by Carmel Bird
WARNING
Notice on the white picket fence at the entrance to the seaside cemetery at Stanley: ‘Circular Head Council—Warning—Soil Unstable—Take care as you walk due to rabbits burrowing.’
X
SIEV–X
Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel, the boat that sailed from Indonesia and sank off Christmas Island on 19 October 2001, drowning three hundred and fifty-three people who were seeking the safety of political asylum in Australia. I realise that this entry belongs under ‘S’, but I have placed it under ‘X’ because the X seems to me to be a particularly significant and sinister element of the acronym, and because the X stands poignantly here as a reminder of the ‘Christ’ in ‘Christmas Island’. If I die in the sea, don’t leave me here alone.
Z
ZINN, JOHANN GOTTFRIED (1727–1759)
A German anatomist and botanist who published a monograph on the human eye. He is remembered in the name of Zinn’s ligament, which is the fibrous ligament surrounding the optic nerve, and Zinn’s zonule, the ring-shaped suspensory ligament of the crystalline lens of the eye. His name is more commonly invoked by the name of a vivid flower, the zinnia.
ZINNIA
A complex daisy-like flower with a lollipop, pom-pom storybook appearance. The surface of the petals of these flowers is seemingly dusted with a fine powdery bloom, rendering zinnias brilliant yet faintly dreamy, faded and other-worldly. They may be rose, pink, purple, lilac, scarlet, orange, cadmium yellow or white. And there is one that is a vivid chartreuse green that is called Green Envy. They belong to the Compositae family, which includes calendulas, dahlias, sunflowers and chrysanthemums, and are native to South America and Mexico. The first examples of zinnias reached Europe in 1750, although seeds were not available there until 1796 when they were taken to Spain. They grew in profusion in the gardens of Montezuma, where it was said that the Aztec gardeners would prick their ears and scatter the blood on the leaves of young plants to encourage growth. A common name for the zinnia is ‘Youth and Age’, and in the Language of Flowers it stands for Simplicity, and also for Thoughts of Absent Friends.
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features included in a new section…
About the Author
Meet the author
CARMEL BIRD was born in Launceston in 1940. ‘My heritage is Tasmanian,’ she says, ‘and when I lived there, as a young child, I thought a lot about the island’s past; it fascinated me.’ She is the second daughter of an optometrist, and grew up close to her three girl cousins, who lived next door. Her only brother was born eight years later, and she adores him, she says now. She grew up with a dream of escaping to Paris and studied French and Literature at the University of Tasmania before leaving for marriage to a Melbourne lawyer in 1963.
She travelled to the United States with her first husband, and spent a year in Los Angeles before driving in a leisurely fashion across the States. She spent a year in Paris, and travelled in England, Germany, Italy, and Spain where she became fascinated by the language. On returning to Australia she studied Spanish at Monash, and has since made several journeys back to Spain, the latest in 2001 when she was researching her upcoming novel. In the seventies she remarried, and in 1975 her daughter Camilla was born. Her first published short story appeared in the Women’s Weekly in 1963, and she won many prizes in short story competitions before the publication of her first book in her forties.
Carmel says she has always loved reading and writing, constructing narratives in a kind of attempt to make sense and nonsense out of the world of her experience. She is fascinated by words and language, and the possibility of a kind of playing, of making something (a story) out of just words and nothing else, of drawing images with words alone. As a child she wrote plays for herself to direct and other children to perform, and for ‘various kind, long-suffering’ adults to witness as members of the audience.
‘Carmel has always loved reading and writing, constructing narratives in a kind of attempt to make sense and nonsense out of the world of her experience.’
Now, Carmel Bird is considered one of the most exciting and original writers in Australia today. She was also one of the pioneers of Australia’s creative writing programs, when in the early ‘80s she introduced the first short-story writing course at the Council for Adult Education in Melbourne. As well as mentoring developing writers and teaching creative writing, she’s written two popular books about the writing process—Dear Writer (one of the first such guides to appear on the market and a benchmark for the genre) and Not Now Jack, I’m Writing a Novel, and is working on a third, What Possessed You?
Her other writing ranges from non-fiction to multimedia, and includes novels for adults and works for children. Her novels include Red Shoes, The White Garden and The Bluebird Café, all of which were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and she has published several volumes of short stories as well as editing anthologies including The Penguin Century of Australian Stories and The Stolen Children—Their Stories. The story ‘A Telephone Call For Genevieve Snow’ from Automatic Teller was made into a film directed by Peter Long, which won the Silver Lion award in Venice in 2001. Carmel lives in Melbourne, Victoria.
Life at a glance
BORN
Launceston, in 1940
EDUCATED
University of Tasmania
CAREER
Has worked as a teacher of French and English, currently Writer in Residence at Latrobe University.
