INTERVIEW FROM ATLANTIS JOURNAL

28.2 (December 2006): 125–132
ISSN 0210-6124



‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird

Gerardo Rodríguez Salas
Universidad de Granada
gerardor@ugr.es


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 individual 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 García Márquez. 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
126 Gerardo Rodríguez

of the three novels—charismatic leaders keep proving to be quite a powerful weapon of
mass destruction.
As Wilde et al. (1994: 94) state, Bird is “a witty writer with a wide but always highly
original tonal range”, who “raises what is often potentially sinister or horrific to
something approaching comedy. Disease, deaths and violence are staples in her fictional
world, which has similarities with Barbara Hanrahan’s Gothic sensuality and feminist
irony, although Bird’s deadpan humour is a distinctive, determining element”.
The interview that follows is the result of two meetings (Granada, December 2001
and Sydney, July 2002) and further contact through e-mail, phone and letter. I have
concentrated principally on discussions of the genesis and inspiration of Bird’s work
and on her reflections regarding these central issues.

You have specified elsewhere (Walker 2004b:281) that the concept of charisma is the
leitmotif of your Mandala Trilogy (The White Garden, Red Shoes and Cape Grimm).
Actually, you describe the protagonist in Red Shoes, Petra Penfold-Knight as having a ‘Halo
Effect’. In which way are the three main characters in this trilogy (i.e. Ambrose Goddard,
Petra Penfold-Knight and Caleb Mean) charismatic? And then, would you say that
Ambrose, for example, is as charismatic as Petra? Is there any difference in the halo effect of
these powerfully attractive people?

I was only looking for a trinity (man, woman and child) where each character would be
charismatic and evil, but different according to age and gender. Petra was, in fact, the
only one I imagined entering a roomful of children and having the other infants drawn
to her as moths to a candle flame. In that image there is the notion of the danger that
the halo person is to others. I toy with the idea of having a character somewhere
(perhaps in The Green Language), who is charismatic and good, probably someone like
Mother Teresa or St Teresa. Goodness is harder to deal with than evil, because part of
goodness tends to be humility. It would be interesting to put Petra, Ambrose and Caleb
on a stage together and see who shines the brightest. Actors and singers have charisma
to begin with, and this is bolstered by PR and lights and costumes, as indeed it is for
Petra and the other charismatic leaders in the trilogy, and perhaps because actors and
other famous people offer their art, they have a goodness and purity that was not
available to Petra and the rest of the team.

As Shirley Walker has already acknowledged, “Caleb is the most unearthly and inhuman of
Bird’s charismatic figures” (2004a: 273) and, indeed, after reading the Mandala Trilogy,
one gets the impression that he is the creepiest of the three protagonists: Goddard becomes
aware that he is a fake and commits suicide when this is acknowledged by society; Petra is
also aware of her falsity after murdering Celeste, but she kills herself choosing to remain an
immortal myth to her community’s eyes; Caleb seems to believe in his supernatural power
until the very end and his death is not even clear. And yet it is as if, behind the fakeness of
these figures, there is some truth to their supernatural power, like Petra’s ability to see her
guardian angel or Caleb’s fatalistic signs—the plane that kills a mother and her daughter in
his presence, Marina Galaxy’s accident while listening to his preaching, and his
grandmother’s vision the day of his birth.

‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird 127

I sometimes think that the three of them lack a kind of skin that most humans have, a
membrane that shuts the world of the supernatural off from more regular people. You
could call it a gift—the skin-lessness—or a curse. The three have access to some power
or at least to some ability or way of knowing.

The three charismatic figures in The Mandala Trilogy are terribly cold and wicked. Is there
any of them that, despite this perverse nature, gains the reader’s sympathy?

Maybe it is worth considering the tragic events in the early lives of Petra and Caleb, as
they both suffered from the circumstances and events at that time. Petra was the child
of her sister and the priest (Somerset Jones), although she believed she had the same
mother and father as her sister. She was then sexually abused by Somerset, who was
Petra’s best friend’s father. That she possessed the halo effect is something unaccounted
for. It is seen to be a gift, like amazing musical ability or mathematical intelligence. It is
just a feature of the person, a legacy they are born with. It could be argued that since
Petra was born with so many strikes against her, a benign creator gifted her with the
beginnings of her charisma. She used that charisma to rise to power over others, to
enslave them, to force them to fit into the image of reality that she had developed
gradually with the input of such people as Meena and then all the men who fell for her.
I do not suggest that readers should feel ‘sympathy’ for her actions; I only suggest that
her character and personality developed from the confluence of her heritage and her
nature and experience. I imagine that at some point she could have used her powers for
good. So I am proposing understanding, not sympathy.
Caleb was spoilt from birth: again his heritage told against him, being born into the
community at Skye, and having the grandmother who saw the visions at his birth. He
was doomed to be a little tyrant, although he could have chosen to be good. However,
the easy path to power (or even, I suppose, the difficult one) can be like a drug: it went
to his head as it did to Petra’s. He seems to have been insane.
Ambrose is a bit different. He was a bright boy in a patriarchal society where he
could fairly easily rise to power in his field, having images of himself as a great elephant.
The point in his character that is sometimes sympathetic is his humour. He is
sometimes funny—of course it is dark humour—and, although he is a vile criminal
who dominates, rapes and murders, his take on things is sometimes quite funny. The
humour in Red Shoes comes from Beau, the guardian angel, and his control of the
narrative is in itself intended to be ironic and amusing. The mild humour in Cape
Grimm comes from Paul’s lack of self-knowledge. He does not seem to be able to see
that he is the other side of Caleb. He is un-ironic and thinks he is so smart and good.

