Another Voice
8 November 2008
I am woken by the song of the kookaburra in this ancient, haunting landscape
We admired a Japanese work, ‘Harmony with the Breeze’, which delicately balanced filigree wings of steel and titanium on artful pivots so that they flapped with slow grace in the breeze. But the Australian magpie perching amid the grey-green leaves and white bottle-brush flowers of a small native banksia tree nearby stole the show with his dark colours and darker song.
And we returned to Glenview Crescent after a happily remembered day. But those impermanent sculptures will fade in my memory. The scoured rock, the flowing floral carpet and that cruel beak and evil eye will not.
Tomorrow those birds — the carolling magpie, the gurgling kookaburra, the haunting currawong and the angry screech of the rosella — will wake me again. Like those skulls, memento mori, in the corners of a late-mediaeval paintings, these alien songs, memento exsilii, tease from an almost European garden. Remember where you are, they sing. How they must have taunted the first settlers.
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Richard Coleman
November 8th, 2008 6:21am Report this commentAn excellent piece.
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