My dad liked watching cockatoos throw conkers on people’s heads. They were the teenage boys of the skies, he said, a whooping, hollering brat pack, infectious with the joy of claiming public spaces.
Every night before bed when I was a kid, he sat by the night-light. Tell me stories with birds in them, I asked.
When it stormed, he told me about Thunderbird. Some indigenous North American tribes believed the heavy wing beats of this powerful, supernatural bird stirred the winds and caused the thunder. He showed me the pictures of heavy, carved wooden sculptures painted in bright colors with their wide, hollow eyes staring out of the pages.
These birds could shape-shift, he said, as I snuggled deeper into my blankets. In the pictures they stretched their beaks open, revealing human heads inside, like a mask. They swooped down from the skies and taking their human form captured and married the beautiful women from the earth.
Watch out, one might come for you, my dad teased, and kissed me goodnight.
I fell asleep, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars he had stuck on the ceiling, half-terrified and half-thrilled at the thought of one day finding my bird-man.
The birds are flying across the city sky to roost for the night when I missed two calls from my dad. He has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
People tell me, the real world goes like this. It is the natural cycle, and that I shouldn’t, in fact, I can’t, fight it. Everyone talks over each other with advice, platitudes, and diagnoses. I sit, dazed, in my backyard in Sydney and instead try to learn the names of birds.
I start with the ones that visit the city daily.
Sparrows come from the Passeridae family. I love the sound of a whole family comprised of “Old World Songbirds.” The brown honeyeater is a member of the genus Lichmera, from the Greek word meaning “to lick.” In the 1948 edition of Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, they recorded the song of the brown honeyeater and it sounded like, sweet-sweet-quarty-quarty. The ibis belongs to Threskiornithidae, the ancient Greek word for a group of birds. I try to remember the white Australian ibis that haunts parks and city workers at lunch time and think that what we call “bin bird” is actually the sister of the sacred ibis, Threskiornis molucca.
I write these lists out neatly in a black felt tip pen as though I think I can protect myself and my family, by collecting the names of things to come. Sweet-sweet-quarty-quarty. The unknown is what terrifies us.
My dad and I don’t know what to say to each other, or how to cut through the choking weight of the day, or where to begin with the information. So, one day we decide to book a flight and go to the Daintree—to bird-watch.
I find the number of a guide called Murray, who says he will pick us up and take us around the rainforest. My dad used to work on the rail-yards in Queensland when he was in his twenties, and the original plan was to catch the train along the old Atherton Tableland scenic track from Cairns and head north like he used to do. Neither of us knows how to drive. I jokingly tell people it’s hereditary, but as we’re standing at the Cairns Visitor Centre and being told the train line has been defunct for over twenty years, I’m cursing him, and I resolve to finally get my license.
That evening in the pub room where we are staying, my dad is excitable.
We used to make sure the couplers on the old trains were secure, so the carriages wouldn’t roll away. It felt good after years of university and politics, to hold something real, and feel the weight of the solid chains in your hands.
But even though I can tell he wants to keep telling me about his younger days and he has always been a night owl, his body is fatigued, and he apologizes over and over, and goes to bed early while there is still light in the sky. I go for a walk outside around the esplanade where the wide ocean has gotten caught in mud flats, and a pelican treads lightly on the brown, puckered skin.
The next day, Murray greets us with his ginger-colored hair and a stop-starting manner. He asks us if we want to go. Then if we want to sit down. And then what it is we want to see. Birds, my father says and Murray’s halting manner vanishes and his shoulders relax.
I have to admit, he says with a wink directed to my dad, I’m a bird-man.
My dad and I stare at each other in amazement. I feel like giggling.
We spend the next twenty minutes sitting at a picnic bench by the water writing out our plan. Murray makes us little scorecards with the names of local birds: buff-breasted paradise kingfisher, great-billed heron, little kingfisher, tawny frogmouth, southern cassowary.