The philosophy underlying your fiction, which you have explained on countless occasions
with different words and similes, is the one that Celeste Penfold-Knight summarises in Red
Shoes: “Mama tells us that beauty is like a water lily, like the lotus, for without the mud
and slime and darkness beneath the surface of the water, it would not be possible for the
lilies to rise up and break into all the luminous grace and pure colour above the pool” (Bird
1998:189). Like alchemy, fiction is the gold that appears when facts and imagined events are
intertwined by means of a third element that escapes any wording. Could you elaborate on
this?
128 Gerardo Rodríguez


I see fiction like alchemical gold, appearing when facts and the imagination come
together to make a new element. That is ‘magic’. Something magical happens—the facts
and the imaginings lock together and a new creature slips out: fiction.

Every writer has certain key topics and preoccupations. Could you summarise yours?

I am always looking for meaning, hence the playing around with the Mean family.
Language, of course, is a preoccupation, and I know that Mean is only a word, but I like
having the family just called that, without any comment—it amuses me that nobody
has ever examined any of this. Nobody ever seems to comment on the fact that all of my
books have at least an epigraph from some mad book by Carrillo Mean, and then he
turns up in the text, more or less unexplained. Basically, I am seeking beauty and I
always run up against its opposite too. To return to the metaphor of alchemy, I grope
around in the slime under the surface of the pool, and sometimes I am rewarded by the
appearance of the lotus.
There are recurrent images in my work, such as flowers and nature; animals and
birds; gardens; sewing, knitting and houses; death and murder; power and
powerlessness; children; religious iconography; loss; and psychology. I am crazy about
the beauty of the opium poppy and fascinated by the fabulous poison it carries. It was
nice in Cape Grimm when readers challenged me on the poisonous character of the
hydrangea which Dorothea ate; people did not know that this plant was poisonous.
Beautiful things are sometimes poisonous—snakes are very beautiful—and I am
fascinated by the base stories, such as Garden of Eden, and also by the German folk tales
which express in Western thought many of the deep problems in human life in such a
magical and frankly matter-of-fact way. I love that tone, and I feel nourished by it.
Having said this, I must admit that my fiction is steeped in the Australian literary
tradition, to which I belong owing to obvious geographical bonds. The settings of my
fiction are often recognisably Australian, like Melbourne in The White Garden or
Tasmania in Red Shoes and Cape Grimm. In this last novel, the keys to understand
supernatural events lie in Tasmania—or to give it its previous name, Van Diemen’s
Land—and its history. Virginia has the visionary power to see the ghost of an aboriginal
girl that takes the narrative back to the silenced chronicle of abused indigenous
Tasmanians. Through this ghost, named Mannaginna, Virginia witnesses the 1820s
massacres of native Tasmanians at the hands of white European whalers, sealers,
soldiers and farmers, who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. This central issue in Cape Grimm connects with the nineteenth-
century Australian tradition of the novels of Henry Kingsley, brother of Charles
Kingsley, and the many others who wrote about pioneer life. And yet, my scope is
universal, since, also in the line of writers like Patrick White, my interest lies in the
discovery of universal values.

The guardian angel narrator in Red Shoes (Beau) is a brilliant idea, very much in line with
the classical child narrator or the figure of the stranger in such novels as Joyce’s Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Did you pursue a similar effect?

‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird 129

I had imagined the story of Petra, and then I wondered how to tell it, who on earth
would have the voice to tell this. It had to be bright and special, and suddenly—this is
the moment of magic I spoke of earlier—the idea of a guardian angel came to me. I
realised he could have just the job of preventing Petra from being in danger but that he
would have no business with her morality, and this really appealed to me because I
realised that guardian angels do not seem to have a moral dimension: they save people
from physical danger or disease, but that seems to be it. Humans are left with the free
will to choose good or evil. He developed into a captivating character; indeed, I think he
goes a lot further than any such character in anything I have ever read.

