Carmel Bird – Interviewed by
Madeleine Watts, November 2013
MW: One of the phrases I
loved best in your essay was when you wrote, “Storytelling is a mechanism for
reflecting on what it is to be human in time and space”. Why do you think the compulsion
to tell stories about ourselves is so universal?
CB: The way I see it, the
narrative response to life is a characteristic of being human. As a baby
develops memory and language, it begins to realise and organize its place in
the world by sorting out the characters, plots and settings of its sensual
experiences. It realizes pretty early on that one of the great joys of being
alive is the power to tell the story of how it is to be alive. Quite
quickly the beauty of speculation and fabrication enters, and the stories take
a leap into fiction. Little children love to invent parts of the detail of
their daily lives, filling in the spaces with characters and ideas that have a
flimsy relationship to ordinary reality. Fiction is still telling the teller
and the audience the narrative of what it is to be human, even when the details
no longer have a human face or an earthly setting. In families some of the
stories of family life take hold and are repeated over and over again – and so
it is with tribes and national groups – some tales give such delight, or tell
such important truths, that they become enshrined in the traditions of the
people. I think it is no mistake that ‘fairy tales’ (and other classes of tale
such as myth, legend, parable, fable) are widely associated with the child.
They sit close to the open minds and hearts of innocence, taking the listener
back to a state in which all things are possible, to a place where good and
evil are clear and vivid, and where important truths are spoken in ways that
are hard to forget. I think of Greek myths, Persian fairy tales, Norse sagas.
MW: You’re an extremely
prolific writer, with many novels and short story collections to your name.
You’ve also edited several anthologies of essays and stories. How does the
practice of writing interact with your work as an editor, particularly given
that you’ve co-edited Griffith REVIEW 42 with Julianne?
CB: I love writing fiction, and also
essays, and I enjoy very much reflecting on writing, my own and the work of
other writers. I also enjoy teaching writing, and editing other people’s work. One
task more or less flows into another. Working with Julianne (and also Nicholas
Bray) was a terrific experience, one that I have not had before, working in
concert. The back and forth and discussion and co-operation were all very
stimulating, and the result is really very satisfying and I am proud of my part
in the current journal.
MW: You co-edited this
edition of Griffith REVIEW, and your opening essay really frames the entire
edition, focusing the lens on the central ideas, as it were. What was it about
this subject that caught your interest, and how did your ideas come together?
For instance, you mention in the essay that the bicentenary of the publication
of the Brothers Grimm fairytales gave you cause for reflection.
CB: The subject of the fairy tale has
been one of my favourites since childhood, and I have a nice collection of
books, both of stories and of scholarship on the subject. Yes, fairy tales have
fascinated me for ages. One of the books I have is Mirror Mirror on the Wall,
a collection of essays on fairy tales, collected by Kate Bernheimer. Late in
2012, when readers all over the world were celebrating the 200th
anniversary of the Grimms, I was re-reading this book, which is American. It
sits on the bookshelf next to From the Beast to the Blonde, a book ‘on
fairy tales and their tellers’ by Marina Warner, who is English. I had an idle
thought that I didn’t have a book on the topic written in Australia. Just then,
Charlotte Wood published a short reflection on fairy tales in a weekend
newspaper. The idea of a collection of essays on the subject, with an
Australian slant, came to me. I developed a proposal which was universally
rejected by Australian publishers who felt that there was no interest in the
topic in this country. I realized I would have to think a bit laterally. What
about a journal instead of a book? Helen Hopcroft suggested I try Griffith
Review. The visionary Julianne Schultz decided to go with it – and what a joy
it was when Chong at Text Publishing came up with the fabulous cover image of
the mermaid in the desert, enclosed in a magic mirror. In looking at
fabulations in Australia, it was not possible to confine matters to what might
be classified strictly as ‘fairy tales’. So in the editing of the journal
Julianne and I (with a great deal of help from Nicholas) moved across the
different genres of myth etc.
MW:Your own fiction has
often brushed up against themes of colonialism and the legacy of the past. You
touch on those aspects of Australian myth and storytelling in your essay, but I
wonder what you find so interesting in those themes, what draws you back to
them?
CB: Just as children and families
tell stories about themselves, hence establishing a place in the world, so
peoples fix on key moments across time in a process of fashioning identity –
something that gives shape and meaning, and promises possibility. And those
moments – say, the story of Ned Kelly – move into myth that in turn shapes who
the people are. The history of non-Aboriginal Australia is so short – myth can take
a long time to make itself – and so folk storytelling in Australia is I think
unlike such telling in older cultures. The German tales of the Brothers Grimm
reference German history – for instance, Hansel and Gretel is, at one level, a
famine story. So the colonial story of Australia is vital to me as a writer,
even when I might be writing about the present day. The past casts its shadows
– think of the forever rippling effects of, for one thing, the First World War.
