A
COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, driving with my
daughter just outside the wheat-belt
town of York, Western Australia, we
came across a ‘28’ parrot
that had just been struck by a car.
I scooped it up in a cloth, and my daughter
held it on the back seat until we could
get home. Having been bitten numerous
times by those ‘strong and hooked’
beaks, I warned her to be wary. But
the parrot — a splay of emerald,
turquoise, black and yellow feathers
— was too dazed to bite, and clearly
had a broken wing. Though we’ve
always called these beautiful birds
28s, technically they are a ring-necked
parrot, and possibly even the Port Lincoln
variety of ring-necked. The demarcation
lines between varieties are hazy. The
local ‘nickname’ matters as
local names do. We eventually handed
the injured bird over to the local ‘bird
lady’, who later let me know that
it had died due to massive brain damage.
My daughter doesn’t know it died.
She said it was the closest she’d
ever come to something so ‘amazing’.
I left it at that.
Despising nation and patriotism and
jingoism as I do, I baulk when I hear
that ‘parrots’ are clichés
or overused symbols of Australia, particularly
the outback. I have a personal history
of parrotology, a deep respect for all
their varieties, and a fascination for
their manifestations in literature,
particularly poetry. For me, a parrot
isn’t simply a parrot. In the thrust
forward to make of Australian poetry
some-thing more cosmopolitan, internationalist
and sophisticated, there’s been
some throwing of the baby out with the
bathwater. Arguments of literary maturity
are the old cultural cringe stuff reformed
as residue, a bit like the cherishing
of remnant bushland when all else is
reduced to salinity. The parrot becomes
a transitional object in this child-nation’s
shift from linguistic acquisition to
linguistic confidence and exploration.
Arguably, this exploration of linguistic
possibilities in poetry — searching
for new ways of expressing confidence
in identity — is parallel to, or
maybe even an extension of, the narratives
of exploration that ‘opened up’
land for ‘settler’ use, and
sought to reset the co-ordinates (namings,
markings, topography and explication)
of place, with the aim of creating ‘guilt-free’
occupation. It might well be, disturbingly,
a new form of colonisation.
In the just-released Australian issue
of the stalwart British poetry journal
Agenda, the critic Martin Dodsworth
says:
Whilst
[Australia] was coming out from under
the shadow of Empire it is understandable
that its poetry should have sought
to reinforce a fragile national identity.
But things are different now; there
is a new confidence, identity is no
longer the issue that it was, and
poets can if they wish go easy on
the kangaroos and the wallabies, the
parrots and the rosellas.
This
is fascinating in a number of ways.
Every new migrant wrestles with identity
on arriving in Australia. Many indigenous
commentators would argue that the loss
of indigenous languages constitutes
a steady loss of identity on that (paramount)
level alone, and those concerned with
the destruction of the land would argue
that identity-loss is inseparable from
this loss. And so the list can be continued.
Dodsworth’s point, to give it credit,
is not so much that to be ‘confident’
one has to go into a denial of, say,
references to native fauna, but that
to write outside such signifiers allows
for a maturity and freedom.
My question is: why? Surely any signifier
can be used in a clichéd manner
— not only the name of a bird or
animal, but of a building, piece of
art or shopping mall. In fact, any word
or phrase or line in a poem, used without
attention to the range of readings outside
one’s own immediate purpose, would
be impoverished.
Don’t get me wrong. I actually
value skilfully arranged clichés
in poetry — as long as the clichés
are doing work on (or deconstructing)
their own existence in the poem. Robert
L. Mitchell’s use of the expression
‘renovation of clichés’,
when talking about the nature and aspects
of ‘poetic voice’ (in The
Poetic Voice of Charles Cros: A Centennial
Study of His Songs, 1976), is particularly
appropriate to a discussion about the
reinvigoration of clichéd language.
