If she had a bit of time off, she’d wait on the main street for the camel teams to come in. She’d study the red dirt clinging to their fuzzy sides. She’d touch it, to touch a little of the country of her birth.
One day, there was a great roaring sound. Children screamed and dogs barked as they ran along beside a machine driven not by horses or camels but by some mysterious energy within. It was a motorised truck, piled high with bales of wool. After that, more trucks appeared, and fewer camels.
A destitute cameleer takes the pins from his camels’ noses. He chases them, screaming at them, until they run in all directions, some into the desert, some down the main street of Port Badminton, where they are arrested for causing a nuisance. He stands in the middle of Dromedary Lane and curses Port Badminton, wholeheartedly, fulsomely. He says:
You are a donkey
A monkey
A prostitute town
Fuck your trucks
You have no moustache
No manhood
I spit on your mother’s grave
I shove my leg up your arse
May you suffer
And all your children and their children
May they suffer a thousand torments
And curse the day they were born.
Passers-by watch the entertainment appreciatively, not understanding a word.
Lizzie’s mother was taken into the doctor’s house, and into the doctor’s study, in which there was a comfortable day bed for reading and for conducting sexual intercourse with housemaids. She quietly bore the doctor’s children, continuing to sweep and polish his house through each pregnancy.
Lizzie’s mother and her children lived in a shack on land that would one day become the yacht club. Lizzie was the youngest, and shy. She preferred animals to people, and birds most of all. Her mother, using the pedagogical technique learned during her years on the island, taught her to read and write using scraps of newspaper and magazines.
Gold-fish are very delicate, and you have injured them, we fancy.
The wooden seawall was built, and all the doctor’s children, black and white, liked to play on it, to run along its narrow, single-planked top. They also understood, without ever being told, that the official and unofficial children must regard each other as belonging to separate worlds. The official children might suck on boiled lollies; the unofficial children might often go hungry. They all knew each other’s names, of course, and played together surreptitiously.
When she reached her teens, Lizzie began work at the hospital, mopping floors and scrubbing out toilets and basins. She had a habit of stealth, of imagining herself invisible. She loved to read the newspaper and have a cigarette in her breaks, but rarely joined the conversations that swirled around the corridors and back rooms of the hospital.
Lizzie was well into middle age when she met the Old Patient. She had been mopping the floor, pushing the mop head right under his bed, when she stopped to listen to a flock of little corellas flying overhead. They listened together. He said: ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ And Lizzie, instead of pretending she hadn’t heard, said simply: ‘Yes.’ They continued their discussions in tiny increments over the days and weeks that followed. A mention of the weather, a query about morning tea. He was a rich old pastoralist whose wife was dead; his fortune was being circled by avaricious children. He was taking much longer than expected to die.
Lizzie would linger in his room fractionally longer than necessary, to discuss lambs, or lambing, or the price of wool: she knew about these things because she was interested in sheep, and in her breaks she had been reading the newspaper from one end to the other, including Livestock and Shipping.
The Old Patient got well enough to be discharged to his town house in Oyster Street. He asked Lizzie to move in to help care for him.
Lizzie said yes, before she thought about it too much. She liked him.
Was she his girlfriend, a boarder, a maid? It was never quite clear. But they were very comfortable together. She still ironed her uniform and went off to hospital each day, but now she ran home during her lunch break to make sure the Old Patient hadn’t fallen out of bed or cracked his head on the tiles in the bathroom.
He paid for an aviary for the backyard and they filled it with budgerigars, cockatiels and finches. It was more work for Lizzie, but she loved it. This was her calling. She began breeding birds and selling them on. She became a little more sociable, because she had to, for the sake of the aviary and the Old Patient.
I see the Old Patient and Lizzie sitting in their backyard on two old wooden chairs. On a tea chest between them there is an aluminium teapot, a Vegemite jar full of white sugar, a tin of Carnation evaporated milk with two holes punched in the top, a teaspoon and an old strainer. They drink from chipped enamel mugs. A wall of aviary birds is cheeping.
