Carrie Tiffany biography

Interview

A poignant and funny essay by Carrie Tiffany, author of Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living: an ode to librarians everywhere and a must read for all who have ever found themselves lost in a good book.

I learnt to read in the desert. I was twenty years old and working as a park ranger in central Australia. I lived in a silver caravan stumped up with old house bricks. During the day I emptied the rubbish bins, or went on patrol, or took tourists on guided walks, or shot feral cats. At night I read books.

Books were scarce in the desert. The national park I worked on was serviced by a tourist resort that sold fly spray and wafer thin boomerangs made in China. It did not sell books. The nearest books were in a library 400-kilometres away. I rang the library and joined up as a remote reader. Books would be sent out to me every month on one of the tourist buses. I couldn't access the catalogue so a librarian would choose the books on my behalf. My librarian was called Merv. I wrote him a note with a summary of my tastes. But I was twenty - it was the summary of a taste for something I had never eaten.

The books arrived one afternoon on a Greyhound bus with a dozen Swedes, some Germans and Japanese. I was still in my ranger uniform and it went badly. The tourists thought I had come to meet them, not to collect a box of books, so I had to explain. They nodded and ...