I'm struggling to rate this book. There is much to be savoured. Lonely farmer Harry's loving and detailed accounts of the kookaburras he can see from his home. The odd, dependent relationship he has with neighbour Betty and her two children. Lonely childhoods. Sex, actual and imagined.

Somehow however, for me the story never gets off the ground. I love Tiffany's descriptive powers, her rich use of vocabulary. I may read more of her work. But this one? I shan't open it again. ( )

Mateship with Birds is the title of a book of nature notes by Alec Chisholm, first published in 1922, and of this quirky short novel set in a small town farming community in 1950s Australia. (Cohuna, Victoria, apparently 170 miles from Melbourne).

Farmer Harry observes a family of kookaburras, from reproductive rituals to family life, through his binoculars, and writes about what he sees in free verse. He also daydreams about his neighbour next door. Betty also has binoculars, only she isn't watching the birds....

I really liked the characterisation in this novel, especially Betty, single mother of two by choice who simply lets people assume her husband must have died in the war, and avoids gossip or scandal.

This is a story about watching and thinking, with lots of sex thrown in , bird sex and human sex. It takes time to piece together what is going on, but it turns out to be quite a witty and delightful story about two people and the others around them.

I received a review copy of this book through the Amazon Vine programme. ( )

http://wp.me/p20PAS-j1 ( )

I heard about this book when it won the inaugural Stella Prize, an Australian prize for women writers of fiction and non-fiction. From the description of the novel I was sure I would like it. However, my library didn't have it in their catalogue yet so I took out Tiffany's first book, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living. I loved that book and so I was primed to like this one. And fortunately my library acquired a copy.

This book is set in the Australian countryside in the 1950s. Aside from the descriptions of the birds, I know this place because it is almost identical to where and when I grew up in Canada. Harry runs a dairy farm and next door is an unmarried woman, Betty. Harry is divorced; his wife decided she hated the farm and ran off with a birdwatching friend of Harry's. Betty doesn't seem to have been married but she is certainly a mother with two children. She works in the small town as a nurse in a senior's care home. She and Harry are friendly and both would probably like more but neither wants to make the first move. Harry stands in as a father to the kids, a boy entering puberty and a girl. Harry and Betty may not be having sex but there's a lot of it going on between other people, between animals, between birds and, in one disgusting case, between a person and an animal. Harry and Betty are also thinking about sex a lot.

This is a humourous book in places but also profound. Harry, especially, thinks a lot about life, people, nature and likes to record his thoughts. So these details get passed along to the reader. I recommend it. ( )

Carrie Tiffany has just released her second novel called Mateship With Birds. Cute and quirky, the novel is set in the Australian outback in 1953. On his farm, Harry, a middle-aged bachelor, understands life through his observations of the wild birds on his farm. Betty, his single-mom neighbour, is making observations of her own and has her eyes (and binoculars) trained on Harry. When Harry is called upon to explain the facts of life to Betty’s son Michael, he instinctively turns to his birds for inspiration.