Mateship With Birds By AH Chisholm
Avian calling in Chisholm’s Mateship with Birds
by: Robert Adamson
From:
The Australian
May 18, 2013 12:00AM
An undated photograph from Mateship with Birds. The caption reads: Happy Australians. Domesticated Cockatoo. Source: Supplied
WHEN Orpheus arrived in Hades, the first thing he noticed was an absence of birds in the trees. To conjure a bleak mood, John Keats finished one of his poems with the line, “And no birds sing”. In Mateship with Birds, first published 90 years ago, AH Chisholm speculates about what it would be like to wake up in the Australian bush without the dawn chorus.
Carrie Tiffany borrowed the title of Chisholm’s book for her second novel, which has been shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award. She was inspired by a first edition found in a secondhand bookshop. “He refers to birds and animals as female and male,” Tiffany said recently, adding she thought there was something missing from how we relate to nature at the moment. These days, most of us consider birds through the template of science. There’s much to be gained from Chisholm’s writing, however. He is unashamedly lyrical and poetic about his engagement with the bush. Tiffany’s comments bring present attitudes in nature writing into focus: science has made us self-conscious, wary of emotional responses, careful to steer away from the anthropomorphic.
Science is beneficial to the survival of birds; if we allowed ourselves to become “mates” with birds, however, rather than seeing them as objects to be collected, as specimens, photographic catches, or more names in a twitcher’s obsessive list, then we might be more inclined to find empathy with them. Alexander Hugh (but known as “Chris”) Chisholm was a remarkable man. Born in 1890 in the Victorian goldfield town of Maryborough, he left school at 12 to work as a delivery boy. He started writing to spread his passion for birds, initially for the ornithological journal Emu, then for general newspapers. His first story of note was a plea to stop the killing of egrets for the fashion designers of the day, who used their plumes as fascinators. Chisholm went on to become editor of several newspapers and the editor-in-chief of the Australian Encyclopaedia. He was also a sports reporter in Melbourne and press officer for the governor-general. In 1976 he wrote a foreword for the Reader’s Digest Complete Book of Australian Birds. In his lively foreword to this long overdue reissue of Mateship with Birds, Melbourne author and birdwatcher Sean Dooley suggests it was via his innumerable articles for newspapers and ornithological journals that “Chisholm left an indelible mark”. Other reviewers have called his prose ornate or archaic, but I prefer the word stately. With Mateship with Birds, Chisholm became a forerunner to modern nature writers such as Eric Rolls. It was the bible for birdwatchers before we became “birders” and it ranks along with that most influential of books from the 1950s, What Bird is That? The introduction was written by poet CJ Dennis of Sentimental Bloke fame, who offers a wry description of the naturalists of the day: “Many a learned savant shoots birds with a gun and writes about them as a pedant. Mr Chisholm shoots them with a camera and writes about them as a human being.” Chisholm was opposed to egg collecting and clashed with most of the professional ornithologists of the time over the unnecessary shooting and trapping of birds for “scientific” specimens. He was known for his tenacious ability to argue a point until he exhausted his adversary. He was described as a quarrelsome man; however, his writing became the bridge between the arcane world of ornithology and the reading public. Mateship with Birds opens with a chapter titled The Gifts of August, in which the brown flycatcher, the Jacky Winter, sings loud enough to “make the approach of Persephone perceptible even to the dullard”. This winter bird’s song becomes “ecstatic” and strikes a chord in “the breasts of those gems of the grass, the communistic Red Robins, White-fronted Bush-Chats, and Yellowtailed Tit-Warblers”.
I was delighted to read the old names for these birds again, and throughout the book we discover local names for certain birds alongside their Latin ornithological tags. The common names survive in conversation although they have been “corrected” by many committees. In his day Chisholm sat on one such committee, and although it designated the name “thornbill” for an indigenous family of small insectivorous birds, he continued to call them tit-warblers in his articles.
