Birdman's Wife

by Melissa Ashley

  ‘I know we have to do it, but it seems such a waste of life,’ I reflected.

  ‘It does appear excessive when you see it all laid out like this,’ Charles agreed.

  ‘I remember John raging about the killing of black swans on the Derwent. He was incensed at how cruelly they were trapped and starved, how the cobs and pens were plucked of their insulating down feathers, while their young looked on, then were left to die. The lakes on which they built their nests ran black with their discarded plumage. Are our practices different just because our god is science rather than commerce? I fail to see how that absolves us.’

  ‘You must remember the good your husband does. He is a gentleman of considered thought. He certainly doesn’t have a cruel nature like a lot of the men out here – I’ve seen how appallingly some of them treat their native guides, and John is nothing but kind and respectful to Natty and Jemmy. And John’s collecting is for a worthy cause. Think of the pleasure you both bring your clients. And what of the honour of being the first to describe so many of the colonies’ species?’

  ‘I’m well versed in the seductions of zoological honour,’ I replied.

  ‘But how else are we to discover the habits animals engage in to survive? How common and rare a particular species, how widespread? Not to mention how Australian tribes compare with the taxonomies of the wider world? You must remember that the creatures’ lives are sacrificed for a reason.’

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I fully support John’s mission.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘But I do sometimes wonder if we’ve gone too far. Surely there are days when we have to consider that we’ve killed enough, observed enough, pursued enough, collected enough, caged and skeletonised and stuffed and preserved enough? When will our thirst to learn be slaked? We do birds no favours. What do animals care of systematic classification, binominal appellation, the branch they are assigned in the grand tree of birdlife? They have fared rather better without us.’

  Hands grasped my shoulders and I started and turned. ‘It’s nice to see you out here, Eliza.’ John’s face had tanned to a dark mahogany, his forehead dotted with freckles, the contrast making his gaze an even more vivid blue. ‘Stephen expects rain,’ he said to Charles. ‘We must move quickly.’

  ‘You’ve plenty of assistance,’ I said, gesturing to the shearers hard at work. ‘But I’m finished with drawing for the moment. Might I be of use somewhere?’

  John held me to the offer, aware of how I detested idleness, and set me up at a table with a bucket of water, a few blades and a bin for waste to prepare a brush turkey. He instructed me to remove the meat and feathers so all that remained were its bones. Along with skins to ship back to London, John required skeletons of all the continent’s bird families. The initial preparations could be undertaken in the colonies, then articulation – the art of fitting the bones into a skeleton – could be completed in England, saving packing space and time.

  The brush turkey was common in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land and had garnered an intense fascination among ornithologists. Four decades earlier it had been classified for the first time by John Latham, who believed it to be a member of the gallinaceous tribe. Mr Swainson thought it related to the raptors, while several other taxonomists argued that it was better filed among the vultuperous orders. John, eager to clear up the dispute, decided to provide wet and dry specimens along with skeletons of the species for his expert peers to analyse, after which he would compare the results and draw his own conclusions.

  The male sported a bright yellow collar; its head and throat were a dull red, interspersed with sparse black hairs. Its eyes were a deep brown and its mandibles were typical of the gallinaceous sort, most closely resembling a fowl’s. Its large feet were trimmed with long, sharp claws for scratching up plant material and lifting the bark off logs to find insects. Out of curiosity, I touched the rubbery skin wattle and ruffled collar. My specimen’s powerful talons were curled, one still clutching a spear of grass. The feathers of the tail were horizontal, rather than standing in the usual vertical arrangement. In Sydney, a friend had invited me to sketch his pet brush turkey while at work on its mound. Just last week we received a letter informing us that the creature had mistaken its reflection in a well for another brush turkey, like a young Narcissus gazing at his own image. But rather than falling in love, the turkey had interpreted the blurry form as a rival and thrust forward in a diving attack. Unfortunately the silly creature drowned.

