out behind him like his own set of ties he had broken free of. They both saw the blue nightie lying in the straw next to the sheep. The sheep lifted its head slightly in the direction of the sound they had made with the door. Mues didn’t stop, he didn’t look up. He said, ‘Shut the door.’ And they did.Read the full review at Crikey
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