He puts a box next to each one so we can tick it off as we see them and hands us hats with “Murray’s Trips” scrawled on it. I am slightly annoyed. I don’t want our boat trip hijacked by these kid’s games. Alongside us a gaggle of excited tourists climb aboard a wooden riverboat with a sign for Crocodile Tours that shows an ugly cartoon croc grinning and snapping at the letters.
Murray has a small speedboat and steers us along the Daintree River. He cuts the engine as we slip down side estuaries. We duck our heads as branches stretch out from the embankments, desperately trying to reach the other side of the murky waters. My dad carries the binoculars. And it is my job to hold the Book of Birds and read aloud from the entries.
I intone, the magpie goose is a large, distinctive black-and-white water bird (from 70-90 cm long) with a prominent knob on the head, and orange legs. It is not a duck or goose, but is regarded as a primitive relative of them.
They both give me a thumbs-up, and slowly, we establish a pattern for the day.
Conversation flows gently as we float downstream. Murray used to work in the Northern Territory and tells us about the gorges. My dad used to work as a store man on an Aboriginal welfare settlement in Arnhem Land called Maningrida. This is news to me and I enjoy watching my dad talking about his memories so easily with this man on the river.
It turns out Murray also worked at the same settlement.
They talk about how it might have changed, and then sadly realize it hasn’t, as government intervention policies took over when my dad worked there and then again thirty years later when Murray worked there.
Why can’t this country give some respect to the past so we can all move forwards? Murray says, and I watch them both, nodding in agreement.
Murray suddenly goes quiet and points. Ahead on a finger of sand a large crocodile is sunning itself. It is so close we can make out the flashes of yellows and mottled brown swirls on its hide. Its mouth is wide open and Murray explains this is to release heat. He says it is over-cooking, and, almost on cue, it slips into the water and disappears beneath us. As we wind along the river we see more crocodiles and more houses on stilts appear on the embankments.
We trail past one house that has been boarded up. I ask if it’s dangerous to have the houses so close to the river.
Murray nods.
Overall, it’s fine, he says. The locals get it and they are smart and they respect each other. But there’s always that one time that goes wrong.
That house, he says nodding to the boarded up one we had passed. That’s a sad fucking story, and his voice drops down out of respect.
There was a young boy there, three or four, he tells us. And he knew, even at that age, he knew never to go down to the river. His parents taught him well. But this one time the dog had escaped and the boy saw it running down the banks and he wanted to warn it so he ran on after it. And, well, when he got down to the water’s edge there was a croc that had been lying in the shallows. The saddest part was his dad used to own and run that old crocodile tour boat you saw earlier. Can you imagine? You make a living off tourists watching crocodiles for so long and then…I don’t know what that’s called, irony or what.
Sad fate, says my dad looking out past the house.
We turn the boat around and head back home, our boxes all ticked. The boat bumps against the bank and we begin uncoiling rope to tether it.
What is your favorite bird? I ask Murray as I’m tallying up our scorecards. He looks like I’ve just handed him a winning lottery ticket and, in the excitement of the question, his halting manner returns. He says he has a trick bird as his favorite. After making both of us guess for a while, he tells us: the phoenix.
It lives for about one thousand years and then towards the end it builds itself a giant nest, he tells me. The nest and bird ignite in flames and they burn fiercely and in a terrible way. It is cyclical. It is only once everything has broken down and been reduced to the final ashes that we can build anything again. He jumps out of the boat into the shallows holding the rope and says quietly, I like the idea of this bird.
My dad and I sit on the wide verandah of our hostel above the embankment where the river curves. The sun is dipping. We put aloe vera on our sunburn and sit quietly, sipping on cold bottles of beer. Next week when we return, he will start the chemotherapy sessions. But we both know this is just a stalling tactic for the inevitable.
We watch as a tree-load of birds suddenly breaks the silence with the heavy beat of their wings, neatly cleaving the air as they separate into white and black and playfully re-form, all the while knowing their exact place in the sky.