Bird call

This space of Sydney city—Tubugawle Bamarramatta—is an amazing place. I wonder if there is any other city in the world where one can see and hear birds so clearly and in such number, at its very heart?

At home in Campbelltown, I hear a familiar cackle, a happy conversation, and going to the door, see a gaggle of honey-eaters and friarbirds hopping to and fro, all over the bottle brush trees in the front lawns of the houses in the street. Noticing birds of all kinds, all around the city. Sydney wears her birds like a singing, feathery cloak of many colours.

In Arnhem Land, it is said that the crow (associated with death and sorrow) initiated the marradjirri sacred string-making ceremony, but passed the running of the ceremony over to the honey bird, and to happier times.

They see things we can’t see, they talk to us—the little silver-eye flying into Anne Marie’s house and searching through every room before leaving. The little bird who banged into the window pane next to my head at the Beaufort Hotel in Darwin, telling me to go home to see Paddy before he left—he’d caught a cold and kept bumping into things and tripping over his own feet. I’m too old now, he despaired.

There was that crow loitering in the backyard, who comforted Brenda on her brother’s good-bye. And that flock of white cockatoos marked against the velvety, dream-like, black, slow-motion figure of a single, black cockatoo.

One day in the Netherlands, I was taken to a small regional zoo—the day was wet, the air cold, and the sky grey and bleak. A solitary, soaked white cockatoo with its back to me avoiding my eyes like a prisoner of war—if ever I wanted to free an animal, this was it. It was Australia, my own family, held in misery inside this sad lonely creature.

Feathers float, so do clouds and dreams.

Figure eight, downward spiral, infinity.