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Catalogue Essay
Photograph by George Chaloupka, Courtesy of Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

The Emu Hunter c.13 000BC
Dangurrung, Mt Brockman, Northern Territory rock painting.
Photography by George Chaloupka
Courtesy of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

Birds—the only creatures of our earth with the gifts of both flight and song—were flying and singing across the great southern continent (only recently called Australia) for millions of years before humans heard them. Potent symbols of the natural world, their flight and endurance also make them symbols of the human spirit. Their lives seem to us numinous and eternal, but they are dangerously threatened by our activities.

This exhibition is about birds that fly and sing in the Australian imagination. Its images may vividly remind us of the birds that live in the world around us, but they also trace our changing attitudes to birds and our practical, scientific and artistic uses of birds. Even ornithological illustration is only illustration. While it reminds us of birds we recognise, it equally reveals passing artistic values and a 'scientific' way of seeing which contrasts strikingly, for instance, with Aboriginal bird drawings. Even today, a 'bird in the hand' is often held to be 'worth two in the bush', but the 'hand' of this exhibition is more that of the artist than of the shooter, collector, taxidermist or more recent bird bander.

The colonisation of Australia coincided with the development of the new European bird science, ornithology, and of a wide popular interest in birds. It also coincided with the flowering of print culture: illustrative engraving, lithographic and other colour-print technologies, fine book-making and photography. Today, just as these arts face the radical challenge of new electronic technologies, this exhibition presents a retrospective of images of birds produced by that period of spectacular art and paper work. Most of the birds of this story come from the diverse European-Australian collections in the National Library of Australia; from European scientific and artistic traditions recreated progressively within our colonial and recent pasts. Generous loans of modern Aboriginal bird sculptures and paintings show that ancient indigenous and younger European forms have existed side by side in Australia, but have only recently begun to learn from one another. The image of the rock painting The Emu Hunter of 15 000 years ago, photographed by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, attests to the breathtaking antiquity of Australian culture. In the light of this painting, the birds of a medieval manuscript from fifteenth-century Europe spring into recent time. Following these historic images from the two great streams of our tradition—indigenous and European—the collections of the National Library go on to tell their story of birds and modern Australia.

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National Library of Australia.
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