They are comfortable in the shade under the wide canvas awning. They speak only of what is before them, and then only briefly, to save the Old Patient’s throat. They breathe only this moment’s air. When they fall silent, it is in contemplation of the cracked concrete beneath their feet or the articles of clothing on the clothesline.
Sometimes the Old Patient thinks about the death of lambs, white skeletons in red earth. He remembers the bliss of a scalding cup of tea when work was done. That was the best tea. He says, laboriously, putting his hand to his throat: ‘Is this the same tea we had before, or a different one?’
Liz replies: ‘It’s a different one. Do you like it?’
The Old Patient nods.
The aviary birds cheep and twitter all day, doing all the talking.
When the Old Patient finally stops breathing, Lizzie begins her death wail. Alerted by the eerie noise, neighbours appear, and then an ambulance, and then church ladies begin to take matters in hand, disappearing into their cars with bundles of the Old Patient’s clothes to be redistributed at the mission. The avaricious relatives arrive on the scene. But the Old Patient’s will is perfectly clear: they can have the farm, but Lizzie will have the house in town.
At the declining Port Badminton Club, where elderly gentlemen woolgrowers still take a few drinks in their best town clothes, they shake their heads in wonder. He gave it to an Abo? The old bugger was clearly being contrary, like the rich New York ladies who leave their fortunes to their poodles.
After the death of the Old Patient, Lizzie retires from the hospital. She likes to walk slowly about town. Eventually, she appears with a galah on her shoulder. She is nonchalant about it, acting as if it has always been there. She is welcomed warmly at the Port Badminton Book Exchange. At home, she reads and listens to the radio and tends her aviary and cleans up after her galah.
Like me, Lizzie has been lucky. Whether by chance or choice, she has made a series of deft moves. Her sister’s children were stolen and given to white families to raise; Lizzie, who had no children, was spared this. She had no home of her own, but found someone to give her one. Her relations would like to move in, but she has a ferocious, jealous galah – that’s me – to drive them away. She works in her aviary and takes long, leisurely walks about town.
The wind is still howling, but Lizzie is spent. As she gets older, her cyclone threnodies get shorter.
‘That’s enough,’ she says. She kisses me and goes to bed.
What was the nature of Lizzie’s relationship with the Old Patient? Was it mere cupboard love – love of the one who feeds and waters you – or was there more to it than that?
And what about my own love for Lizzie? Is mere cupboard love at the bottom of it? Is cupboard love such a bad thing, if it is the only thing available?
Linda Johnson, on her way out to see Harry Baumgarten, was pursuing a pure love, not love tainted by the cupboard. A reckless, extreme sort of love that would go anywhere it needed to go. To hell with propriety, security and other middle-class preoccupations.
�
��And they flew,’ she whispered to herself at the wheel of the EH Holden.
I’m jealous of Linda Johnson, long gone from town, no longer the driver of an EH Holden. I’m jealous of her long legs, her human form, her ability to impress and even possibly mate with the magnificent entomologist, Dr Harry Baumgarten. I feel my own short legs – not even legs – my squat shape, the impossibility. He saw me, he saw Linda. But Linda is of his own kind, and I am not.
Still as the wind howls, I can imagine myself as Linda, at the wheel of the car, my foot on the accelerator, enjoying the delicious, delirious moment of possibility. On all sides, as the dawn breaks, the chiming wedgebills strike up a chorus:
Did ya get drunk?
Is pure, human–avian love possible?
Ambrose Pratt tells the true story of James the lyrebird and his relationship with a Mrs Wilkinson who lived in the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria in the 1930s.
