Mateship with Birds

Mateship with Birds is a novel by the Australian writer Carrie Tiffany, published in 2012. It won the first Stella Prize, and it borrows its title from an older Australian book about birds.

The novel is set in the 1950s in Cohuna, a town in northern Victoria. Betty is a nurse who lives on the outskirts of town, and her next-door neighbour is Harry, a dairy farmer whose wife has left him for a man she met through the local bird fanciers' club.

The book follows the two of them and Betty's son Michael over the course of a year, and it keeps its eye on the animals and birds around the farm as closely as on the people. Tiffany writes about the small negotiations of neighbours in a country town, and about what people can and cannot say to each other, and reviewers received the book as both tender and unsentimental about the place it describes. The year turns through the seasons on the farm, and the dairy work and the birds in the paddocks set much of its pace.