Carrie Tiffany Soilbox

The cover of this book is a piece of an artwork I call Soil Box. I made the box at around the same time as I finished the novel. Countless hours of sifting soil and cutting wheat stems with my nail scissors probably demonstrates that I wasn’t ready to let the novel go. The soil comes from Australian farms I have visited for my work as a rural journalist. But the very blackest soil (from a place in the far south called Gippsland), was given to me in a calico bag by a soil scientist colleague.

Some years ago I was washing the coffee cups at work with this soil scientist. I noticed how he plunged his hands painlessly into a sink of near boiling water. He explained that as a young scientist he’d had to remove hot soil samples from the drying ovens. It took too much time to put on the protective gloves so he worked at reducing the sensation in his hands. Day after day he subjected his hands to hotter and hotter temperatures until the skin calloused and thickened and he could hold the most scorching soil with ease. I wondered at a man who would eradicate his sense of touch so efficiently for science. I wondered about his young wife; how he felt the heat of her skin when he touched her. These sorts of questions about science and sensuality are at the heart of Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living. They come from time spent with scientists and farmers and the simple and under acknowledged act of noticing things. Art starts with noticing things – the way a man holds a shovel, how a soil cracks underfoot, the serendipity of arriving at a farm house to find a woman stitching on the porch while her husband is on the tractor sowing the paddocks around her. Sometimes this noticing produced sentences, other times paintings or drawings or artworks like Soil Box. The process is much the same; running what you notice through your mind and searching for what is true.

Soil Box also contains some found objects that have meaning to the text. I copied the Japanese lettering from a dictionary and printed it on the flyleaf pages of a book from the 1930s. The parrot feathers and gum leaves were collected on a research trip. The slip of erotic postcard is from a collection held by a museum in the north of England. But it is the soil I remember the most. When the soil scientist presented me with the Gippsland black loam it felt strangely illicit. He joked that he was giving me a slice of the earth’s skin. Robert Pettergree would have rushed to taste it.

Carrie Tiffany
December 2006