To renovate is both to renew and reinvigorate;
the reader’s desire to enter the
familiar yet also be surprised is the
marketing tactic employed from selling
neo-colonial houses through to contemporary
takes on the sonnet:
By
poetic voice, I mean those stylistic
devices or traits which are particularly
characteristic of a poet’s writing
and which reveal certain marked tendencies
through their idiosyncratic usage.
These elements may range from choice
of words (the predominance of a particular
part of speech, a predilection for
the abstract or concrete, the use
of neologism, the renovation of clichés,
or borrowings from other languages,
to name a few possibilities) to the
use of particular types of images,
to noticeable idiosyncrasies regarding
syntax, rhythm, structure, rhyme,
and versification.
Parrots
for me are always ‘renovated’
— an addictively necessary part
of a poetics. They are the source of
beauty in my aesthetics. I am probably
an irrelevancy to theirs, but who knows?
Anthropocentrically, William Hogarth
noted in The Analysis of Beauty (1753):
‘The shapes and colours of plants,
flowers, leaves, the paintings in butterflies
wings, shells, &c. seem of little
other intended use, than that of entertaining
the eye with the pleasure of variety.’
This is often what’s observed of
parrots: their infinitude, their beauty.
The range of their colour-ings is a
constant pleasure, but not much thought
is given to why that myriad of difference
exists. There are biological and geographical
answers, obviously evolutionary and
creationist answers. But in the moment
of poetic contact, it’s the array
of colours combined with the uniqueness
of movement that captures the poet.
I share with the poet Dorothy Porter
an interest in the rare or extinct night
parrot, which is (or was) not a particularly
colourful parrot. Its sublimity is in
its discretion, its vulnerability, its
solitude. Porter wrote a book of poetry
entitled The Night Parrot (1984); I,
coincidentally, wrote one entitled Night
Parrots (1989). The ground dwelling,
the strange cry, habitation in arid
Australia, and probable extinction make
it vulnerable to the interiorities of
the poet. Though we ‘deploy’
the parrot in very different ways, the
parrot becomes an alter ego, a conscience,
counterpoint, antagonist, often indifferent
companion, of address. In Porter’s
work, this is more literal — the
bird is a ‘character’ in the
internalised dialogue with a shifting
persona — whereas in mine it is
most often absent. From Porter’s
‘Trial Separation’: ‘it’s
the dry season / the night parrot /
is starving / and won’t mate /
can’t nest / and finds my water
/ bitter, / we’re fighting ...’
Characteristic of Porter’s poetry
in general is the play between the casual,
familiar language and a razor-edged
intensity. Her night parrot is no mere
empty signifier.
I understand why Australian Book
Review gratefully observed that
the ‘wonted parrots’ were
strangely silent when it ran its inaugural
poetry competition (ABR, March
2005). What ABR noted, of course, is
the familiar trope — like the gum
tree or kangaroo — that becomes
a signifier for a larger, more generalised
discourse of national identity. It’s
the cover-all, the cliché. We
might also add to this the metaphoric
investment of the familiar with emotional
pre-dictability: the beauty of the bird
becomes a sign for a complexity that
is not really there. It is not difficult
to list reasons why the ‘parrot’
is perceived as a cliché in Australian
poetry, but it does lead one to ask
a few questions.
For example, how many anthologised Australian
poems are about parrots, or even include
parrots? How and when did they become
figurative currency? Why the joy at
not encountering them? First, we’d
have to consider the demographics and
cultural values of the judges. Are they
urban people, for whom the parrot is
a bland representation of the rural
other — an expected trope that
denies variety in all its guises? Is
the parrot the Anglo-Celtic displacement
of indigeneity, a kind of legitimising
or reterritorialising of the sign? The
rendering of the Derridean monster into
something acceptable? The event defanged,
or debeaked? By way of distraction,
let’s think of Australian parrots
as our version of the hippogriff.
We might ask of the cultural density
and liberality of the city — real
or desired — is everything therein
not parrot? Interestingly, ‘pissed
as a parrot’ applies as much to
parrots in the north of Queensland consuming
fermented fruit as to rainbow lorikeets
dining on the fermented nectar of schotia
brachypetala in the Sydney Botanical
Gardens, so drunk they featured in the
Sydney Morning Herald (2004) and wire
pick-ups in newspapers around the world.