Although happily married, James, looking for something more, befriends a plump, cardiganed middle-aged widow who lives alone in a beautiful house surrounded by wide verandahs. James adores her, and to show his adoration, he dances and sings for her. His performances are breathtaking, a marvel to all who witness them. His tail feathers curve over his body, forming a fringe over his eyes as he faces his audience. His dance steps are light and supple. His original compositions freely reference all the sounds he has ever heard, from a dog barking to a tree being sawed to the songs of other birds. During the mating season each year, quivering with passion for his own lyrebird wife – who watches ardently – he returns to his own innate song, the song of himself. This is a simpler song, but utterly haunting. Afterwards, he moults. He loses his magnificent feathers, hiding them carefully as they fall off, and during this time he prefers not to be seen by Mrs Wilkinson. He withdraws from society, using this time to grow a new set of feathers and perfect new songs. Suddenly, he will reappear with a new repertoire, more elaborate dance steps, more complex melodies and rhythms.
James has never been caught or caged or locked up. His love holds not a trace of cupboard love, because he is not offered food in exchange for his performances. They are freely given.
Mrs Wilkinson is humbled by James’s beauty and artistry. She knows it might be best to simply receive what is given, lightly and non-possessively, but she can’t help her desire to show him off. This is how James came to be known by Ambrose Pratt, President of the Royal Zoological Society of Victoria, and how he became the subject of a collectable hardcover book, a slim but elegant volume with its own photographic plates and the silhouette of a lyrebird on the front, embossed in silver.
Mr Pratt and the other guests arrive by motor car and take their places on the verandah, where they are served refreshments. Sooner than they dared hope, James himself quietly materialises. He stands in the dappled light not too far away, as the assembled audience quiets itself to a reverent silence. Then, all eyes expectantly upon him, James begins to preen his long feathers, carefully and thoroughly. This takes twenty minutes, giving his audience adequate time to examine his beauty.
Then he takes a step backwards and opens his beak to a magnificent overture. According to Ambrose Pratt, his concert pays tribute to the following birds:
(1) The magpie.
(2) A young magpie being fed by parent-bird.
(3) The whip-bird.
(4) The bell-bird.
(5) The complete laughing-song of a kukuburra.
(6) Two kukuburras laughing in unison.
(7) The black cockatoo.
(8) The gang-gang.
(09) The rosella.
(10) The butcher-bird.
(11) The wattle bird.
(12) The harmonious thrush.
(13) The scrub wren.
(14) The pardalote.
(15) The thornbill.
(16) The starling.
(17) The yellow robin.
(18) The golden whistler.
(19) A flock of parrots whistling in flight.
(20) The crimson rosella.
Afterwards, when James has melted back into the bush, the audience agrees that he has also incorporated the sound of a rock-crusher at work, a hydraulic ram and the tooting of motor horns.
Unnoticed by the audience on the verandah, a variety of small birds had also attended the concert, taking up position on nearby branches. They were every bit as enthralled as Mrs Wilkinson’s invited guests. In the silence after James’s final note, a pair of harmonious thrushes looked at each other in wonder. His version of their song was both loving tribute and a distillation of its essence, better than anything they could have sung themselves.
Can I even call myself a bird? Can one so reliant on supermarket food, books and television really be a called a bird? You may feel moved to reassure me that I had no choice but to abandon my birdness. That the hand of fate overwhelmed personal choices. But there have been times – quite a few times – when I might have flown. After a few weeks with Lizzie, I was fit and healthy and still young. I felt the energy surging through my shoulders at the base of my wings. The long feathers of my clipped wing had grown back. I knew that, physiologically, I could do it. Or at least try.
But just at that moment, Lizzie called me to the table for a cup of tea. I turned my back on the blue sky. I guzzled my tea. I danced on the table as Lizzie stirred her mug. I nibbled a biscuit. Lizzie laughed and kissed me on the beak. Afterwards, we napped, companionably, and the call of the wheeling flock receded from my mind.
I have never flown, or mated, or laid an egg. My right wing is clipped. Yes: Lizzie, too, clipped my wing. I am a lopped, waddling, pet galah.
NINE
Chinaman’s Pool
It is dawn and Linda Johnson is driving into the scrub looking for Harry Baumgarten. It is the morning after the wild party at the single men’s quarters and she’s pretty sure she can find his camping spot.
‘I’ll be catching the morning chorus at Ticklebelly Flats,’ he’d said.