The centre of the novel I am working on now is a dark secret from over half a
century back.
MW: You point out that what
makes Australian storytelling different from that of other places is the fact
that Aboriginal place was telling itself for tens of thousands of years before
European settlement, while from the outside, from the other side of the world,
people were dreaming about it. That the difference comes from the meeting of
these two legacies of myth. I wonder if you’d be able to speak a little more
about that?
CB: I love trying to think about the
great stretch of time during which the First Peoples have been in Australia.
And the storytelling on rocks and in dance and spoken word. I grew up in
Tasmania, and from a very early age I was aware that different people had been
there, and didn’t seem to be there any more. In The Bluebird Café and
also in Cape Grimm (two of my novels) there are hauntings by Aboriginal
characters in Tasmania. And it has always thrilled me strangely somehow that
while life was going on here over the many centuries, people in Europe were
trying to imagine what it must be like here, trying to imagine that here
even existed. Early on people brought the European folk and fairy tales here,
and they have of course survived in the culture, been added to by the many many
other different peoples who now make up the population, but there is, I sense,
a deep well of stories that are somehow indelibly etched into the land.
I am struggling here to explain what I mean. I have always had a sense that
there is an Aboriginal presence everywhere here. Just about everywhere here
anyway. Certainly in Tasmania. Also a convict presence there. Don’t get me
started. As we edited the journal I became more aware of how the Aboriginal
stories and the other stories (literary and historical) seemed to be, however
subtly, merging. I had a go at expressing it in the essay – I’m not sure how
successful I was. Perhaps this was happening only in my own mind? I suppose
stories are a process, and there is a long way to go.
MW: I thought it was
interesting that you ended your essay on a question. You sketch all the permutations of myth and storytelling in Australia,
without giving any aspect more weight than the other. It’s a very open-ended
piece, which I think leaves the reader with many questions and serves as a
wonderful introduction to the rest of the edition. Was it your intention to
structure the piece in that way?
CB: That’s quite funny – because I just
ended the last response to your penultimate question with a little question.
Oh I knew my essay had to be open-ended,
as you describe it. I’m pleased you see that I was not giving one element more
weight than another. I wanted to invite readers into the discussion, and to
lead them to read joyfully the responses of the contributors. Sometimes I was
(and am) overwhelmed by the vastness of the topic – the fairy tale in
Australia?? (Two question marks – and I don’t really like question marks.) The
Annotated Brothers Grimm edited by Maria Tatar lists 237 books as ‘Further
Reading on Fairy Tales’ – and that’s nothing to do with Australia at all. The
title for my essay ‘Dreaming the Place’ occurred to me after I had written the
piece, and it sums up for me the link between ‘place’ which is so very
important in Australia, and storytelling which is ultimately a product of the
imagination. One of my favourite characters in the story of Australia is
Archbishop Moran who (I believe) taught his flock that the New Jerusalem was
established in Queensland in 1605. Now there’s a myth to conjure with.
One of the most interesting and powerful
myth-making events in my lifetime was the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain.
Simply put, a wild dog abducted a baby girl from a sleeping tent in central
Australia, at the Aboriginal sacred site of Ularu – the big red rock. The
public and media response to this event chose to characterize the baby’s mother
as the bad mother who had killed her own baby. So a motif from folklore drove
the unfolding story. And today, the whole terrible saga of the lost child, the
wrongfully punished mother has become (as how could it not) a tale set firmly
in the lexicon of Australian myths.
For myths (and fairy tales) do not
always have happy outcomes, even though the expression ‘fairy tale ending’
means happy ending. In common speech when the term ‘fairy tale’ is invoked, the
meaning is generally ‘wondrous, marvelous, good beyond reality.’ And fairy
tales have their share of truly horrible moments – the shock of cannibalism in
‘The Juniper Tree’ or the moment with the huntsman in ‘Snow White’. Now there
were two wicked (step) mothers. Who knows where those tales really originated? They
are more or less set in their own formulas now, their origins lost in time.
Whereas the story of Azaria is still part of recent history, her parents and
brothers still living. It is, I suppose, an Australian fairy tale in the
making. It has a moral. I think you know what it is.
The modern communication media have made
a difference (huge) to the way stories are made. Hansel and Gretel would have
developed from human to human – there are still humans, but oh, how much farther,
how much faster they can reach.
Am I being open-ended again?
