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Secured the mainland but couldn't do

Tassie..clean air china air kingdom hospital bachmann

 

gotti and tassie devil....

 

an entry from The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature

 

BIRD, Carmel (1940- ), born Launceston, Tasmania, was educated at the University of Tasmania and lived for a period in Europe and the USA before settling in Melbourne. Bird's fiction blends real and surreal, mundane and macabre with inventive irony, reflecting her perception of Tasmania itself as an 'ironic' island, whose picturesque surface masks deep secrets and is haunted by the ghosts of Aborigines and convicts. She has published two novels, Cherry Ripe (1985) and The Bluebird Cafe (1990), and four collections of short stories, Births, Deaths and Marriages (1983), The Woodpecker Toy Fact (1987), Woodpecker Point (1988) and The Common Rat (1993). She has also written a guide for writers, Dear Writer (1988), and edited a collection of short stories, Relations (1991).

A witty writer with a wide but always highly original tonal range, Bird raises what is often potentially dour or even 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.

 

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Uploaded on March 27, 2011
Taken on March 26, 2011