  I lifted the body of the brush turkey onto the cutting board. I took a scalpel, checking I had rags nearby to sop the blood. I laid the animal on its back, parting the soft feathers of the abdomen until I was able to make an incision, as I had seen John do so many times, into the bared skin. I cut and peeled, folding the skin back, wiping the fat on the rag. I found the joints of the wings and severed the tendons and ligaments, making it easier to work in behind the back and sides of the body. The meat came away easily in my hands, like preparing a chicken, and it was not long before I had separated the skin from around the torso and gut. The next task, of severing the wing bones from their feathers, was more difficult – a finicky and messy process. I worked over a tub of water, dropping the separated bones into a solution of brine to loosen any adhering flesh. My stomach growled, but there was too much to do. I must keep slicing and separating.

  A curious trait of the brush turkey was its habit of constructing a conical pyramid, inside which it deposited its eggs. Rather than employ its beak, as a crow might, to arrange the sticks of its nest, the brush turkey relied on the flicking motions of its unusually large feet. The adults cavorted in pairs, spending the day obsessing over their mountains of rotting vegetation. They fussed, fixed and adjusted. The decomposing plant material created heat, which incubated the eggs buried inside like a clutch of spring potatoes. The young, when they finally managed to clamber out of the huge mound, were ignored. Immediately after emerging from their shells, they had to fare without parents. Precariously they scratched and crawled to the opening at the top of the pyramid of vegetation, tumbling down its steep sides in search of flat ground. Their first meal was of the swarms of insects attracted by the festering leafy material. Their emergence into the world was precocious: the chicks were born with feathers, their eyes were open and their feet were strong enough to run from predators. Unlike other species, they were not cared for in a nest and fed partially digested food. Indeed, John was making a case that they were the only juveniles of the avian class that did not form bonds with their parents, a detail that had attracted publishing interest from the editors of several zoological journals.

  Our group of skinners worked through the afternoon and into the early evening. Stephen wandered about, occasionally shouting like a shearing ringer at one of the lads to get on with the job. In the time it took each of Stephen’s men to produce a skin, John or Charles could stitch and stuff three.

  During his most engaged periods John slept just four hours a night, but I required my full measure of rest, and even a little more on account of young Frank. The following morning, after tending to my son’s morning feed and change, I relented to another day in the hot shearing shed. My first task was to check on the bucket in which the bones of the brush turkey soaked. I lifted the brine-drenched flutes and poles, the yellow sticks and cream-white ladles of bone from the water. When clean and dry, the skeleton would be packed in carpenter’s shavings and cotton, then sealed in a wooden box for despatch. Near the entrance to the shed was a container of calico bags brought from home that we used to store each individual skeleton. To identify the species, two labels were attached to the bag: one tied to the neck, the other inside.

  I lifted out a sack and opened the drawstring neck, surprised to see a pile of knitted materials within – tiny items made for a newborn. The storage bag must not have been emptied before being packed away to take on our voyage. I dropped the bag as if it were on fire. Suddenly I was no longer in my working dress in Stephen’s shed in
Yarrundi, but in London. It was ten years earlier, John’s hands were tight around my waist and he was lifting me into the air, away from a burning mat. His boots stamped on the smouldering hem of my nightgown, cheeks flushed red with exertion and fear. A bundle of nightcaps and jackets I had knitted in the last months of my first pregnancy were scattered across the rug. John had been working late and I had been feeling desperately lonely and sad, still grieving the death of our first child. On a mad impulse, I had rifled the top shelf of our wardrobe for the box I had hidden away of my son’s baby clothes. Undoing the container, a furious rage at my fate risen in my throat, I hurled the clothes at the flames.

  Shaking at the memory, I crouched down to pick up the bag and opened it. As I drew out each item – a matinee jacket, a pair of booties, a pale frock – I rubbed them against my cheeks, searching out the scent of baby Edward, whose clothes I had not destroyed. I recognised the blue shawl I had crocheted for him and loneliness enfolded me like fire. Oh, how I missed my children. I was filled with bitterness that my sons were taken from me, my heart more shell than tissue, divided into so many fragments.