In the gardens, beneath the drunken
parrots, families of diverse spiritual
beliefs, politics, social attitudes,
ethnicities and cultural practices look
up and take note. Some might be embarrassed,
some make jokes at the expense of the
parrots, some feel pity, even empathy.
The parrot as symbol of nation falls
off its perch.
Chris Mansell’s ‘Definition
Poem: Pissed as a Parrot’ is a
poem of word slippage: ‘If the
sheep’s fly-blown it’s a rosella.’
It is also a poem that implicitly satirises
an aspect of pseudo-cultural identity
(Australian drinking behaviour) at the
same time as affectionately laying claim
to it. The following lines add to the
plethora of claims for the origin of
the expression, ironised doubly in the
polite colonial occasion (tea taking)
and the cringe of scientific (and cul-tural)
validation (Sydney University):
But
I went to afternoon tea
in the School of Chemistry at the
University of Sydney
at 4pm on Thursday 6 November
and there, Dr A.R. Lacey, physical
chemist, MSc PhD,
informed me, in his capacity as
a true blue,
down to earth, dinky-di, grass roots
Aussie that
when working on his horse stud in
Wingecarribee Shire
he had observed that Gang Gang cockatoos
fall with paralytic suddenness
from the branches of Hawthorn bushes
after ingesting the berries ...
In this larrikin lampooning, Mansell
manages multi-directional satire while,
in essence, not writing about parrots
at all. Official culture, she suggests,
diverts attention from the full story.
The parrot is of the city as much as
of the country, where diversity and
flock sizes are rapidly diminishing
as tree hollows and other nesting spaces
vanish with the clearing of land, with
pesticide and herbicide dulling colour
and hearts, and where teenagers take
potshots with more ruthless efficiency
than one can imagine, with 22s. I love
parrots because I once, before I became
a vegan, killed them.
I
lived for a while in an apartment opposite
the Perth Zoo, an ambivalent interaction
from a vegan perspective. I loved being
near the animals, but not where and
how they were kept. It made me angry.
A vast flock of lorikeets gathered in
the Moreton Bay fig trees around South
Perth near the zoo, close to the river,
attracted by the abundant fruit-bearing
trees. Rainbow lorikeets are not native
to Perth, and this healthy flock was
mostly the result of ten birds let loose
near the University of Western Australia
in the 1960s. They are considered public
enemy number one in Perth now, and their
appearance in a celebratory poem or
any poem other than one of damnation
would be considered treasonable by farmers,
suburban gardeners and the Department
of Agriculture.
What is generally agreed is that the
lorikeets have become part of an artificial
environment (the city), replete with
‘exotic’ eucalypts and palms
that attract and encourage these birds.
I have heard many local poems refer
to them as positive symbols — of
lively colour, of life as opposed to
the ‘deathly’ pollution or
detritus of city life. This is, in most
cases, classic separation of the signified
and signifier. Few people, including
poets, bother to identify birds, animals
or plants, and they become for people
simply ciphers — points of comparison
in the quick-fix simile.
It is easy to see why parrots in Australian
poems get a bad reputation. But there
is a double irony here: the bird’s
‘non-belonging’ becomes a
metaphor for colonisation on an obvious
level, but also, since they are declared
vermin, for their status in ‘uncaring’
Australian society. Pragmatics leads
to a defensive military language of
vermin and control (much like that deployed
against refugees). In the way that we
read texts against their intended meaning,
so the general ‘parrot’ in
a Perth poem shocks with implication.
The benign becomes the aggressively
challenging (and here was I thinking
I was just writing about nature being
nice and the human-made being soulless).
The simpler the apparent usage, the
less defined the noun, the stronger
the signs of disturbance.
It is fascinating to consider the near-absence
of parrots, galahs and cockatoos in
Dorothy Hewett’s poetry, coming
as she did from a parrot-heavy region.
