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Catalogue Essay
Lewin (1770 - 1819), Lyrebird of Australia c.1810

John William Lewin (17701819)
Lyrebird of Australia c.1810
National Library of Australia T3234

Harping on Lyrebirds and Investing in Emus

Many works from the Library's collections suggest a changing popular focus on different birds. An early settler fascination with the elusive lyrebird grew from scientific excitement about mound-building birds. The lyrebird appears in many works, including John William Lewin’s watercolour Lyrebird of Australia c.1810. First known by settlers as 'colonial pheasant' (as in Pheasant's Creek near Bargo, NSW), even this shy creature did not escape the colonist's Sunday oven—nor avoid sacrificing its tail-feathers for fans and drawing room display cabinets.

Late nineteenth-century bird stories for children—one eye on English morals, one on dawning Federation—include many Australian birds, but argue the rise of the emu. Kookaburras, heads to one side, were clearly wise as owls, but lyrebirds, silly and proud as peacocks, were self-declared liars. Emus by contrast, tall and stern, might come to represent a nation's authority. So began the emu's flightless parade on sculpted silver ware, the decorative carving of its eggs, and the development of its image on the national coat of arms.

As early as 1853, the decorative frame of S.T. Gill's Tattersall's Horse Bazaar, Melbourne had as good as invented Australia's national coat of arms. Here a jumped-up kangaroo and startled emu anticipate and already parody Federation heraldry.

Fun and games with birds—as well as ceremony and ritual—had begun long before in Aboriginal lore. White Australians, such as K. Langloh Parker in her Australian Legendary Tales (1896), soon made English versions of Aboriginal creation stories. Along with these, there emerged a children's story land of birds, and an exciting new era of book-making. Storytellers and artists such as Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, J.J. Hall, Dorothy Wall and May Gibbs made emus, cockatoos and honeyeaters as familiar to generations of white Australians as they had always been to indigenous people. And the day of the kookaburra was near.


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