Somewhere else you said that in your writing you need the organising force of a male
narrator (Walker 2004b: 287) and yet, one gets the impression that in your novels the real
force comes from female characters. That is the case of the women patients at the Mandala
Clinic, Petra in Red Shoes and Virginia Mean in Cape Grimm.

You are right about the sometime female narrators, but often I do also like to have a
male storyteller delivering the stories. My most sustained one is in Crisis, a comic novel,
and when it was first published it had a male author as well as a male narrator—Jack
Power, my surname before I was married, quite hilarious indeed—and then it was re-
published under my name. Maybe the male is the organising force, but then the women
often write diaries or deliver monologues within the framework of the male narrative,
subverting the male sometimes, not always, but certainly in The White Garden.
There is, in my reception, perception and experience of life—particularly in my
observation of the lives of women in my mother’s generation—a vast un-tapped
creative power in women, a power beyond the creative act of child-bearing, which is
amazing in itself. And this creative force was often—and still sometimes is—dammed
up and unable to find its expression. I think of my mother who channelled her
creativity into the home and children, who loved to sew and embroider, to play the
piano and sing, and yet there was a sense I had—this is not only in retrospect—that
there was so much more she could have done, and I knew she could do, but there was
no way of even discovering what that was. She gave me the wonderful gift of the
opportunity to practise creative arts of various kinds, but the society of Australia in the
years immediately after World War Two gave women of her generation very little
chance to shine. So there was frequently a sadness in them. This sadness began to be
acknowledged in the writing of Betty Friedan, but it was a bit late then. So I suppose
that in the voices and the sometimes subversive behaviour of the women in my work,
there is an acknowledgement of what I observed in the women of my mother’s
generation.

How did you come up with the idea of adding a footnote section to such novels as Red Shoes
and Cape Grimm? What is for you the process of writing a novel as regards the
orchestration of all the documentation and its filtering into the fictional product?

In the late eighties I decided to add a section to the end of my novel The Bluebird Café,
called ‘A Reader’s Guide to The Bluebird Café’. My intention was to separate and yet
integrate certain little bits of information, for example the titles of some of Carrillo’s
130 Gerardo Rodríguez

books. The question is why I did not have a similar section in The White Garden. I
honestly work fairly unconsciously, so I find it hard sometimes to answer sensible
questions. With Red Shoes there was the joke of the ‘Foot Note’ and then with Cape
Grimm there was so much history that I had to have the end bits. I puzzled for a long
time over what to call them and then one morning I woke up with the words time and
tide and could not see why I had not realised this before. Another trait of my fiction is
that I like to include fictitious information along with the truth; for example, the
timeline in Cape Grimm has dates of fictitious events, which are fairly obvious, but in
the Tide section there are fake stories as well as true stories. I am very interested in the
borderlines that run between the true and the false, and I know that fiction is the place
to explore these slippages and boundaries.

Your real experience as a Tasmanian has definitely informed your writing.

Yes, I was born at the beginning of the Second World War in Tasmania, which was
about as far from the action and realities of war as you could get, but I have always been
fascinated by the war, by the year (1940), by the idea of being born just then. I seek out
anything that happened in 1940 and feel a strange link and comfort to be derived from
the fact: I think of writers who died that year and imagine myself moving forward as
they move back, wishing I could have met them. The Tasmanian aspect of this is also
significant: I have always been fascinated by the history of and geography and geology
of Tasmania—settled by the British as a prison colony, so that there is a horrible prison
history as well as virtual extermination of indigenous people who were a unique race,
not the same as the indigenous people of Australia. As a Tasmanian, I have always felt
cut off not only from the world but also from Australia—the island is often left off
maps because it is insignificant. It is a very beautiful place, physically, but I believe it is
haunted (literally) by the ghosts of its sorrowful past, and I am made melancholy by
this. Thus, definitely, it does inform what I write.

Your fascination with the fairy tale seems significant to me in relation with the interest that
it has aroused in other contemporary women writers such as Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt,
Jeannette Winterson, to name just a few. To what extent is it important in your fiction and
why do you think so many women writers have re-encountered a new value in this genre?

