Title: 'Time and Tide': An Interview with Carmel Bird
Abstract: The contemporary Australian author Carmel Bird writes a fiction that blends real and surreal, mundane and macabre with inventive irony. In doing so, she reflects a perception of her birthplace (Tasmania) as a meaningfully multi-faceted island, whose picturesque surface masks deep secrets and is haunted by the ghosts of the indigenous peoples as well as those of the convicted criminals who were the first colonial inhabitants. With the themes of colonialism and genocide frequently infusing her fiction, Bird has edited a ground-breaking collection of the oral histories of Australian indigenous people who were forcibly removed from their land in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: The Stolen Children—Their Stories. It is perhaps this work that has brought Bird’s own stories, her fiction and essays alike, to a wide international attention. The motif of the dis-empowered is one of the key elements of all her work, colouring her response to the broader questions of life, love and justice. Her most recent novel Cape Grimm is currently listed for the Dublin IMPAC Award. Bird is one of Australia’s most active and visible writers. Her fiction, while being highly individ ual and varied, sits within the Australian traditions of both Peter Carey’s fabulism and Thea Astley’s humane wit. The work has been compared with that of Angela Carter and Jeannette Winterson, and yet there is a rogue quality about it that brings it into the realm of Kurt Vonnegut and even Garcia Marquez. This is a rare and heady mix that leaps categories and bears very close attention. It is work that attracts the imagination of film-makers, several of the short stories being currently in production. The story ‘A Telephone Call for Genevieve Snow’ was adapted for film in 2001 and won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival. She has published five collections of short stories: Births, Deaths and Marriages (1983), The Woodpecker Toy Fact (1987), Woodpecker Point (1988), The Common Rat (1993), and Automatic Teller (1996), followed by a recent collection of her best stories in 2005 under the title The Essential Bird. Among her novels, the most distinguished work is her Mandala Trilogy, which Bird is planning to convert into a quartet with the novel she is currently working on and whose title will be Green Language. The trilogy so far is made up of The White Garden (1995), Red Shoes (1998), and Cape Grimm (2004). Although freely bound up together, the pieces of this trilogy are connected by the concept of a charisma that, when combined with evil, can cause extreme damage such as mass murder. Bird speaks of ‘The Halo Effect’ that charismatic people exert on average human beings by radiating a mysterious aura and power that are finally translated into blind obedience. Bird fictionalises an unfortunately frequent reality, since, like Ambrose Goddard, Petra Penfold-Knight and Caleb Mean—the protagonists
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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