They are there, but rarely. Her poems
refer to many birds — especially
crows and magpies — but not many
parrots. In ‘Memoirs of a Protestant
Girlhood’, we read ‘black
cockatoos massed shrieking in the sky’,
with the cockatoos taking on their familiar
guise as mass and threat seen so often
in colonial Australian poetry. Individuated
cockatoos are to be found imprisoned
in ‘Zoo Story’; ‘the
white cockatoos parody our babble’.
The caged birds do not babble; it is
the humans that do. In their alienation,
the birds are given the choice of refusal,
of denial of the human. In the first
case, we have them speaking to the persona
out of nature, in the second, mocking
the persona (the ‘we’) because
they are out of nature. Around Wickepin,
where Hewett grew up, parrots are prevalent
— pink and grey galahs, ring-necked
parrots and other species. In the reconstruction
of her childhood, they have been made
largely absent, either because they
lack the starkness of her symbolism
and recall, or because this absence
is a declaration of some denial, hiddenness,
lack or deletion. Rosellas appear in
The Alice Poems (1995): ‘rosellas
flush out behind her / in the branches
naked fledglings / lift up their beaks
for worms …’ A 28 parrot also
bites Alice to the bone and then dies:
‘the parrot joined them / flat
on its back claws in the air.’
This is reminiscent of Hewett’s
fellow Western Australian Randolph Stow,
and also of Sidney Nolan’s painting.
The appearance of these parrots and
their life-death ‘attack’
on Alice’s ‘instress’,
her resistance to expectation (‘Bitch
bitch …’) and compliance,
their reappearance later when time is
wound back and they live again, are
part and parcel of the cathartic symbolism
Hewett reserved for these birds. The
cliché of the parrots is reinvested
so patholo-gically that the self-myth
is transferred, transfigured and resurrected
in them. The general absence of parrots
in Hewett’s poetry is not accidental.
When they do appear, they are hyper-real
and come loaded with portent and death.
The parrot (oh, a rosella is a type
of parrot), the wallaby, or the kangaroo
(the latter two are closely related),
even deployed as clichés, should
never be written off. Let’s take
a look at a few uses of ‘parrots’
in colonial Australian poetry. Here’s
the opening of Richard Whately’s
‘There Is a Place in Distant Seas’:
There
is a place in distant seas
Full of contrarieties:
There, beasts have mallards’
bills and legs,
Have spurs like cocks, like hens
lay eggs.
There parrots walk upon the ground,
And grass upon the trees is found;
On other trees, another wonder!
This
is a trope of early encounter. We also
see, for example, the issue of ‘contrarieties’
in Barron Field’s ‘The Kangaroo’.
This is the reconfiguring of expectation
per experience, the search for a language
of contradiction in this light to express
and describe creatively (and scientifically,
for that matter) what is being seen
to oneself, one’s fellow participants
in the new experience, and those ‘back
home’ who only have their immediate
environment and other artefacts and
observations from empire-building to
compare with and help build the picture.
Parrots had been seen and collected
by the British from other parts of the
globe before they were encountered in
Australia, of course, but to the writer
(and audience) of this poem, the parrots
in the new colonies warranted mention
of specific behavioural (as well as
visual) characteristics that set them
apart. Here, there is as much fascination
as pride, and a lexicographical registering
of language-shift: finding different
co-ordinates for the description of
the world as it is (never as it seems).
Furthermore, not uncommonly, these parrots
become symbols of the pleasure-pain
of the grotesque, that particularly
Australian perversion of the sublime
that has the majestic moment tainted
with depression, loss or potential cataclysm.
Here are a couple of lines from Charles
Harpur’s ‘A Storm in the Mountains’:
‘The duskness thickens! With despairing
cry / From shattering boughs the rain-drenched
parrots fly!’ The lines almost
collapse under the weight of themselves,
and these are no bright and frivolous
‘parrotic’ symbols at work.
With the destruction of habitat, it
amazes me that in poetry parrots persist
in text as if they had been unassailed.
