Earning Its Stripes

This week we felt the faint yet unmistakable signs of spring. Bird calls we hadn’t heard over winter, a strengthening of the light and a lengthening of the days, the scent of pollen in the air, and a strange desire to get things tidy.

A New Holland Honeyeater in a grevillea bush 

I’m sure we’re not the only animals to feel it. The bushes nearest our front door, always attended by birds, are now bursting with them, particularly honeyeaters. The birds come in waves to feed and perch and ready themselves for nesting. They range from our two biggest honeyeater species, the yellow and little wattlebirds, through the New Holland and crescent honeyeaters, down to the tiny eastern spinebills.

Size doesn’t seem to determine success here, and nor does the pecking order remain fixed. Over many years we’ve watched shifts in the seeming dominance of species. But when it comes to frequency of visits, it’s the three small species that dominate around here.

At times crescent honeyeaters, with their v-necked markings and ee-gypt ee-gypt calls, have been the most frequently seen and heard. Eastern spinebills, with their striking red eyes and sibilant tseep tseep-tseeep call, have flashed in and out of view quite often. I’ve often hoped for an unhurried look at their stunning livery and gracefully curved bill, but they always seem the flightiest and shyest of the trio.

New Holland honeyeaters, they of the black and white stripes and loud chip-chip-chipper-chip calls, have been the reigning premiers here over the last few years. They have always seemed the cockiest, busiest and noisiest, using their slight size and weight advantage to harry other birds, including some considerably bigger.

From my casual watching, I have gradually built up a kind of character profile of Phylidonyris novaehollandiae. Words like “bully”, “pushy” and “aggressive” may have snuck in there alongside less pejorative terms like “determined”, “adaptable” and “successful”.

After today I wonder whether, in true Aussie fashion, I’ve been treating this honeyeater as an avian “tall poppy”. And have I been “barracking for the underdog” (ie the other birds) as a result? It gets worse. I should also admit that I’m not a huge Collingwood Football Club fan, and that the New Holland’s markings are very reminiscent of the Collingwood jersey. Prejudices have been based on flimsier matters.

But this morning, while trying to photograph honeyeaters, I had the opportunity to observe some New Hollands up close over thirty minutes or so. Initially my prejudices seem confirmed: their stripey jerseys were everywhere, and the other birds seemed to be pushed to the margins. Certainly they were harder to capture on film.

Some acrobatic nectar sipping from a New Holland Honeyeater 

After about ten minutes the birds grew used to my presence, and seemed to become quieter and more settled. And then I noticed one large New Holland perched inside a grevillea bush. I quickly snapped a few photos, thinking it would flit off quickly, as all honeyeaters seem to do. It sat there. I snapped a few more – none of them good, as the bird was deep within the bush. And then I realised that was the point. This was a New Holland at rest. All that flitting around, all that feeding acrobatically on nectar, plucking insects out of the air, impressing mates, seeing off rivals, protecting the bush from “invaders”, must take its toll.

At first I expected it would fly away after a few minutes. A few became ten, and still it sat there. It took a foraging crescent honeyeater to disturb its extraordinary stillness. Some things cannot be tolerated! Our New Holland clapped its wings and chased the interloper off to a nearby kunzia bush. And given the amount of nectar there – and everywhere else in our nearby bush – I didn’t feel the need to barrack for the crescent.

Kunzia baxteri in bloom

Come to think of it, none of these birds asks to be cheered on. Short of making sure they have plants for food and shelter, and protection from our pets, there’s not much they require of us. Of course on our side, how immeasurably wonderful is it to have birds sharing these places with us?

The Wright Approach

I’m not sure what I expected to find, driving from Canberra’s tableland down the undulating road to the coast. But when we stopped for a break at Braidwood, an odd mix of memories and connections surfaced.

I had vaguely associated Braidwood with family stories of mild motoring adventures in days beyond memory. There was a bit of Toad of Toad Hall – poop poop and all – about my father, and his father. In cars that are now vintage they forded swollen rivers and braved dirt tracks in this district before Canberra even existed.

I also associated the place with the poet Judith Wright. Hers was a poetry that had been with me all my life, from the pages of primary school’s The School Magazine onwards. And I knew that she had lived near Braidwood for the last few decades of her life.

Australian Poet Judith Wright (image: The Age)

We had lunch in the town on the way to the coast, coffee on the way back. We explored a few other shops, and drove on. It was hardly an in-depth tour of Braidwood – and certainly not the way to gain any sense of the place that the great poet knew and wrote about. As I said, I’m not sure what I expected.

