Catalogue
Essay
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John
William Lewin (17701819)
Lyrebird of Australia c.1810
National Library of Australia T3234
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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 Lewins 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 ovennor avoid
sacrificing its tail-feathers for fans and drawing room
display cabinets.
Late nineteenth-century
bird stories for childrenone eye on English morals,
one on dawning Federationinclude 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
birdsas well as ceremony and ritualhad 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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