PREVIOUS WORKS:
NOVELS
Cherry Ripe (1985)
The Bluebird Café (1990)
The White Garden (1995)
Crisis (1996)
Red Shoes (1998)
Unholy Writ (2000)
Open for Inspection (2002)
Cape Grimm (2004)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Births, Deaths and Marriages (1983)
The Woodpecker Toy Fact (1987)
The Common Rat (1993)
Automatic Teller (1996)
CHILDRENS
The Mouth (1996)
The Cassowary’s Quiz (1998)
NON-FICTION
Dear Writer (1988, revised and expanded 1996)
Not Now Jack—I’m Writing a Novel (1994)
AS EDITOR
The Writing on the Wall: Collection of Poetry and Prose by Women (1985)
Relations: Australian short stories (1991)
Red Hot Notes (1996)
Daughters and Fathers (1997)
The Stolen Children: Their Stories (1998)
The Penguin Century of Australian Stories (2000)
About the book
The critical eye
‘GIVEN HER due’ begins professor of Australian literature Peter Pierce’s Sydney Morning Herald review, ‘Carmel Bird would be recognised as one of Australia’s finest storytellers and connoisseurs of story. In her latest novel, Cape Grimm, the stories that families and region inherit, and others they make for themselves, are the principal subject. With the addition of a single letter, Cape Grim, on the north-west coast of Tasmania and site of the purest air in the world, is transformed into Cape Grimm, a site where horrid and marvellous tales are generated and harboured.’ He concludes: ‘It is a bravura performance, a fantasia of and on storytelling, that makes all the stranger the tale Bird has added to the many told of Tasmania.’
Writing in the Bulletin, journalist and reviewer Anne Susskind feels that ‘Carmel Bird makes no concessions in Cape Grimm, a portentous, threatening whirlpool of a novel about a cult suicide which dives deep into the recesses of madness…it is nightmarish, about the dark side of life and, more particularly, the effects on the Australian psyche of the treatment of Aborigines.’ Bird shows here that she is ‘a powerful and lyrical writer, and Cape Grimm makes compelling reading’.
Nicola Walker, reviewing for the Age, comments on the author’s own writing about, well, writing: ‘Carmel Bird once noted that “the writer is a kind of confidence trickster whose jo
b it is to get the reader in”. All fiction is an artifice, and a good writer is by definition convincing, but the idea that the reader needs to be gulled is rather curious. Perhaps it is because Bird likes to play with the fantastic that she feels like an illywhacker. Or perhaps it is that after 20 books in as many years, she is as much concerned with the reasons writers make up stories as with what’s in them…There are plenty of clues to the sparks of her own zesty imagination in the prologue and end pieces of her new novel, Cape Grimm.’
‘a powerful and lyrical writer’
Anne Susskind The Bulletin
‘It is clear from the start that Cape Grimm… is to be a mythic tale…By setting the novel in north-western Tasmania, Bird brilliantly combines a landscape and seascape that seem made for myth with a story of mass murder,’ writes Dorothy Johnston in The Canberra Times. ‘The massacre and death by disease of the indigenous inhabitants are woven in, as are aspects of Tasmanian history that other writers have developed into a strong fictional tradition. But not until Cape Grimm have the various elements been brought so powerfully together…Bird’s prose style delights in coincidences and conundrums, in the playful and dangerous blend of fact and fiction. She is not afraid of spinning out the many glittering facets of a theme. One last plus—the cover is a beauty.’