The urbanite, noting the ‘renegade’
flocks of parrots appearing in cities
around Australia, might well take this
to mean excess and a lushness of the
symbolic — not so out in the wheat
belt. Flocks of certain parrots, galahs
and cockatoos thrive until culled, but
others are extinct or on the verge of
extinction. Where I am now, the destruction
of wandoo habitat has meant a lack of
nesting places (hollowed branches and
trunks).
The refutation of ‘parrots’
— the sign or signifier ‘parrot’,
or simply the visual representation
of ‘parrot’ in a poem —
goes hand in hand with the denial of
participation and agency within the
aesthetic. Because parrots are not made
(yet) by humans, because they are seemingly
no more than poetically receptive to
mimesis and reproduction or recounting
in the text (they don’t answer
back despite their ability to ‘mimic’
human speech), they are beyond sympathy.
They mimic aspects of the human but
cannot be appreciated as participating
in the poem-text. Here is what Descartes
has to say about parrots in Discourse
on Method in 1637:
For
it is really remarkable that there
are no men so dull and stupid, including
even idiots, who are not capable of
putting together different words and
of creating out of them a conversation
through which they make their thoughts
known; by contrast, there is no other
animal, no matter how perfect and
how successful it might be, which
can do anything like that. And this
inability does not come about from
a lack of organs. For we see that
magpies and parrots can emit words,
as we can, but nonetheless cannot
talk like us, that is to say, giving
evidence that they are thinking about
what they are uttering; whereas, men
who are born deaf and dumb are deprived
of organs which other people use to
speak — just as much as or more
than the animals — but they have
a habit of inventing on their own
some signs by which they can make
themselves understood to those who,
being usually with them, have the
spare time to learn their language.And
this point attests not merely to the
fact that animals have less reason
than men, but also to the fact that
they have none at all.
Bearing
Descartes’ words in mind, let’s
consider Colin Allen’s comment
in ‘Animal Consciousness’
(2005):
A
common refrain in response to such
arguments is that, in situations of
partial information, ‘absence
of evidence is not evidence of absence’.
Descartes dismissed parrots vocalizing
human words because he thought it
was merely meaningless repetition.
This judgement may have been appropriate
for the few parrots he encountered,
but it was not based on a systematic,
scientific investigation of the capacities
of parrots. Nowadays many would argue
that Pepperberg’s study of the
African Grey parrot ‘Alex’
(Pepperberg 1999) should lay the Cartesian
prejudice to rest. This study, along
with several on the acquisition of
a degree of linguistic competence
by chimpanzees and bonobos would seem
to undermine Descartes’ assertions
about lack of conversational language
use and general reasoning abilities
in animals.
I
argue that the appearance of the ‘parrot’
in Australian poetry is an essential
and reasoned phenomenon because the
birds themselves actively inculcate
themselves into the imagination of those
who encounter them on a variety of levels;
that they are monitors (like frogs)
of the health of an ecosystem and therefore
political and environmental symbols;
that they have a symbolic function in
the imagination of contradiction —
damnation and deliverance; and that
though deployed as nationalist jingoistic
icons or default positions (easy observation
like ‘gum trees’), they are
equally used iconoclastically.
In a sense, the arguments (and experiments)
of ‘animal consciousness’
are as élitist and insulting
as Descartes’ summations, but the
hierarchising of ability does serve
to show that human sense of faculty
and facility is judgmental and limited.
The parrot in the poem is no less valuable
than the person in the poem; both are
ultimately textual and symbolic. They
are not really there, no matter how
‘touching’ the text. A sophisticated
liberated poetry might just as well
do away with people. The bird that ‘mimics’
does so because of human interaction
— forced or (rarely) circumstantial.
It involves itself in the language.
A
little personal history of writing parrots.
I have written a lot of bird poems,
referring to birds from around the world,
from the various places I have lived
in, whether watching a cardinal in mid-Ohio
or a black-bird in Cambridge, England.