She pulls up near his khaki canvas tent, noting in the smudgy early light the remains of his neat fire and the blackened billy. A tea towel is pegged to a guy rope. She gets out of the car slowly, conscious of her long dark hair, her long legs. She can almost hear swelling music.
His face appears out of the flap of the canvas tent. His expression is comically quizzical, like a man in a silent movie: Now who might this be? She is preparing to smile becomingly when he disappears abruptly back into his tent, without a word. Linda leans on the car, arms folded, looking at the tent containing the body of the man she loves. He emerges a moment later, fully clothed, with a pair of binoculars slung around his neck.
‘Good morning,’ she says, seeing that it is hopeless, but holding on to a tiny sliver of hope.
His reply is to take hold of his binoculars, as if he is about to hold them up to his eyes and look off into the distance. The air smells fresh.
‘Good Lord,’ he says. ‘This certainly is an early visit.’
Linda sags back against the EH Holden. Tears spring into her eyes.
Now that he has got his words started, they come thick and fast. ‘I’ve decided to start with the chiming wedgebill. They’re a dime a dozen, so it should be a breeze. I’ve got a twenty-foot cable. I’m going to tie the microphone to a likely shrub and then back off and sit quietly. I’m sure it’ll be quite splendid.’
‘Which one’s the chiming wedgebill?’ asks Linda dutifully, as if she is his niece on a camping trip.
‘That’s the “did ya get drunk?”,’ the friendly uncle says. He whistles the tune. In reply, a real one pipes up.
The shit bird. Birdus shittus. Others join in, their calls cycling round and round, taunting her. Did ya get drunk? Did ya get drunk?
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asks the friendly amateur ornithologist.
‘No, it’s all right,’ says Linda. ‘I t
hink I should be getting back. I just came out for an early-morning walk.’
Linda turns and gets back into the car, slamming the door more loudly than she’d intended, desperate to get away as quickly as possible.
As she drives off, she glances back at him in the rear-vision mirror, standing there with his mouth open as if frozen in a game of statues.
Linda is driving back down the highway. Every minute, there’s more light in the day. The colours of Port Badminton are coming to life out of the greyness. The red of the earth. The grey-green of the scrub. The dusty grey line of bitumen down the middle of the road. A gently strengthening blue sky. A brown and white dog is trotting loosely beside the road, perfectly at ease. It’s time for Linda to go home and boil up a pot of tea and hope that no-one has noticed her car’s unusual movements. It’s time to put herself to bed for a couple of hours before going to retrieve Jo, saying a few inconsequential words to Marjorie about the party. She is bound to have a dreadful hangover but there can be a long shower, another nap in the afternoon, another dip into the book she’s reading. Everything will be all right if she can simply identify the next appropriate action and carry it out.
But Linda is driving like a wild thing, her accelerator foot flat on the floor. Tears are streaming down her face and more are welling up in her eyes, blurring her vision. She holds the steering wheel with one hand and belts at it with the other, as if boxing its ears. The brown and white dog recoils from the veering car. Linda stops, lights a cigarette and draws back. She winds the window down and breathes smoke out into the air. Calming down.
She gets out of the car and goes to sit under a big old tree, the trunk smooth from many other bottoms. The water at Chinaman’s Pool is perfectly flat and reflective, like a mirror. She stubs out her cigarette and lights up another one and continues to sit. She says aloud, ‘Oh, bugger it,’ and belts the tree trunk with her left hand.
The Dogger, sleeping in the long grass behind the Port Badminton Hotel, is woken by these words. He opens his eyes, with some effort because the lids are stuck together. He moves his head slowly from side to side, getting the blood moving. He turns onto his side and rests his head on his hand. There in the middle distance, on the bank of Chinaman’s Pool, a beautiful woman with long dark hair is undressing. She is unzipping her dress, removing her underwear, shaking off her sandals. Moving silently, the hunter reaches for his rifle. He brings the rifle to his shoulder, training the crosshairs on Linda’s back, buttocks and legs as she lowers herself into the water. He can hardly believe his luck.
The Lucky Galah Page 12