Despising nation and patriotism and jingoism as I do, I baulk when I hear that ‘parrots’ are clichés or overused symbols of Australia, particularly the outback. I have a personal history of parrotology, a deep respect for all their varieties, and a fascination for their manifestations in literature, particularly poetry. For me, a parrot isn’t simply a parrot. In the thrust forward to make of Australian poetry some-thing more cosmopolitan, internationalist and sophisticated, there’s been some throwing of the baby out with the bathwater. Arguments of literary maturity are the old cultural cringe stuff reformed as residue, a bit like the cherishing of remnant bushland when all else is reduced to salinity. The parrot becomes a transitional object in this child-nation’s shift from linguistic acquisition to linguistic confidence and exploration.

Arguably, this exploration of linguistic possibilities in poetry – searching for new ways of expressing confidence in identity – is parallel to, or maybe even an extension of, the narratives of exploration that ‘opened up’ land for ‘settler’ use, and sought to reset the co-ordinates (namings, markings, topography and explication) of place, with the aim of creating ‘guilt-free’ occupation. It might well be, disturbingly, a new form of colonisation.

In the just-released Australian issue of the stalwart British poetry journal Agenda, the critic Martin Dodsworth says:

Whilst [Australia] was coming out from under the shadow of Empire it is understandable that its poetry should have sought to reinforce a fragile national identity. But things are different now; there is a new confidence, identity is no longer the issue that it was, and poets can if they wish go easy on the kangaroos and the wallabies, the parrots and the rosellas.

This is fascinating in a number of ways. Every new migrant wrestles with identity on arriving in Australia. Many indigenous commentators would argue that the loss of indigenous languages constitutes a steady loss of identity on that (paramount) level alone, and those concerned with the destruction of the land would argue that identity-loss is inseparable from this loss. And so the list can be continued. Dodsworth’s point, to give it credit, is not so much that to be ‘confident’ one has to go into a denial of, say, references to native fauna, but that to write outside such signifiers allows for a maturity and freedom.

My question is: why? Surely any signifier can be used in a clichéd manner – not only the name of a bird or animal, but of a building, piece of art or shopping mall. In fact, any word or phrase or line in a poem, used without attention to the range of readings outside one’s own immediate purpose, would be impoverished.

Don’t get me wrong. I actually value skilfully arranged clichés in poetry – as long as the clichés are doing work on (or deconstructing) their own existence in the poem. Robert L. Mitchell’s use of the expression ‘renovation of clichés’, when talking about the nature and aspects of ‘poetic voice’ (in The Poetic Voice of Charles Cros: A Centennial Study of His Songs, 1976), is particularly appropriate to a discussion about the reinvigoration of clichéd language. To renovate is both to renew and reinvigorate; the reader’s desire to enter the familiar yet also be surprised is the marketing tactic employed from selling neo-colonial houses through to contemporary takes on the sonnet:

By poetic voice, I mean those stylistic devices or traits which are particularly characteristic of a poet’s writing and which reveal certain marked tendencies through their idiosyncratic usage. These elements may range from choice of words (the predominance of a particular part of speech, a predilection for the abstract or concrete, the use of neologism, the renovation of clichés, or borrowings from other languages, to name a few possibilities) to the use of particular types of images, to noticeable idiosyncrasies regarding syntax, rhythm, structure, rhyme, and versification.

Parrots for me are always ‘renovated’ – an addictively necessary part of a poetics. They are the source of beauty in my aesthetics. I am probably an irrelevancy to theirs, but who knows? Anthropocentrically, William Hogarth noted in The Analysis of Beauty (1753): ‘The shapes and colours of plants, flowers, leaves, the paintings in butterflies wings, shells, &c. seem of little other intended use, than that of entertaining the eye with the pleasure of variety.’ This is often what’s observed of parrots: their infinitude, their beauty. The range of their colourings is a constant pleasure, but not much thought is given to why that myriad of difference exists. There are biological and geographical answers, obviously evolutionary and creationist answers. But in the moment of poetic contact, it’s the array of colours combined with the uniqueness of movement that captures the poet.