I suppose one has to get out from beneath
the shadow of nature to really come
of age — something I doubt I will
ever do! I spend a lot of my non-poetry
time writing and lecturing on environmental
and political issues, so it is not surprising
they should become a prime focus of
my creative work.
Parrots, especially Western Australian
wheat-belt parrots, are more than symbolic
or textually easy; they are part of
my life’s experience. Up until
the end of my teenage years, I shot
them as often as I could. Sometimes
I trapped them for our aviaries, but
most often I killed them and left them
where they dropped. I have seen boxes
and boxes of parrot carcasses, and once
even a box of twenty-eight parrot heads,
at country rubbish tips. It is easy
when those around you declare them ‘vermin’,
and as much as you admire and are fascinated
by them, there’s a frisson in destroying
the beautiful. Thankfully, I eventually
ended my role in their destruction.
Writing about parrots becomes an act
of atonement. Though it does not make
what I did any less horrific, it does
declare not only a recognition of wrongdoing,
but also a hope that words might make
others reflect. On motor-bikes with
my cousins near York, I would race 28
parrots — they have a penchant
for a fast undulating flight alongside
vehicles travelling on narrow roads
— sideswiping wandoo and salmon
gums, a few feet above the gravel, accelerating
as fast as the bike.
As symbol, parrots become the destruction
not only of beauty in nature (and all,
to my mind, is beautiful in nature),
but of the ‘beauty’ in oneself.
They are contradictory symbols, and
always disport themselves against nation,
against settler culture, against bigotry.
I guess I have loaded them right up,
and I am not alone in this. Many contemporary
Australian poets ‘deploy’
parrots out of direct experience and
observation, but also reflectively against
the ‘parrot cliché’.
A modern ‘parrot poem’ by
Peter Skrzynecki, ‘To This Day’,
from There, Behind the Lids (1970),
brilliantly takes the stilled retrospective
moment invested with the silence of
listening, and recounting, and divests
the clichéd bird of all —
‘mostly’ — but the colours.
The colours of a parrot are what most
people recall, along with the shriek
or squawk or call. The parrot —
ostensibly non-threatening — is
loud, bright, defiant. The still moment
is lit up by the colour alone. A reminder
of presence in landscape, a vestigial
consciousness of dreamtime agency haunts
non-indigenous parrot poetry.
Skrzynecki was once termed a ‘migrant’
poet, a strange liminal term that owes
its origins to post-World War II shifts
in population, but is obviously applicable
to non-indigenous Australians generally.
Consciousness of newness in a place
is countermanded by fatuous claims of
First-Fleet authenticity, and the parrot
as totemic representative of the pre-migrant
and the synaesthesic touch-point, spark
for the migrant’s symbiosis and
imagining of the place she works and
lives in, is dynamic. Whether in dreamtime
mythology the red of a particular parrot’s
wing is the result or cause of fire,
or the red fires an awareness of intertextuality
within the articulation of place, the
presence of the parrot becomes a metamorphic
and transitional figure — a reminder
and a prompt.
My
father came in much later, carrying
some
Of the potatoes he’d dug up
in the late afternoon;
Took off his hat, wiped the dirt
from around his eyes;
Rolled a smoke and told us about
the bird he saw:
Remembering
the colours, mostly, that was all
—
Of the small, green and blue parrot
that alighted
On a nearby clump of wattle as he
sat there
Scraping the mud and grass from
his gum boots:
Remained
there as he stood up, reached over
And threw a handful of sunflower
seeds into the tree.
In
trying to chart the usage and repetition
of specific words or phrases in poems
— why, say, ‘parrot’
works cumulatively across different
poets’ works as it does —
I have started using Set Theory as a
method of discussing the collecting
of words in lines and stanzas in poems.
Russell’s Paradox is the key, I
feel; it basically led to the progression
from a naïve Set Theory to Axiomatic
Set Theory.
Parrotology finds its apotheosis in
the paradox. The pervasive presence
of parrots in all aspects of Australian
life (from television to tomato sauce
bottles) means that it is necessarily
part of any set associated with ‘nation’.
