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Introduction
Conservatory
Fact or Fiction: Who Knows, Who Cares
A Telephone Call for Genevieve Snow
Afterword
Copyright © Carmel Bird 1996. All rights reserved.
AFTERWORD
Many of the stories in this collection have been concerned with
dark and terrible events, with the effects that my knowledge and
understanding of some of these things have on the way I see the
world, the way I feel and think and imagine. The teller takes
the tale and fashions it in the hope of making sense first of
all for the teller, and then for whoever it is who listens. I
said in the Introduction that the stories I write have a context
in my own life, that I write what I write because I must. I didn't
plan to write an Afterword; I thought that the last line of 'Major
Butler's Kidneys' was a final and dreadful wound that would take
a reader's imagination back into the other stories. But since
I wrote that line, I have had reason to reflect on the fact that
the last word is never really written, that the last story is
never told. There is always another story.
I have written, fleetingly, of the murder of little children in
Dunblane; I have written of the bombing in Oklahoma; I have quoted
from a newspaper the words: 'If it can happen in Oklahoma, it
can happen anywhere'. After thirty-five people were murdered at
Port Arthur, on 28 April 1996, I kept telling myself that AutomaticTeller was finished, that I could write about Port Arthur later, in another
book. But I became steadily more uncomfortable about the last
line of 'Major Butler's Kidneys' being the last line of the book;
I realised I had to speak about Port Arthur, however briefly.
I spent the first twenty-three years of my life in Tasmania. I
always understood that Tasmania, however beautiful it might be,
was the end of the earth, the edge of the civilised world. Australia
was a bit ridiculous as far as the rest of the world was concerned;
Tasmania was Australia's own small joke island. I had a sense
that Tasmania didn't exist (this idea being strengthened by the
fact that the island was routinely left off maps because it was
much easier to draw a map without it.) So I grew up feeling that
I was actually walking around in nowhere. This was kind of fun,
and gave me terrific freedom to invent. I began collecting references
to Tasmania in things I read when I was very young, finding the
name was used by such people as Virginia Woolf and Nabokov to
mean weird and funny and far away. I still collect these things,
the latest being a full page advertisement in the NewYorker for an Italian fashion house which uses only Tasmanian wool. Maybe
I'm over-sensitive about this, but I can detect the condescension
in the ad.
I can never not be Tasmanian, but when I began to write and publish
fiction, I discovered that there was a great unwisdom in revealing
my Tasmanian origins. In the eighties in Australia it was still
funny to say you were Tasmanian. I remember being at an Australia
Council meeting where people laughed every time the Tasmanian
Symphony Orchestra was mentioned. I asked why this was so, and
I was told that this was because the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
is a joke.
White history in Tasmania can be said to have begun in earnest
when British criminals were sent there to settle the island as
a penal colony. The early years of this period were ugly and violent
and included the deliberate and largely sucessful attempt to kill
off the native Tasmanian people. By the time I was growing up,
these parts of the story had been suppressed. I was very interested
in the convicts and the Aborigines, but I was advised by my teachers
and my family to let sleeping dogs lie. As we know, sleeping dogs
don't. I experienced Tasmania as a strange and haunted place.
If it can happen in Oklahoma, it can happen anywhere. Of course.
And it did, and it will. In the heart of London, Tokyo, Tasmania.
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 as dark as anywhere else. That the murderer shot thirty-five
people in a tourist park set in the ruins of a vile old prison
in 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.
Before this happened I used to look at the name 'Tasmania' with
affection and a certain wry sadness; but now I can scarcely bear
to see or hear the word. What I wrote about Oklahoma -- that you
can't say the name any more without the violent resonance -- is
true of Tasmania, freshly true. There is no getting around this.
We must try to recover, but we can never forget. We weep at the
thought of Port Arthur and the beauty that was stolen and destroyed.
I write this four weeks after the murders, and I find in the weekend
newspaper two temporal ironies. The articles were written many
weeks ago; one is a book review, and the other is about gardening.
The book reviewer quotes a description of Port Arthur from The Tasmanian Journal of William Smith O'Brien 1849-1853 : 'to find a gaol in one of the loveliest spots formed by the hand
of Nature in one of her loneliest solitudes creates a revulsion
of feeling which I cannot describe'. And the gardening writer
rhapsodies about the glories of the roses which ramble over the
ruins of Port Arthur. She saw a bridge that was 'almost submerged
by the old rambler Felicite et Perpetue '.
As the teller of these tales I set out to move you, to stir your
heart and your imagination. If I have sometimes done this, I am
pleased, and I'm grateful for your attention, because there are
three of us in this -- the tale, the teller and the told. At least
three -- there are also the ones eating chocolate bars inside
my head, and somebody planting roses that will bloom for centuries
in sad and happy places.
Melbourne, 26 May 1996
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