Carter and Byatt are the same age as I am, and I imagine they, like me, were nourished
as child readers by the fairy tales. There was very little fiction for children then and the
fairy stories dealt so elegantly with deep issues. A child or girl with the need to put into
narrative the unspoken—except in fairy tales—themes of love and hate was instantly
gripped by the way the stories could do this with ease and dead-pan language and
brilliant images. In my opinion, the fairy stories are probably speaking a feminine
language which appeals to women writers in particular. The stories are in one sense
transgressive, and yet they were sanctioned by adults because they were ‘literature’ and
because they were deemed to be harmless. I was given a beautiful volume bound in dark
blue leather of Grimm when I was about seven and I wonder if my parents looked at the
hideous—fascinating—little black and white etchings by Cruikshank—they were very
frightening and engaging. There is also an urge in women writers to re-write these
‘Time and Tide’: An Interview with Carmel Bird 131

stories, to explore their possibilities and meanings. As regards fairy tales, the beginning
of Cape Grimm where Lady Jane Franklin brings the Grimm tales to Van Diemen’s
Land is metaphoric: the idea of European stories transmitted by a woman to nourish
the minds and hearts of the children of Tasmania, so far away from the centres of
‘civilisation’.

Quoting N. E. Solomon at the beginning of the Footnote section in Red Shoes (1998: 223),
you say that “All stories rest in other stories which have gone before”. Is there any
writer/text, classic or contemporary, that has exerted a significant influence in your writing?

Yes, N. E. Solomon is invented and just means any wise person. What I meant is that
stories keep building on past stories, piling up and up to build the big story—the whole
story—which will be as big as a grain of sand in the end. I am very influenced by the
things I love to read—too many to mention, I suppose. My favourite recent one is
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. In The Bluebird Café the female narrator talks about how she
feels she is writing a volume that is part of some great book along with all other books.
There is a section of this novel that is called ‘The Interviews’. The character, Virginia—
you will see that I frequently use that name, since it has for me at least three meanings:
Woolf, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Virgin Mary—is a writer, and she in fact goes on
to be the narrator of my book Dear Writer. What I think of as ‘The Virginia Effect’
covers a wide range of issues in my work—issues of creativity and inspiration,
feminism, image and language. I sometimes think of language itself as a whole universe
of chaos from which is born thought, from which thought is shaped. It is like music,
but that is a rather banal observation—yet a true one.

We have mainly discussed your approach to novels. But now that a collection of your short
fiction (The Essential Bird) has been recently published, is your approach to short fiction
the same as that to the novels?

With short fiction I think of a lovely idea and can just sit down, explore it, complete the
writing and see the result quickly. In a short piece of writing, I do not inhabit the
narrative for so long, but I do keep coming back to the stories in my mind and thinking
about them. However, it is more or less the same technique as in a novel—dream it up
and write it down. I like to say over in my head things I have written—but this applies
to both short and long—they both have moments that I love to think about over and
over again.
I love the discipline of the short story, the way that, in a few thousand words, a piece
of short fiction can make a powerful point, can deliver such imagery and such music. I
love the freedom to be found within the discipline, and the opportunity for revelation
and discovery, and I adore the way the whole cavalcade of humanity can parade swiftly
by in a handful of sentences. There is something so joyful, so satisfying about reading
and writing short fiction.
For a range of reasons, Australian fiction has a deep tradition of the short story, and
I feel that my work in this area sits firmly within this tradition. It is a nice place to be,
although I must point out that Australia, particularly in its literature, still operates
within what we here call ‘The cultural cringe’, whereby Australian readers still look to
132 Gerardo Rodríguez

the works of English, North American and European writers as the benchmark. Fiction
from other countries is generally still more celebrated here than the home-grown
variety. This is just a fact of life. My impression is that this is changing. I hope it is.
When I studied at university in Australia in the fifties, there was no Australian text on
the syllabus. Literature, students were led to believe, originated in the British Isles,
North America and France, and to a certain extent Spain (I refer to Cervantes and
Lorca, for example). Australian texts are today studied in Australian universities, and
have even migrated to other countries. Nevertheless, as I say, the cultural cringe is still
present in Australian literary culture. I am sorry to end on this note. I am, in fact, very
positive and cheerful, but, I hope, honest and realistic enough.


Works Cited

Bird, Carmel 1995: The White Garden. Queensland: U of Queensland P.
———— 1998: Red Shoes. Sydney: Vintage.
———— 2004: Cape Grimm. Sydney: Flamingo.
Walker, Shirley 2004a: ‘All the Way to Cape Grimm: Reflections on Carmel Bird’s Fiction’.
Australian Literary Studies 21.3: 264-76.
———— 2004b: ‘Conversations at Rochester Road: Carmel Bird Discusses Her Writing with
Shirley Walker’. Australian Literary Studies 21.3: 277-88.
Wilde, H. William, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, eds. 1994: Oxford Companion to Australian
Literature 2nd ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. On line at
http://www.carmelbird.com/about_toc.html. Accessed December 2005

Received 4 April 2006
Revised version received 10 September 2006