It is part of the schema, part of the
contents. If we deny the parrot its
presence in the poem, then it permeates
subtextually. Parrots shadow Australian
poetry — or poems written in or
out of Australia. I have argued before
that Australian pastoral poetry is what
so much urban Australian poetry defines
itself against, so pervasive are the
notions of the ‘outback’,
‘the bush’, and ‘the
farm’. So it is with symbols and
signifiers such as ‘parrots’,
‘kangaroos’ and ‘gum
trees’ — they are more than
part of the place, and their inclusion
in a poem does not necessarily mean
jingoism. Avoidance becomes a fear as
much as anything else — brilliant
birds that can terrify with their call;
that can mimic what we say. They are
reminders of our own failings, our own
mortality. As Ouyang Yu’s translation
‘An Imperial Palace Poem’
by Zhu Qingyu (Tang Dynasty) shows:
lonely
flowers behind the closed palace
door
beautiful women stand side by side
in a jaded verandah
they would love to talk about what’s
going on in the palace
but dare not say a word before the
parrots
This
apprehension is timeless and geographically
wide-ranging. For Ouyang Yu, a Chinese-Australian
who grew up in China, the presence of
parrots is polymorphous. There is a
wonderfully ironic inflection of the
brooding fear in mainstream Australia
that the primacy of the English language
will be challenged — do the parrots
hear in Chinese or English translation,
so to speak. Ouyang Yu says of this
poem that ‘imperial concubines
[are] in fear of being informed against
by the parrots, parrots being imperial
police informants!’. This evokes
the idea of the wariness of parrots
in poetry as a general fear of surveillance;
their absence, a delusion of freedom
(from Empire, the colonial state).
A couple of years ago, I wrote a poem
called ‘White Cockatoos’ —
the generalised local name given to
corellas. White cockatoos — or
‘cockies’ — are not endemic
to this region. The poem was originally
entitled ‘Little Corellas’.
They are only found in the Kimberley
region in Western Australia, though
widespread in the eastern states. The
misnomer is of particular interest given
that rogue aviary-escapee birds have
in fact been forming colonies just outside
Perth. Supposedly, they have not reached
the wheat belt.
In fact, they have. I have regularly
seen two or three birds in large flocks
of corellas, themselves considered ‘pests’
around here and culled yearly (including
being shot in the town and on the local
school oval). I e-mailed an authority
on birds recently, who, after confirming
he felt corellas should be culled, professed
to be very interested in my observations.
Realising it would mean more culling,
I remained silent.
The reconfiguring of the ‘actual’
(according to scientific nomenclature),
the overlaying of indigenous naming
with more recent ‘Western’
namings, and the nicknaming of a ‘pest’
bird as one that would be considered
even more of a ‘pest’. Degrees
of separation take us to both confidence
and insecurity about belonging. The
paradoxical familiarity and loathing
of the species (especially when they
eat crops and fruit) make them part
of a conversation even when they are
absent: a kind of semi-benign threat
that at worst can give you the disease
psittacosis or tear your finger, or
terrify you with their other-worldly
cry, a step closer to death; or at best
make you feel good about the glory of
the day. Here is that paradoxical poem:
Spectres
inverting sunlit
paddocks after late rain
field into quadrature out
of
blind-spots, raucous
it’s said, like broken glass
in a nature reserve
but
that’s no comparison;
cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters
curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’
yellow
parameters reflect clusters
of white feathers from canopies
of wandoos or sheaths of flight,
down
in deep green crops
ready to turn when rains are gone,
beaks turned back toward
whereabouts
unknown,
but almost certain to appear,
at least as atmosphere.
‘White Cockatoos’
As
I drove back from the city the other
day, a flight of white-tailed black
cockatoos flew out of the jarrah over
the road, screeching. Uncle Jack used
to say that, along with glistening gum
leaves and a ring around the moon, they
portended bad weather. We have just
had the driest July in 120 years. The
clichés of the Australian bush
line up like the planets, making science
of superstition.