I share with the poet Dorothy Porter an interest in the rare or extinct night parrot, which is (or was) not a particularly colourful parrot. Its sublimity is in its discretion, its vulnerability, its solitude. Porter wrote a book of poetry entitled The Night Parrot (1984); I, coincidentally, wrote one entitled Night Parrots (1989). The ground dwelling, the strange cry, habitation in arid Australia, and probable extinction make it vulnerable to the interiorities of the poet. Though we ‘deploy’ the parrot in very different ways, the parrot becomes an alter ego, a conscience, counterpoint, antagonist, often indifferent companion, of address. In Porter’s work, this is more literal – the bird is a ‘character’ in the internalised dialogue with a shifting persona – whereas in mine it is most often absent. From Porter’s ‘Trial Separation’: ‘it’s the dry season / the night parrot / is starving / and won’t mate / can’t nest / and finds my water / bitter, / we’re fighting ...’ Characteristic of Porter’s poetry in general is the play between the casual, familiar language and a razor-edged intensity. Her night parrot is no mere empty signifier.

I understand why Australian Book Review gratefully observed that the ‘wonted parrots’ were strangely silent when it ran its inaugural poetry competition (ABR, March 2005). What ABR noted, of course, is the familiar trope – like the gum tree or kangaroo – that becomes a signifier for a larger, more generalised discourse of national identity. It’s the cover-all, the cliché. We might also add to this the metaphoric investment of the familiar with emotional pre-dictability: the beauty of the bird becomes a sign for a complexity that is not really there. It is not difficult to list reasons why the ‘parrot’ is perceived as a cliché in Australian poetry, but it does lead one to ask a few questions.

For example, how many anthologised Australian poems are about parrots, or even include parrots? How and when did they become figurative currency? Why the joy at not encountering them? First, we’d have to consider the demographics and cultural values of the judges. Are they urban people, for whom the parrot is a bland representation of the rural other – an expected trope that denies variety in all its guises? Is the parrot the Anglo-Celtic displacement of indigeneity, a kind of legitimising or reterritorialising of the sign? The rendering of the Derridean monster into something acceptable? The event defanged, or debeaked? By way of distraction, let’s think of Australian parrots as our version of the hippogriff.

We might ask of the cultural density and liberality of the city – real or desired – is everything therein not parrot? Interestingly, ‘pissed as a parrot’ applies as much to parrots in the north of Queensland consuming fermented fruit as to rainbow lorikeets dining on the fermented nectar of schotia brachypetala in the Sydney Botanical Gardens, so drunk they featured in the Sydney Morning Herald (2004) and wire pick-ups in newspapers around the world. In the gardens, beneath the drunken parrots, families of diverse spiritual beliefs, politics, social attitudes, ethnicities and cultural practices look up and take note. Some might be embarrassed, some make jokes at the expense of the parrots, some feel pity, even empathy. The parrot as symbol of nation falls off its perch.

Chris Mansell’s ‘Definition Poem: Pissed as a Parrot’ is a poem of word slippage: ‘If the sheep’s fly-blown it’s a rosella.’ It is also a poem that implicitly satirises an aspect of pseudo-cultural identity (Australian drinking behaviour) at the same time as affectionately laying claim to it. The following lines add to the plethora of claims for the origin of the expression, ironised doubly in the polite colonial occasion (tea taking) and the cringe of scientific (and cul-tural) validation (Sydney University):

But I went to afternoon tea
in the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney
at 4pm on Thursday 6 November
and there, Dr A.R. Lacey, physical chemist, MSc PhD,
informed me, in his capacity as a true blue,
down to earth, dinky-di, grass roots Aussie that
when working on his horse stud in Wingecarribee Shire
he had observed that Gang Gang cockatoos
fall with paralytic suddenness
from the branches of Hawthorn bushes
after ingesting the berries ...

In this larrikin lampooning, Mansell manages multi-directional satire while, in essence, not writing about parrots at all. Official culture, she suggests, diverts attention from the full story.

The parrot is of the city as much as of the country, where diversity and flock sizes are rapidly diminishing as tree hollows and other nesting spaces vanish with the clearing of land, with pesticide and herbicide dulling colour and hearts, and where teenagers take potshots with more ruthless efficiency than one can imagine, with 22s. I love parrots because I once, before I became a vegan, killed them.