  I felt myself slump, giving way to tears of self-pity. There was so much stuffing to get through that I should have been able to think of little else, but though my grief had been buried deep, it never went away. I needed rest I realised. John had promised a family Christmas, but as the time neared it became clear that my husband would be working through the holiday, and expected me to do the same. Henry was to pass the festive season at school, his letters showing no sign of the disappointment I knew he must be feeling. Nobody in my family appeared to follow a normal path; our lives were full of complications. Charles could not, or would not, find himself a suitable woman to make his wife. Dear Stephen was trying to face the terror of turning blind. And my husband seemed to prefer the company of dead animals to people. Now this constant drought – perhaps we had cursed ourselves. For comfort, I tried to picture the features of my children, the shapes of their fingers, the dimples on their cheeks and sprays of freckles on their noses. One day we would be finished with this collecting business and we could be a family again.

  I felt a sudden drop in temperature. I drew my shawl around my shoulders and moved to the door of the shearing shed, catching a quicksilver flash of lightning. A loud rumble issued from the upset belly of storm cloud overhead. Preoccupied with my work, I had been unaware of the fast-moving greenish pall.

  Rain at home was a grey drizzle that set in for weeks. But the pellets pouring from Yarrundi’s skies produced another kind of soaking. Sensibly, all birdlife had fled. Ruptures of lightning, followed by sharp cracks of thunder, lit the sky, joining it to the hilltops like a great tree root. Hardened pellets of ice landed on the tin roof, pinging until I wished to stop my ears with cotton. Streaks of muddy water ran along the path beside the shed. The raindrops were big as pennies, falling and splashing like the juice of some god-favoured fruit, running down the tin overhang of the roof, racing in rivulets over the gutters, weighing down the canopies of the trees so that in a heaving shimmer they became overloaded and dumped their offerings of water onto the ground.

  The skins lying on the tables flashed purple and blue; the passerines looking eerily like they were not of this world. They were arranged in subdued rank and file: rows of robins, tribes of scrubwrens, a brigade of babblers, a cadetship of fantails and flycatchers, a company of honeyeaters, a tour of parrots. All were assembled in death, like bodies fallen during warfare, muslin cloths wrapped around their folded wings like shrouds. Blue-white flickers lit an emu and wedge-tailed eagle, a bustard and the pink fleshy pouch of a pelican. The cotton wool stopping their eye sockets from bleeding turned pink.

  ‘Strike me!’ yelled Stephen, his eyes flashing with joy. ‘The drought’s breaking.’

  ‘I think this calls for a drink!’ shouted John.

  ‘I’ll second that!’ yelled Charles.

  The ensuing round of cheering and stomping rivalled the hail’s tattoo. A strange relief washed through me. Perhaps we had not angered the heavens after all.

  ‘Enough!’ shouted John. ‘The deuced roof is leaking!’ He pointed to a vent in the centre of the barn through which a stream of water poured onto the floor.

  ‘Don’t just stand there like fools!’ said Stephen. ‘Make yourselves useful!’

  Charles rushed towards a brolga specimen, its lavender plumage deepening into charcoal grey. He helped John to wrap the huge bird inside a sack, in his haste knocking the pelican beside it onto the wet floor.

  Our carefully amassed ark was about to be flooded. All around me men worked to cover the hoard, ferrying bags of half-stuffed specimens to dry corners of the shed. Taxidermy materials were folded away, and in less than five minutes the collection was more or less secured.

  ‘Come,’ said Charles, taking my hand. ‘We’re getting wet.’

  We found cover near the doorway. I adjusted my shawl, which fell about my shoulders like spider’s web, moving closer to my brother to steal some of his warmth.

  ‘Do you realise, brother, that if it wasn’t for you,’ I said, ‘I’d not be standing here, with the moon in the wrong part of the sky, the seasons at the opposite ends of the year? If I hadn’t always tried to keep you from falling down riverbanks and drowning, or stepping in a poacher’s trap, or being stung by a poisonous caterpillar, or burning your skin with preserving chemicals, I’d never have come on this adventure.’

