Category: Writing

Peacocks and hens

My sister-in-law rears chooks at her property on the peninsula. Orange-brown feathered things that strut around her acres of green and dip in amid the buses in search of titbits to eat. One day over Christmas, I broke away from our family gathering and took to following a couple of these chooks as they darted ahead of me. 

Chooks are unlike other domestic animals. They do not stop to be patted with affection. At least not the ones I’ve met. The ones at my sister in law’s place are preoccupied with their search for food and some other tribal process among themselves where the rooster bosses around the hens who bicker among themselves in whatever rivalry exists within the chook world. 

My sister-in-law told me about a peacock who had arrived unannounced one day in her garden and fluffed out its plumage to her grandchildren’s delight. On this day I followed the chooks in hopes of finding the peacock or his partner who had arrived a few weeks after the flashy bird. 

As in many instances within the bird kingdom, the female tends towards the dowdy, but she holds the secret to procreation. The peacock must impress her in order for mating to happen, otherwise no more baby peacocks or pea hens. 

Despite my feminist inclinations I wanted to see the male with his plumage on full display. I can be as seduced as the next hen by such a glamourous display. Out of nowhere, the peacock appeared and did his stuff. All turquoise purples and blues with those magical eyes at the tip of the tallest feathers. The majesty of what people call the natural world, though I’m not sure about the word ‘nature’. A person made word to distinguish between them, the animals and us.

Privilege is a funny thing, visible to all except the privileged ones who wear their status like a ‘natural’ thing, as if it has ever been and will always be so. Thinking of my peacock and its magnificent plumage and some comments I read recently from distant friends of my husband who decry the notion of Invasion Day and consider the indigenous people of this nation to have been given enough privileges to warrant them staying silent about their situation.

Like critical parents they seem to say: look at what we’ve done for you. All this money poured into your people and still you’re ungrateful.

My stomach churns when I read the comments one person put out from the right-wing Andrew Bolt about the excesses of governmental largesse to the indigenous people.

It’s as if they pay no heed to history. As if they cannot see that we are the ones who should feel grateful for the land we stand on, land our forebears stole from the indigenous people already here. 

And if half the people in this country support continuing to host Australia Day on 26 January then we are as divided a nation as we see in the United States where around half the people are supposed to support Donald Trump.

When one group profits from the misfortunes of another group. When one group seeks to keep another group down, then we’re in trouble. 

My husband’s acquaintances wrote about how the minorities control us. And again, I question this idea. Is it that the minorities control or is it that they alert us to the inequalities rife in our world and they also prick people’s consciences? Then some people at least imagine, like Hitler, if we can silence those nuisance minorities, we can have it all for ourselves in comfort.

Only trouble is this never works. Our minorities are like Mrs Peahen. They serve a purpose that goes beyond procreation and diversify. They have a right to be here. They have a right to flourish. They have as much right to exist as anyone else who might consider themselves mainstream, white male middle aged and comfortable, white female middle aged and comfortable, going down the line of privilege into the arena of all those inequalities that exist for people across time.

It seems simpler in the peacock’s world which is about survival, whereas we humankind have taken survival up a notch and struggle with a wish to accumulate, then get more than we need for survival at the expense of those who teeter on the edge of not surviving. 

We have a problem here and if we’re not careful, we will lose our beloved ‘natural’ world to all the dark endings that come out of excess.

When we owe ourselves and our children and their children’s children a bright future where there’s room for all the chooks, the peacocks and hens and all peoples.  

If birds ran the government

Birds are smarter than we think. The other day out walking the dog, my daughter’s boyfriend suggested we cross the street on our return home.

‘To pay our respects to the birds,’ he said. ‘So they put in a good word for us at the parliament of crows.’ 

Crows can recognise human faces, he told me. They retain a memory of the same face for several years, and are particularly wary of menacing humans. 

I prefer the notion of a parliament of crows to our human parliament. In my fantasy, crows are better placed to judge behaviour and to establish fair practices in communal affairs. We humans tend to make a mash of things. 

In my imagination, I can see the flock of senior crows seated in the top most branches of a eucalypt nodding wisely. Their bright eyes aglow with contemplation on how best to proceed in face of the ongoing damage to their space. 

Humans chop down trees. Human make endless noise with their cars and machinery such that the crows’ nests with their delicate eggs tremble even when well placed in the fork of a tree. And the days have grown hotter with each passing year, the storms more frequent and less predictable within the bird calendar of events. 

The parliament of crows is not one to exclude its younger crows, its females and even the crow whose wing was bent in a freak accident when the crow collided with a streaking car that leapt out of nowhere. 

My imaginary crows are into equity but also they discipline their flock in ways we humans can only imagine. They hold no truck with poor behaviour, no skylarking among the young sure of wing birds, the ones who want to interfere with their neighbouring birds’ nests. 

No, the crows are respectful of other birds and their territories while standing up for their own.

Here I speak of our indigenous crows, not the huge thugs whose ancestors arrived here from the UK over a hundred years ago.

The native crows are at one with the land, the crow visitors or at least their offspring are less able to know the limits of their space. They over step the mark. Grow fat on human rubbish and mess up the landscape for everyone.

I never was one to plunge myself in my imagination into the mind of an animal or bird and my imaginings here can only take me so far before a certain itchiness attacks me. 

An irritability in my ears and mine’s eye. I want to connect to what I write. I need it to mean something to me beyond my imaginings and for this I need my memory of events. I need to add the human element. Perhaps because I am not a bird, not a crow but a human person who finds the vagaries of human kind the most amazing and puzzling of all my observations, even as I recognise the limitations of this.

When I first read about a second woman who died alongside her three children and the police urged caution in concluding this was yet another example of family violence, a man taking away the lives of his wife and children, I did not desist in my immediate speculation, it was the father. It happens so often these days.

When we later discovered it was the mother who killed herself after killing her three children the world flipped a little to the side. 

Some mothers kill their children. And we do not yet know what was happening in the mind of this mother that she should destroy the lives of her three small children but I suspect some madness in her mind that told her it was a kind thing to do, or too dangerous for them all to live.

The family violence we read about more often when men kill their partners and/or children is more often motivated by rage and revenge. Though then we have the story of Medea. Yet Medea is a story written by a man. Had Medea been written by a woman I wonder what trajectory this story might take.

Sometimes mothers are cruel to their children. Some mothers murder their children. All mothers are from time to time ambivalent about their children and most of us mothers struggle with the needs of our children weighed up against our own, especially when the grand narrative of our lives is one of laying our lives down for our children. 

A call to selflessness and nurturance that in many ways has been fuelled by the patriarchal narrative, one that says the men might be selfish because they need to go out into the world and fight for their wives and children. 

Whereas the women at home in the care of small children must put their needs aside for the good of the family. There is no room for a woman’s ambition or desire for self in the patriarchal narrative. It requires a genuine self-disregard on the part of women to blossom. And this gets passed down the generations. 

So when we hear about a woman who has killed her children we are thrown off balance even more off balance than when we hear about a father who has taken the lives of his children.  

And the parliament of crows sits on high in the trees and looks down on our failure as a species to care for the next generation in caring for ourselves and the other creatures around us, including the plant life and all aspects of our landscape, the water and sky, the sun and moon.

Because we are a flawed species and have not yet learned to live in a balanced way. Have not yet learned to find a comfortable reckoning between our individual needs for recognition and the needs of all as a group which requires a certain loss of individuality to thrive. When the group is first and foremost the entity for which we care and our own individuality is nurtured within such a powerful occurrence as a parliament of crows.