I lived for a while in an apartment opposite the Perth Zoo, an ambivalent interaction from a vegan perspective. I loved being near the animals, but not where and how they were kept. It made me angry. A vast flock of lorikeets gathered in the Moreton Bay fig trees around South Perth near the zoo, close to the river, attracted by the abundant fruit-bearing trees. Rainbow lorikeets are not native to Perth, and this healthy flock was mostly the result of ten birds let loose near the University of Western Australia in the 1960s. They are considered public enemy number one in Perth now, and their appearance in a celebratory poem or any poem other than one of damnation would be considered treasonable by farmers, suburban gardeners and the Department of Agriculture.

What is generally agreed is that the lorikeets have become part of an artificial environment (the city), replete with ‘exotic’ eucalypts and palms that attract and encourage these birds. I have heard many local poems refer to them as positive symbols – of lively colour, of life as opposed to the ‘deathly’ pollution or detritus of city life. This is, in most cases, classic separation of the signified and signifier. Few people, including poets, bother to identify birds, animals or plants, and they become for people simply ciphers – points of comparison in the quick-fix simile.

It is easy to see why parrots in Australian poems get a bad reputation. But there is a double irony here: the bird’s ‘non-belonging’ becomes a metaphor for colonisation on an obvious level, but also, since they are declared vermin, for their status in ‘uncaring’ Australian society. Pragmatics leads to a defensive military language of vermin and control (much like that deployed against refugees). In the way that we read texts against their intended meaning, so the general ‘parrot’ in a Perth poem shocks with implication. The benign becomes the aggressively challenging (and here was I thinking I was just writing about nature being nice and the human-made being soulless). The simpler the apparent usage, the less defined the noun, the stronger the signs of disturbance.

It is fascinating to consider the near-absence of parrots, galahs, and cockatoos in Dorothy Hewett’s poetry, coming as she did from a parrot-heavy region. They are there, but rarely. Her poems refer to many birds – especially crows and magpies – but not many parrots. In ‘Memoirs of a Protestant Girlhood’, we read ‘black cockatoos massed shrieking in the sky’, with the cockatoos taking on their familiar guise as mass and threat seen so often in colonial Australian poetry. Individuated cockatoos are to be found imprisoned in ‘Zoo Story’; ‘the white cockatoos parody our babble’. The caged birds do not babble; it is the humans that do. In their alienation, the birds are given the choice of refusal, of denial of the human. In the first case, we have them speaking to the persona out of nature, in the second, mocking the persona (the ‘we’) because they are out of nature. Around Wickepin, where Hewett grew up, parrots are prevalent – pink and grey galahs, ring-necked parrots and other species. In the reconstruction of her childhood, they have been made largely absent, either because they lack the starkness of her symbolism and recall, or because this absence is a declaration of some denial, hiddenness, lack or deletion. Rosellas appear in The Alice Poems (1995): ‘rosellas flush out behind her / in the branches naked fledglings / lift up their beaks for worms …’ A 28 parrot also bites Alice to the bone and then dies: ‘the parrot joined them / flat on its back claws in the air.’

This is reminiscent of Hewett’s fellow Western Australian Randolph Stow, and also of Sidney Nolan’s painting. The appearance of these parrots and their life-death ‘attack’ on Alice’s ‘instress’, her resistance to expectation (‘Bitch bitch…’) and compliance, their reappearance later when time is wound back and they live again, are part and parcel of the cathartic symbolism Hewett reserved for these birds. The cliché of the parrots is reinvested so pathologically that the self-myth is transferred, transfigured and resurrected in them. The general absence of parrots in Hewett’s poetry is not accidental. When they do appear, they are hyper-real and come loaded with portent and death.

The parrot (oh, a rosella is a type of parrot), the wallaby, or the kangaroo (the latter two are closely related), even deployed as clichés, should never be written off. Let’s take a look at a few uses of ‘parrots’ in colonial Australian poetry. Here’s the opening of Richard Whately’s ‘There Is a Place in Distant Seas’:

There is a place in distant seas
Full of contrarieties:
There, beasts have mallards’ bills and legs,
Have spurs like cocks, like hens lay eggs.
There parrots walk upon the ground,
And grass upon the trees is found;
On other trees, another wonder!

