Figures in Farming: Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds (2012) and the Sexual Politics of Animal Figuration

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents new scholarship on the complex figuration of the animal in Australian fiction through the significantly under-analysed Mateship with Birds (2012). Carrie Tiffany’s acclaimed second novel explores the hidden loves and traumas of post-war regional Australia in explicitly cross-species terms. Contemporary reviewers lauded the novel’s celebration of an authentic Australian farming life. Its animal representation, however, is not simply realism. Rather, it is a complex interrogation of animal as metaphor in human lives, and the consequences of that figurative displacement for both human and nonhuman material existence. I read the novel specifically through Carol J Adams’ the ‘absent referent’ alongside notions of an aesthetics of care, as envisioned by Josephine Donovan, to probe the limits and affordances of mutual and agentic interspecies engagements on the farm. Tiffany evokes a reverence for quotidian animal life and human lives: human lives are animalian. In evoking and exposing the place of animal figuration in the lives of people working, and living closely, with material, nonhuman animals, however, Tiffany intricately interrogates the ways in which, as Adams says, discourses of animality, sexuality, gender, and violence intersect, particularly in a 1950s Australian masculinist, pastoral economy.