  ‘I’m glad to have inspired you,’ Charles said, laughing.

  ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ I said. ‘How could I have stood all of this if not for my apprenticeship with my littlest brother?’

  John and Stephen, spying us in the alcove, rushed to share our shelter.

  ‘If I hadn’t secretly coveted your junior taxidermy kit, Charles, I’d not be here – and I’d never have been able to appreciate your bird fetish, dear husband,’ I said, smiling at John.

  My personality had formed in the shadow of my younger brother’s passion for the natural world. I had spent many a morning musing at his absorbed attention, wondering why my own queer will bent and swayed with the slightest change in atmosphere. His way of engaging with objects and creatures – noting their patterns, habits, details – fascinated me no end, garlanding him in my eyes with magical abilities. The study of nature, I believed, allowed Charles to forget his cares for entire days, reappearing at dusk, refreshed, to face the strictures of home life in Shoreham, a life I did not know how to escape.

  ‘Look at us,’ said Stephen, his eyes lit with pleasure. ‘Who would have thought it, we four huddling here together at the very bottom of the world?’

  ‘If Father could see us now,’ I mused.

  ‘We can blame it all on Eliza,’ said John, hugging me around the waist and dropping a kiss on my cheek.

  ‘Oh, I think Stephen and Charles made one or two contributions.’

  We waited in the doorway for the storm to calm, the smoky cloud throwing out its intermittent flares, rain overflowing the gutters like a beaded curtain.

  ‘We have done well,’ said John, holding his coat over my head as we walked back to the homestead. ‘But I’m ready for a rest. How about you set the agenda for tomorrow?’

  ‘I should like that,’ I replied, struck with an idea. Stephen’s eagerness to show me the market must have made an impression. ‘We’re going to Scone, then. I have letters to post and fabrics to replace.’

  ‘I’m at your service, Mrs Gould.’

  The prospect of buying new wraps and stockings held an irresistible appeal as I stepped onto the veranda, my worn skirt clinging to my legs, my bodice soaked to the skin.

  Part THREE

  destinato

  (I. homecoming)

  Chapter 20

  Budgerigar

  Melopsittacus undulatus

  Yarrundi, ‘Place of possums’ 1840

  February brought an insistent rain that transformed Stephen’s paddocks into shallow lakes, drowning his crops.
The local newspaper reported that a man and his son out duck-shooting were caught in the rising waters of a tributary of the Hunter River and had to clamber up the trunk of a eucalypt until the floodwaters drained. The breaking of the drought birthed huge colonies of insects, grasshoppers and moths, and then an explosion of birdlife. Charms of budgerigars, in companies comprising up to ten thousand individuals, swelled the dusk skies. They roosted on adjacent trees, draping every available inch of branch with their green and yellow forms. Backlit like angels, they cooed and preened one another while readying for sleep. If disturbed by a raptor, they lifted off the branches en masse, creating the illusion that the tree was shaking off its very leaves.

  While droving, Charles had netted a score of the budgerigars, bringing them home to his farm to house in an aviary he had built to rear parrots. He was fascinated by the parrot tribe and was determined to teach his new pets to talk. Parrots had enjoyed centuries as the favourite pet of many Europeans, their ability to learn words making it less of an effort for their human companions to develop a bond – and more satisfying, surely, than caring for a fish or lizard or beetle, or so my brother thought. He collected hollowed tree limbs to place around the birdhouse, hoping this would encourage the adult parakeets to lay their tiny, pearl-white eggs. Keeping his usual meticulous notes in his field book, Charles had found that the young budgerigars emerged from their shells in a fully helpless state. They were bereft of feathers and their eyes did not open for a week. The hen nestled her babies close, feeding them constantly and using her body to give warmth.

  Eventually our final preparations were complete and we hired a wagon for our overland passage to Sydney. As a parting gift, Charles entrusted us with six of his precious flock to take home to London. I was deeply touched, and glad to have such unique mementoes of the time I had spent with my brothers. I promised to keep the budgerigars safe, smiling at the thought of our children’s delight at meeting their uncle’s pets.