This is a trope of early encounter. We also see, for example, the issue of ‘contrarieties’ in Barron Field’s ‘The Kangaroo’. This is the reconfiguring of expectation per experience, the search for a language of contradiction in this light to express and describe creatively (and scientifically, for that matter) what is being seen to oneself, one’s fellow participants in the new experience, and those ‘back home’ who only have their immediate environment and other artefacts and observations from empire-building to compare with and help build the picture.

Parrots had been seen and collected by the British from other parts of the globe before they were encountered in Australia, of course, but to the writer (and audience) of this poem, the parrots in the new colonies warranted mention of specific behavioural (as well as visual) characteristics that set them apart. Here, there is as much fascination as pride, and a lexicographical registering of language-shift: finding different co-ordinates for the description of the world as it is (never as it seems). Furthermore, not uncommonly, these parrots become symbols of the pleasure-pain of the grotesque, that particularly Australian perversion of the sublime that has the majestic moment tainted with depression, loss or potential cataclysm. Here are a couple of lines from Charles Harpur’s ‘A Storm in the Mountains’: ‘The duskness thickens! With despairing cry / From shattering boughs the rain-drenched parrots fly!’ The lines almost collapse under the weight of themselves, and these are no bright and frivolous ‘parrotic’ symbols at work. With the destruction of habitat, it amazes me that in poetry parrots persist in text as if they had been unassailed. The urbanite, noting the ‘renegade’ flocks of parrots appearing in cities around Australia, might well take this to mean excess and a lushness of the symbolic – not so out in the wheat belt. Flocks of certain parrots, galahs and cockatoos thrive until culled, but others are extinct or on the verge of extinction. Where I am now, the destruction of wandoo habitat has meant a lack of nesting places (hollowed branches and trunks).

The refutation of ‘parrots’ – the sign or signifier ‘parrot’, or simply the visual representation of ‘parrot’ in a poem – goes hand in hand with the denial of participation and agency within the aesthetic. Because parrots are not made (yet) by humans, because they are seemingly no more than poetically receptive to mimesis and reproduction or recounting in the text (they don’t answer back despite their ability to ‘mimic’ human speech), they are beyond sympathy. They mimic aspects of the human but cannot be appreciated as participating in the poem-text. Here is what Descartes has to say about parrots in Discourse on Method in 1837:

For it is really remarkable that there are no men so dull and stupid, including even idiots, who are not capable of putting together different words and of creating out of them a conversation through which they make their thoughts known; by contrast, there is no other animal, no matter how perfect and how successful it might be, which can do anything like that. And this inability does not come about from a lack of organs. For we see that magpies and parrots can emit words, as we can, but nonetheless cannot talk like us, that is to say, giving evidence that they are thinking about what they are uttering; whereas, men who are born deaf and dumb are deprived of organs which other people use to speak – just as much as or more than the animals – but they have a habit of inventing on their own some signs by which they can make themselves understood to those who, being usually with them, have the spare time to learn their language.

And this point attests not merely to the fact that animals have less reason than men, but also to the fact that they have none at all. Bearing Descartes’ words in mind, let’s consider Colin Allen’s comment in ‘Animal Consciousness’ (2005):

A common refrain in response to such arguments is that, in situations of partial information, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. Descartes dismissed parrots vocalizing human words because he thought it was merely meaningless repetition. This judgement may have been appropriate for the few parrots he encountered, but it was not based on a systematic, scientific investigation of the capacities of parrots. Nowadays many would argue that Pepperberg’s study of the African Grey parrot ‘Alex’ (Pepperberg 1999) should lay the Cartesian prejudice to rest. This study, along with several on the acquisition of a degree of linguistic competence by chimpanzees and bonobos would seem to undermine Descartes’ assertions about lack of conversational language use and general reasoning abilities in animals.

I argue that the appearance of the ‘parrot’ in Australian poetry is an essential and reasoned phenomenon because the birds themselves actively inculcate themselves into the imagination of those who encounter them on a variety of levels; that they are monitors (like frogs) of the health of an ecosystem and therefore political and environmental symbols; that they have a symbolic function in the imagination of contradiction – damnation and deliverance; and that though deployed as nationalist jingoistic icons or default positions (easy observation like ‘gum trees’), they are equally used iconoclastically.

