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.  

We can’t be all good or bad

When I was a child, I patterned the world into obvious contrasts, cold winters, hot summers, happy times like holidays and hard sad times like housework or a scraped knee.

There were good people and bad people, my favourite teacher Miss Anderson tall, elegant, her hair in a tight French bun, and bad people like my father. Good people like the saints and angels and bad people like the devil. 

Not that we ever met the devil. We only encountered him in bad deeds, our own and others. Hence the need to get as far away from the devil or our misdeeds by visiting the confessional at least monthly.

My mother fitted into the category of the good person, warm kind and predictable, silent and long suffering. I could rely on her to be there for me, or so I reasoned until one night when we had visitors and she promised to bring me a couple of tea before I fell asleep, but the tea never came. 

I waited and waited in my bed into the darkness. Heard the hub bub of voices from the lounge room where my aunts and uncles, mother and father talked together over cups pf coffee and sweetened liqueurs, but no tea for me. 

She had promised she’d bring one to me, the next time she popped into the kitchen to refresh the biscuits she served as savouries, smoked oysters from a tin on salty crackers, and Russian eggs, which she had prepared earlier in the day. She boiled the eggs hard then sliced in two, took out the yolks mashed them together with mayonnaise, a sprinkle of curry, salt and pepper then returned the yolks in a pile to fill white oval space. 

I had not asked for an egg or food, only a cup of tea but my mother became so engrossed with her guests, so intent on focussing on them, the hours slipped by and with it I slipped into sleep but the memory of this one too-long-wait for my mother marked her copy book.

I kept a copy book of sorts in my head. A place in which I listed the misdeeds of people who let me down.

I did not consider myself in those days a Scorpio, a person born in November under the eighth astrological sign therefore prone to vengeful fantasies, like the scorpion who stings when wounded or afraid. I thought everyone kept a record book of other people’s failings.

My father’s misdeeds were many, my mother’s few. Until the day I bounced my ball up and down the path that ran alongside our house to the side door which we used as our front entrance way. 

Up and down with my ball on the pavement. The trick to keep it in motion as long as possible without it derailing off course or having to catch it. Up and down until it slipped sideways and into a plate of glass someone had leaned against the fence. 

The glass was intended to replace the window in the kitchen that one of my brothers had smashed with another ball. He out of carelessness, me out of misadventure. My mother did not see it that way.

‘The glass broke,’ I told her after she came running at the sound of a crash.

‘How could you,’ she said. ‘Not again.’ Her eyes glowered and her cheeks were flushed. My mother had never been angry with me. My mother had always been kind. This was not my mother. This was someone else who had entered my world and did not understand the ways of a ten-year-old child who could not stop her ball from flipping at a right angle and into a plate of glass after it collided with a stone on the concrete.

My mother in the middle, surrounded by some of her children in a familiar pose.

This was not my mother. This was some other monster mother, and I fled from her down the road to the Canterbury park where I pushed the slide swing up and down to soothe my fury at her cruel misjudgement.

I was a good person. I had to be a good person along with the saints and the angels, along with the nuns. I was a good person. If I was not good, then I became bad and to be bad was the worst fate of all. It put me there among the fallen archangels, among the sinners in purgatory, the devils in hell. It put me there with the people whom no one liked, the people like Hitler who started wars, or like the barbarians and Huns the nuns taught us about in history. It put me into the place of the unmentionables.

This was a dilemma for me. An insoluble problem. We could not both be good anymore, my mother and me. Not after she had raged at me. Not after she had shown such hatred in her eyes. 

We could not both be good. One of us had to be bad. And I feared it might end up being me.