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Catalogue Essay

Songless Bright Birds

In 1870, Adam Lindsay Gordon (18331870) wrote of Australian lands 'where bright blossoms are scentless, / And songless bright birds'. This common colonial prejudice could not long defy what people actually heard in the bush.

Yet the predatory activities of visitors and settlers quickly created an actual 'songlessness' in the spreading, colonised lands. In the first starvation years of invasion, many birds, like the abundant mutton bird on Norfolk Island, were simply eaten out. Many admired birds were destroyed by their admirers' mania for imported field-sports and competitive, lucrative collection. The Kangaroo Island and Macquarie Island emus were extinct before John Gould's Birds of Australia (18411848) was published.

Early colonial bird sketches record the naturalists' fascination with the marvellous southern birds, and show that Australian animals, along with the land and its sovereign people, were invaded. Birds were shot, collected, sketched, stuffed and shipped home as specimens of science by the invaders. Ships returning to England and its insatiable collection trades carried, even into our own century, countless cargoes of songless bright birds.

And Human Bones

Every 'bird in the hand' mirrored the enduring attempt to silence the historic songlines of the world's oldest human culture. 'Enlightened' European greed for an exploitable new world did not, as several works in the exhibition make clear, distinguish between human and animal domains. The whole country seemed one vast repository of specimens.

 

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National Library of Australia.
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