In a sense, the arguments (and experiments) of ‘animal consciousness’ are as élitist and insulting as Descartes’ summations, but the hierarchising of ability does serve to show that human sense of faculty and facility is judgmental and limited. The parrot in the poem is no less valuable than the person in the poem; both are ultimately textual and symbolic. They are not really there, no matter how ‘touching’ the text. A sophisticated liberated poetry might just as well do away with people. The bird that ‘mimics’ does so because of human interaction – forced or (rarely) circumstantial. It involves itself in the language.

A little personal history of writing parrots. I have written a lot of bird poems, referring to birds from around the world, from the various places I have lived in, whether watching a cardinal in mid-Ohio or a black-bird in Cambridge, England. I suppose one has to get out from beneath the shadow of nature to really come of age – something I doubt I will ever do! I spend a lot of my non-poetry time writing and lecturing on environmental and political issues, so it is not surprising they should become a prime focus of my creative work.

Parrots, especially Western Australian wheat-belt parrots, are more than symbolic or textually easy; they are part of my life’s experience. Up until the end of my teenage years, I shot them as often as I could. Sometimes I trapped them for our aviaries, but most often I killed them and left them where they dropped. I have seen boxes and boxes of parrot carcasses, and once even a box of twenty-eight parrot heads, at country rubbish tips. It is easy when those around you declare them ‘vermin’, and as much as you admire and are fascinated by them, there’s a frisson in destroying the beautiful. Thankfully, I eventually ended my role in their destruction.

Writing about parrots becomes an act of atonement. Though it does not make what I did any less horrific, it does declare not only a recognition of wrongdoing, but also a hope that words might make others reflect. On motor-bikes with my cousins near York, I would race 28 parrots – they have a penchant for a fast undulating flight alongside vehicles travelling on narrow roads – sideswiping wandoo and salmon gums, a few feet above the gravel, accelerating as fast as the bike.

As symbol, parrots become the destruction not only of beauty in nature (and all, to my mind, is beautiful in nature), but of the ‘beauty’ in oneself. They are contradictory symbols, and always disport themselves against nation, against settler culture, against bigotry. I guess I have loaded them right up, and I am not alone in this. Many contemporary Australian poets ‘deploy’ parrots out of direct experience and observation, but also reflectively against the ‘parrot cliché’. A modern ‘parrot poem’ by Peter Skrzynecki, ‘To This Day’, from There, Behind the Lids (1970), brilliantly takes the stilled retrospective moment invested with the silence of listening, and recounting, and divests the clichéd bird of all – ‘mostly’ – but the colours. The colours of a parrot are what most people recall, along with the shriek or squawk or call. The parrot – ostensibly non-threatening – is loud, bright, defiant. The still moment is lit up by the colour alone. A reminder of presence in landscape, a vestigial consciousness of dreamtime agency haunts non-indigenous parrot poetry.

Skrzynecki was once termed a ‘migrant’ poet, a strange liminal term that owes its origins to post-World War II shifts in population, but is obviously applicable to non-indigenous Australians generally. Consciousness of newness in a place is countermanded by fatuous claims of First-Fleet authenticity, and the parrot as totemic representative of the pre-migrant and the synaesthesic touch-point, spark for the migrant’s symbiosis and imagining of the place she works and lives in, is dynamic. Whether in dreamtime mythology the red of a particular parrot’s wing is the result or cause of fire, or the red fires an awareness of intertextuality within the articulation of place, the presence of the parrot becomes a metamorphic and transitional figure – a reminder and a prompt.

My father came in much later, carrying some
Of the potatoes he’d dug up in the late afternoon;
Took off his hat, wiped the dirt from around his eyes;
Rolled a smoke and told us about the bird he saw:

Remembering the colours, mostly, that was all –
Of the small, green and blue parrot that alighted
On a nearby clump of wattle as he sat there
Scraping the mud and grass from his gum boots:

Remained there as he stood up, reached over
And threw a handful of sunflower seeds into the tree.