One of the most charming chapters is The Aristocracy of the Crest, which reminds me of Francis Webb’s poem about black cockatoos, “the artists of Heaven, the crested ones”. Chisholm writes about the rarity of the crest, how it lends dignity and “sprightliness” to the bird. He thinks all crested birds, young or old, indicate by the manner of their display that they are indeed “one of Nature’s anointed”. Chisholm writes of the “conscious dignity exhibited by the Cockatoos, and particularly by the pink (Cockalerina) species, which verily appears to have an assured knowledge of the fact that it possesses the most beautiful crest of any bird in Australia”. And that those variegated feathers, like the golden crowns of hoopoes, are “all too fatal in their beauty”. He noted in 1922 that the pink cockatoo was rapidly becoming one of the rarest of its kind: many thousands were trapped and sold as pets, and others were killed for their feathers. Chisholm writes about the song of another bird abundant in his day and now rare, the crested bellbird: As a boy in Victoria … following the commonsense boyish practice of allowing a bird to choose its own name, we knew it as Dick-The-Devil … listening again in fancy to the particular, liquid run of notes, it seems to me that the juvenile ear rendered them as near to human speech as was possible in the words, “Dick, Dick-Dick, the Devil” – the whole phrase to be taken leisurely, with, on the last syllable, a liquid drop as that of a small stone splashing into a pool or a soft “clicking” of a human tongue. The final chapter, The Paradise Parrot Tragedy, refers to John Gilbert, a naturalist and taxidermist, whom Chisholm describes, interestingly, as a “coadjutor” of John Gould, the “father of Australian ornithology”. In 1839, while carrying out ornithological work on the Darling Downs, Gilbert shot a parrot of a species he had not previously seen. Gould referred Gilbert’s specimens to the genus Psephotus and, delighted with the beauty of the birds, gave them the specific title of pulcherrimus. The following quote by Gould acts as a prelude to the extinction of the paradise parrot: “The graceful form of this Parakeet combined with the extreme brilliancy of its plumage, renders it one of the most lovely of the Psittacidae yet discovered; and in whatever light we regard it, whether as a beautiful ornament to our cabinets or a desirable addition to our aviaries, it is still an object of no ordinary interest.” Thinking about Gould’s observation, Chisholm writes: “Superlatives having been wrung from a seasoned scientist, who saw only lifeless specimens of the ‘most lovely’ bird, what was to be expected from those persons fortunate enough to know it in life?” After Gould’s notes there was nothing much written about the paradise parrot until the 1980s. By that time large numbers of Gould’s “beautiful” parrot had been sent abroad for aviaries; they were known to bird dealers in Britain and the Continent under the name of Paradise Paroquet. They gradually died out in captivity, and in Europe it was not known that these birds from paradise had a habit of nesting in termite mounds. In fact even in Queensland there was not much more known about them, other than that they nested in mounds and lived in pairs, not flocks. In Australia they were known variously as the ground parrot (as distinct from the green ground parrot), the ground rosella, beautiful parrot, elegant parrot and the anthill parrot. The last photographs taken of these birds are reproduced in this book. Chisholm discovered the Norwegian author Carl Lumholtz was at the Nogoa River near Rockhampton in 1881, where he wrote up an experience with a pair of these delicate birds that deserved to be “revived from the semi-obscurity of his book”. Here’s Chisholm’s quote from Lumholtz in full; in retrospect it becomes metaphorical: An hour before sunset I left the camp with my gun, and soon caught sight of a pair of these Parrots that were walking near an ant-hill … After I shot the male the female flew up into a neighbouring tree. I did not go at once to pick up the dead bird – the fine scarlet feathers of the lower part of its belly, which shone in the rays of the setting sun, could easily be seen in the distance. Soon after the female came flying down to her dead mate. With her beak she repeatedly lifted the dead head up from the ground, and walked to and fro over the body, as though to bring it to life again; then she flew away, but immediately returned with some fine straws of grass in her beak, and laid them before the dead bird, evidently for the purpose of getting him to eat the seed. As this, too, was in vain, she finally flew into a tree as darkness was coming on. I approached the tree, and a shot put an end to the faithful animal’s sorrow. Chisholm placed an article in newspapers throughout Queensland titled “Is it lost?” Finally, in the southern Burnett River district, he got to see a pair of paradise parrots. After this, there were only two more confirmed sightings, the final one in 1927. Mateship with Birds has been out of print for too long and Melbourne publisher Scribe is to be congratulated for producing this new edition. Chisholm’s work encourages a different way of relating to birds, a way of sharing their world without destroying it. If you take the time to live with this classic bird book, it will enrich your life.
Mateship With Birds By AH Chisholm Introduction by CJ Dennis with a new foreword by Sean Dooley Scribe, 200pp, $24.95 (HB)
Robert Adamson holds the CAL chair of poetry at the University of Technology, Sydney. His books of poetry include The Goldfinches of Baghdad, The Golden Bird and The Kingfisher’s Soul.
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