But the experience did raise some larger questions. What, for instance, would it take for anyone to truly experience a place that has been made famous – “real” even – by someone of note. Is it possible to find William Wordsworth’s Lake District? Or in the Green Mountains of Vermont, might I discover Robert Frost’s road not taken? Or would the Pilliga ever reveal again what it revealed to Eric Rolls?

What does it take for anyone, be they poet, writer, painter or photographer, to capture the sense of a place? Is it even possible? Or is the experience of place such an individual matter, and place itself so mutable, that we can only ever hope to triangulate it?

Judith Wright wrote wisely on this matter. Herself a transplant from Queensland to the Southern Tablelands, she told her friend Kathleen McArthur that:

Before one's country can become accepted background against which (one’s) imagination can move unhindered, it must first be observed, understood, described, and as it were absorbed.

Another Braidwood writer, Jackie French, observed first hand Judith Wright’s ability to sit for hours on her bushland property, just watching. A poem like 'Lichen, Moss, Fungus' illustrates the fruit of such watching.

Lichens, mosses and fungi—


these flourish on this rock ridge,


a delicate crushable tundra:


bracket, star, cup, parasol,


gilled, pored, spored, membraned,


white, chestnut, violet, red.

Winter Sun in the Tasmanian Mountains 

Back in Hobart, the winter has been relatively benign. Nonetheless, while returning to health after a dose of the ‘flu, this week’s snow showers and frost had me recalling another Judith Wright poem, ‘Moving South’.

Wind off the mountain snow,


small white-etched trees


leaning in leeward gestures.


I shall step carefully into the acid vapour


of morning frost.

After four days in a warm bed, I too should have been stepping carefully. But on the fifth day I was ready to welcome the cold embrace of the bush air, the banishment of cabin fever. It was time to again absorb this place.

John Gould's painting of spotted pardalotes, ca. 1860 

Soon the sun was shining its warm promise. And when I heard the season’s first spotted pardalotes calling pee-paw from the tree tops, it put a literal spring in my step. 

Embraced

"Bushfire" by Joan Goldsworthy 

I used to have a debate with my mother-in-law about our mountain. Where we live Kunanyi/Mt Wellington is a looming presence. To me it is inspiring, protective, embracing. To her, while at times inspirational, it could also be oppressive.

I employ the past tense because we will no longer have that debate. Joan – Joey to most family and friends – died last Saturday, aged 77. The date was the 7^th of the 7^th – somehow typical of, and fitting for, this amazing woman.

The Monday after her death I made the mistake of going to work. I lasted past lunch, but achieved nothing useful. Grief is a work that needs space. I decided to walk the five and a half kilometres home; to get some air into my lungs, to let the motion turn my mental cogs.

A moody Kunanyi/Mt Wellington from home 

From the city the mountain felt only mildly dominant. One early navigator aptly described it as a lion couchant. But as I drew closer its presence grew. If ever it was going to feel oppressive, to become rampant, it would be today.

I thought over the last few days. Certainly Joey had been very ill for some time. But then doctors had called her family to her bedside 23 years ago, when she was not expected to last the night. The fighter that she was, she proved them wrong. She recovered, moved to Tasmania, and built a house at the back of our large block. From her studio there, she would add to her stunning body of artwork: mainly paintings in the abstract expressionist style.

"Squall" by Joan Goldsworthy 

Many of her significant later works came to feature Mt Wellington, as well as the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, and other Tasmanian landscape features. For someone who came to resemble the classic little old lady, her works were staggeringly big, hugely expressive. She was not a book to judge by its cover. From her diminutive frame, via her small hands and out of her mild, grey-pated head, came grand and dramatic works that effused emotion, compelled attention and demanded a response.

"Lavender" by Joan Goldsworthy 

It is hard to think that this little (not very) old lady is no longer with us; that she has not somehow beaten decline and death again. This time Joey had quite quickly changed from the person we knew into some kind of transitional being, pale of skin, shallow of breath, and seemingly unaware of our presence. But before the end she had one brief return, one more opening of the eyes, one final acknowledgement of her gathered children and their farewells. 

"Mt Wellington"  by Joan Goldsworthy  

Then she was gone, and only her shell remained. And how different from the living do the dead appear! Their presence drags from us the biggest, most primal of questions, tapping a deep well of emotions, regrets, hopes and fears.

On my walk home two days later, I was still pondering all of this. Looking again towards the mountain, it seemed that its presence had swelled. I was close enough to see individual trees on its forested flanks and to clearly discern single columns of the Organ Pipes. The lower hills on each side seemed to swoop closer still. To me at least, they resembled some kind of giant embrace. Not that I would want to try and score points over my late mother-in-law.

Instead I'll let one of Joey's paintings have the final word.

"Fugue" by Joan Goldsworthy