In trying to chart the usage and repetition of specific words or phrases in poems – why, say, ‘parrot’ works cumulatively across different poets’ works as it does – I have started using Set Theory as a method of discussing the collecting of words in lines and stanzas in poems. Russell’s Paradox is the key, I feel; it basically led to the progression from a naïve Set Theory to Axiomatic Set Theory.

Parrotology finds its apotheosis in the paradox. The pervasive presence of parrots in all aspects of Australian life (from television to tomato sauce bottles) means that it is necessarily part of any set associated with ‘nation’. It is part of the schema, part of the contents. If we deny the parrot its presence in the poem, then it permeates subtextually. Parrots shadow Australian poetry – or poems written in or out of Australia. I have argued before that Australian pastoral poetry is what so much urban Australian poetry defines itself against, so pervasive are the notions of the ‘outback’, ‘the bush’, and ‘the farm’. So it is with symbols and signifiers such as ‘parrots’, ‘kangaroos’ and ‘gum trees’ – they are more than part of the place, and their inclusion in a poem does not necessarily mean jingoism. Avoidance becomes a fear as much as anything else – brilliant birds that can terrify with their call; that can mimic what we say. They are reminders of our own failings, our own mortality. As Ouyang Yu’s translation ‘An Imperial Palace Poem’ by Zhu Qingyu (Tang Dynasty) shows:

lonely flowers behind the closed palace door
beautiful women stand side by side in a jaded verandah
they would love to talk about what’s going on in the palace
but dare not say a word before the parrots

This apprehension is timeless and geographically wide-ranging. For Ouyang Yu, a Chinese-Australian who grew up in China, the presence of parrots is polymorphous. There is a wonderfully ironic inflection of the brooding fear in mainstream Australia that the primacy of the English language will be challenged – do the parrots hear in Chinese or English translation, so to speak. Ouyang Yu says of this poem that ‘imperial concubines [are] in fear of being informed against by the parrots, parrots being imperial police informants!’. This evokes the idea of the wariness of parrots in poetry as a general fear of surveillance; their absence, a delusion of freedom (from Empire, the colonial state).

A couple of years ago, I wrote a poem called ‘White Cockatoos’ – the generalised local name given to corellas. White cockatoos – or ‘cockies’ – are not endemic to this region. The poem was originally entitled ‘Little Corellas’; they are only found in the Kimberley region in Western Australia, though widespread in the eastern states. The misnomer is of particular interest given that rogue aviary-escapee birds have in fact been forming colonies just outside Perth. Supposedly, they have not reached the wheat belt.

In fact, they have. I have regularly seen two or three birds in large flocks of corellas, themselves considered ‘pests’ around here and culled yearly (including being shot in the town and on the local school oval). I e-mailed an authority on birds recently, who, after confirming he felt corellas should be culled, professed to be very interested in my observations. Realising it would mean more culling, I remained silent.

The reconfiguring of the ‘actual’ (according to scientific nomenclature), the overlaying of indigenous naming with more recent ‘Western’ namings, and the nicknaming of a ‘pest’ bird as one that would be considered even more of a ‘pest’. Degrees of separation take us to both confidence and insecurity about belonging. The paradoxical familiarity and loathing of the species (especially when they eat crops and fruit) make them part of a conversation even when they are absent: a kind of semi-benign threat that at worst can give you the disease psittacosis or tear your finger, or terrify you with their other-worldly cry, a step closer to death; or at best make you feel good about the glory of the day. Here is that paradoxical poem:

Spectres inverting sunlit
paddocks after late rain
field into quadrature out

of blind-spots, raucous
it’s said, like broken glass
in a nature reserve

but that’s no comparison;
cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters
curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’

yellow parameters reflect clusters
of white feathers from canopies
of wandoos or sheaths of flight,

down in deep green crops
ready to turn when rains are gone,
beaks turned back toward

whereabouts unknown,
but almost certain to appear,
at least as atmosphere.

‘White Cockatoos’

As I drove back from the city the other day, a flight of white-tailed black cockatoos flew out of the jarrah over the road, screeching. Uncle Jack used to say that, along with glistening gum leaves and a ring around the moon, they portended bad weather. We have just had the driest July in 120 years. The clichés of the Australian bush line up like the planets, making science of superstition.