Growing up in rural England, John Wolseley first had agricultural training, then moved into printmaking, studying with S.W. Hayter in Paris. Coming south, he taught first at the Gippsland CAE, venturing deep into the hills there and into the Otways to feel the bush’s intimate details. He has long expressed his playfulness, as in his celebrated odd socks and early Augustus Johnnery. Yes, he made an impact from the start.

As determined as he is whimsical, both learned and adaptable, Wolseley has travelled and camped in many parts of Australia. The magic of his art lies in the fact that he loves the small, the intimate detail, even the facts of entomology. Because he is also pretty verbal, his large pictures carry plenty of inscribed information, like an explorer’s map-in-progress.

Working beside Wolseley here has been the Australian poet, novelist, and cultural historian Barry Hill, who grew up in the outer suburbs, near the coast. In the introduction to Lines for Birds, he records this liminal experience, declaring that ‘the whole experience of heading west on foot, out across those paddocks miles from the built-up area, was inseparable from a sense of being as free as the hawks above us’.

His attachment to the natural country we inhabit has been underwritten by his major prose work, Broken Song (2002), a study of T.G.H. Strehlow’s relations with the Aranda (or Arrente) people of central Australia; and again by his poems dealing with the near-legendary William Buckley. He comes at our nationality from many angles, always aware of our uneven interaction with the Aboriginal peoples. Like Wolseley, he is also a feet-on-the-ground bloke.

He invokes traditional legend at the same time as interacting with his collaborator’s work, as in his ‘War Music’:

Bunjil’s whistle is thin and strong.
Starting so close to the sun –
notes feather the indigo.

The wingspan of its call
is an invitation to dance –
paint the body with ochre

be reborn in the trance
of a long glide.

At another point, Hill migrates into the culture of Persia, echoing Attar’s classic Conference of the Birds, alongside the artist’s ‘Cloud Forest and Hoopoe’.

Generally, though, his lyrical poems respond to the same arboreal and avian experiences as Wolseley’s.

There is a not-uncommon genre of collaboration between poets and visual artists that we clumsily call ‘artists’ books’. Lines for Birds is not one of these, and calls for quite different responses. It is, for instance, highly readable, with a lot of text. By no means a limited edition, the book is printed on glossy paper and enjoys an ISBN. But it is also beautiful – a volume to keep revisiting.

The publication does not reveal the point-to-point details of collaboration: which sites were actually visited together, which themes were picked up sequentially, even which poems were developed ekphrastically, as re-creations.

Organised by terrain, Wolseley’s pictures here range over the years 1982 to 2010, plus one early watercolour from England in 1959, which could be described as crudely Percevalesque: it depicts an ardent summering thrush, and thus chimes with his fine pictures of Australian kinds of thrush: for instance, the scaly or bassian thrush (Zoothera lunulata) on the cover. Clusters of his depictions spring from his work in Japan, from our ‘Warm Far North’, and from the French garrigue and marais. Some are calligraphically understated, others a marvellous riot of parrot-rich colours and salad-dense leafage.

Now, I suggested earlier that Wolseley can be associated with a postmodern aesthetic. By this I would point to several features of his pictures. Not only do they abjure strong formal construction, seeming to meander across landscapes or loiter in treetops, but they also collage different kinds of information, as in his desert paintings, which can include small essays and disparate sketches.

Moreover, after the 1981 bushfires in Royal National Park, south of Sydney, Wolseley decided to conspire with nature in a new way: dragging the paper across scorched shrubs, he let the blackened twigs draw organically for him. A number of pictures here evince this almost-neolithic interchange. Later again, he and Hill decided to mingle the genres further, musically recording the song of a particular bird nearby. Rough staves recording this information complicate these pictures, or sonograms, even further.

Wolseley even records a moment of happenstance in 2005 when his tracing of burnt acacia bark created a rude score, which he could transform into a sonogram for a nearby honeyeater’s song. Art like this has a great need for the happenstance of the organic.

And Hill can augment this, even with an echo of Olivier Messiaen:

Tinklebell, tinklebell –
ice keys in a hedge
frost notes on a pond.

La Rousserolle effarvatte’s
notes
bloom in the dark

the bird’s all nerves –
sets of light fidgets
runnels in sword-sharp rushes.

As these lines suggest, concise lyrical tercets are among Hill’s techniques for catching the evanescent dartingness of birds. But he is a more politically active figure than Wolseley, so it may be primarily Hill’s voice that we hear when the introduction asserts that ‘We did not set out to compose a politically urgent book. But the shadow that falls upon the lives of many birds has made it so.’ Admittedly, they go straight on to talk about joy, and joy is one of the greatest engines of art. Whatever their political priority, Hill and Wolseley have worked together subtly, inventively, to create a book of beauty and delight.