This month features renowned author Carmel Bird who has written 11 novels, nine collections, seven anthologies, seven non-fiction works and four children’s books.
Her books on writing are widely used in universities, three of her novels have been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, and in 2021 Carmel won the Patrick White Award for Literature. Carmel talks to the Express about her studies, her incredible writing and teaching career, and her travels.
Carmel, an avid reader and writer since she was a young child living in Launceston, had her first foray into the limelight via her school and university magazines, but when she moved to Melbourne in the early 60s, she ventured a little further, sending her short story ‘The Scream at Midnight’ to the Women’s Weekly.
“That was when I was about 22 years old. I didn’t know anything about literary magazines or anything like that, all I knew was, you could get a story in the Women’s Weekly,” Carmel said.
“I didn’t expect them to say anything and then they came back and said they would buy it, which was sort of stunning.”
That moment was a turning point that filled Carmel with the confidence to send her work out and get it published in various publications.
“Then a funny thing happened, it was 1982 and a friend of mine, who was teaching French at the Council of Adult Education, was going overseas and asked me to take his class while he was away – which I did,” she said.
“When my friend came back the director said to me, ‘We can’t have you teaching French anymore, do you teach anything else because you’re a good teacher,’ and I suggested teaching how to write short stories.
“He responded with the quote of the century which was, ‘Nobody would be interested in that!’ I told him we should maybe give it a go and see what happens and well, the rest is history.
“This was a time when Elizabeth Jolley was teaching a bit of fiction writing in Western Australia and Gerald Murnane was doing it a little bit in Toorak and I was doing this little bit in Melbourne. Of course, before too long, fiction writing took off in universities all over the place!”
Carmel, who had completed her arts degree in Hobart, was recently awarded an honorary PhD in literature by the university.
She has worked as a guest lecturer at universities across Australia and world-wide, while also pursuing her writing career.
“I’ve lived in Victoria most of my life, but I did live in California for a year in the early 60s. I had married an academic, who later become a professor of law, who went to work at UCLA,” she said.
“While we were living there, I wrote short stories and worked in a big fancy department store called Bullocks Westward, selling swimming costumes. Some of the customers were movie stars and I met Mia Farrow.
“Then we caught the Queen Mary and went to England. We got a car and roamed all over England and wound up in Paris. My husband was still studying and I was an au pair for two little boys.
“I was very keen on French in high school and I studied it at university, so while we were living in France I got a foreigner’s degree at the Sorbonne, while also learning a huge amount of colloquial French while looking after the little boys.”
Carmel’s first published work was a collection of short stories in 1983, which she privately published on a friend’s printing press in his garage, and after privately publishing a novel in 1986, various large publishing companies commercially printed the body of her work.
“One of the books I’m most proud of is called The Stolen Children, which was published in 1998 after the government had released a report called Bringing Them Home,” she said.
“I’d always been very interested in the position of Indigenous people in this country, so as soon as the report came out, I bought a copy.
“It was very thick and very government reporty (surprise, surprise) and I thought ‘gee, kids in school need to know about this!’ So, I contacted my publisher at the time, which was Random House, and said ‘What I’d like to do is extract from the report the oral histories of the Indigenous people and put them in a book with an introduction and some comment by politicians and people’, and so we did. We made something that was inaccessible, accessible.
“I’ve always found the (what I call) invasion, of the British people to be shocking. It wasn’t only the way they treated the Indigenous people; it was the way they treated the convicts as well; they were slaves. Horrible!”
Carmel has recently started a publishing company called ‘Treasure Street Press’ and has just published her fourth children’s book, Arabella. She is currently working on her first historical novel about Louis XIV and wakes up every day at six o’clock to start working on her manuscript.
So, what’s Carmel’s advice for aspiring writers?
“If you really want to write, you will write.”