Behind the scenes
Carmel Bird on Writing
ON IDEAS
‘People often ask writers where their ideas for their fiction originate; I have truly never known the answer to that question, and I think that now I know even less.’ From ‘Chinese Carpets’
ON JOURNALS
‘My journals are really notebooks, large black books with scarlet spines and corners, in which I write drafts, disjointed drafts and short notes…I collect here scraps of information about things that fascinate me…I love to write about fruits and flowers. I write family trees and other details for the characters in my fiction; I write the notes that go with the editing of my manuscripts and proofs; and I paste in cuttings from newspapers. Sometimes I paste in pages I have written on scrap paper or on the backs of envelopes. I keep notes from my reading of references. There are also photographs I have taken of things I think are significant to a manuscript, and there are images from newspapers, postcards and other scraps. I collect pictures of houses I dream of buying in Tasmania…The journals are the chaos; the fiction is the order manufactured from this disarray.’—from ‘Reflections On Keeping A Writer’s Journal’
ON BURNING DESIRE
‘The longing to examine and expose my ideas in words is something emotional and physical. Ask me where I get my ideas from and I can tell you I don’t really know; but ask me how I feel when I have an idea for a story, and I can tell you that I have a fabulous burning sensation behind the eyes…For me it’s as if something hot is melting in and around my eyeballs, and my hands can’t wait to get to the keyboard, to set in motion the statement, the dramatisation of the thoughts that have ignited somehow in my imagination…I write fiction, and the simple reason I give for doing that is that I believe writing fiction is the thing I do best.’—From ‘Burning Desire: a reflection on writing, inspiration and imagination’
ON FACT AND FICTION
‘Life is a crude inventor; fiction will only be convincing if it is more artful than life. To make fiction take the reader in, you have to leave out lots and lots of remarkable things that happened in life, you have to re-assemble, you have to make…I enjoy reading facts, but when I write, I mostly write fiction…Elements of reality and memory inspire me. I am interested in the play between fact and fiction, interested in the moment when the metamorphosis takes place, when the grub of fact becomes the butterfly of fiction…Sometimes the only way to tell the truth, to get to the meaning of what you are trying to say, is to tell it in fiction.’—From ‘Fact or Fiction: Who Knows, Who Cares’
Author’s top ten favourite books
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Speak, Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
Metamorphoses
by Ovid
A Heart So White
by Javier Marias
Le Grand Meaulnes
by Henri Alain-Fournier
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Moments of Being
by Virginia Woolf
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
Timequake
by Kurt Vonnegut
The inspiration
ALTHOUGH CAPE GRIMM’S apocalyptic cult and its charismatic leader Caleb Mean were only loosely inspired by historic events, ‘those Utopian communities always fascinated me’, Bird says. ‘They can be good and sweet and creative but I see something creepy and arrogant and dangerous and potentially deadly’. The novel’s community of Skye is ‘an amalgam,’ she says, ‘of David Koresh and Heaven’s Gate, and deep within it is the inspiration of the actions of a number of mass murderers who surfaced at the end of the twentieth century.’ This is the third of Bird’s trilogy of novels inspired by the idea of ‘charisma and evil’—the others are The White Garden, based on the controversial deep-sleep therapy of Chelmsford hospital, and The Red Shoes, which draws on the cult known as The Family.
‘…utopian communities always fascinated me. They can be good and sweet and creative but I see something creepy and arrogant and dangerous and potentially deadly.’
But, as readers will have seen from Cape Grimm’s extensive epilogue, the inspirations and symbols go far deeper. Facts and fables are included as a series of notes, a kind of glossary to the novel, and reflect just some of the influences the author absorbed during the eight years (with a few breaks to write essays and a couple of ‘racy’ crime novels) it took to finish Cape Grimm. She is even able to describe the inspiration for some of the smallest details: the ‘small blue dinghy’ Caleb Mean escapes in comes from a passing reference in court transcripts to a boat owned by the family of Martin Bryant, for example.
Tasmania, too, is a constant source of inspiration. ‘Although it is the end of the earth; although it is beautiful; although it is quiet and strange and funny, Tasmania is as vulnerable and dark as anywhere else. That [Martin Bryant] shot thirty-five people in a tourist park set in the ruins of a vile old prison on a place that resembles a little piece of paradise on a sunny Sunday in autumn is an evil, but not such a very surprising fact’, Carmel wrote in 1996, soon after the event. She has also ‘always been fascinated by the racial histories of this island.’ Even as a child, she has written, she ‘had what was considered at the time to be an unnecessary, unhealthy and dangerous interest in convicts, Aborigines and other old things best suppressed. I would spend hours in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, sort of breathing in, imbibing, the old things there…I experienced Tasmania as a strange and haunted place.’ On the release of Cape Grimm, though, she worried that ‘people [would] groan: “not another book about Tasmania”. It became fashionable for a moment and now it’s unfashionable. It doesn’t matter—I write about what I want to write about…Although I haven’t lived in Tasmania since I was 25, I visit frequently and still have family and very close friends there. That’s how I would identify, as a Tasmanian writer.’
Read on
Have you read?
The Woodpecker Toy Fact
(1987, US edition titled Woodpecker Point, New Directions, 1988, ISBN 0811210731) ‘Bird’s stories are, by turns, beautiful, ambiguous and eccentric…seamlessly crafted…both finely wrought and emotionally affecting. In all, the author’s foray into “another reality” is illuminating and unsettling.’ Publishers Weekly
‘I think Carmel Bird’s stories are terrific, and the first thing any review should say is, simply, buy them…There is something of Vonnegut or Mark Twain in her deadpan, mock innocent ironies, and something of Barbara Hanrahan’s wide-eyed breathlessness in her detailed description of weird events.’ Peter Goldsworthy,
Sydney Morning Herald
‘These short stories are of the rare sort that you should avoid reading alone. They are full of good bits to read aloud and giggle at with someone, which yields double the pleasure. Carmel Bird’s touch is deft, bright, and accurate.’ Viki Wright, The Australian