If you are in Alice Springs this weekend you can do a lot worse than go along to the Aralauen Arts Centre and catch the Desert Mob show that will be opening there Sunday - you might be lucky and see one of Nungarrayi's paintings in the exhibition.
The most substantial single source of Aboriginal bird knowledge in the mainstream ornithological literature was John Gould's "Handbook to The Birds of Australia", published in 1865. I've not been able to find a replacement candidate as the primary source - and much of the information contained therein was collected by one of Gould's collectors, John Gilbert, who was taken from us too soon in 1845 while on a cross-country expedition with Ludwig Leichhardt.
These bird sculptures are just about the best bird sculptures I have seen. Made out of the scattered bits of metal that we discard in tips, along the road or just leave to rust where they die, they become a whole lot more than the sum of their parts.
All about me lay the scattered, shattered remains - here the severed head, there a leg, stripped of flesh, next to the road another head, ten feet away a razor-taloned foot, wing and tail. Whatever had happened here had been brief and incredibly brutal.
Feral cats have been in Australia since European settlement. They live independently of humans and are found in all habitats ranging from rainforest to desert throughout the Northern Territory.
The main reason for my travel to Warmun was to get a better look at the work of, and make contact with several of the local artists who paint bird stories grounded in the local landscape and culture.
I stopped, turned and bore witness to the death of this small wonder.
The successful man would be declared Tangata-Manu, would take the egg in his hand and lead a procession back to his homeland. Once in residence there he was tapu (taboo) for the next five months of his year long status, and allowed his nails to grow and wore a headdress of human hair.
Maybe instead of blaming the animals we should be saying "I committed a murder of a kangaroo today", "I was driving too fast to let the Wedge-tailed Eagle get enough height to get off the roadway" or "I didn't slow down to let that Goanna cross the road safely".
The Crested Bellbird has a very distinctive call, from which its Warlpiri name of Kanpanparlala is an onomatopoeic derivation.
