This is a story about the time I slept with a bird and my Mum put my sister in her handbag for a week.
The two wooden rosellas on a perch, dangling off some fishing wire, were a gift from some cousins. We named them after those cousins and hooked them up over the kitchen sink, overlooking the backyard. Their job was to ‘spy’ on whatever mischief my sister and I might be up to and report back to Mum.
Later, maybe a couple of decades later, I was up way too early one morning. Wandering towards the beach I noticed a small technicolour little flapper on the tram line. It wasn’t moving and a tram was clicking towards it. I shooed it, whistled at it, but it still wouldn’t move! There was nothing else to be done but pick it up. It pecked at me incessantly as its feet gripped my finger.
Into the 7/11 I went and asked for a box. I took it down to the foreshore and put it in a tree, but it just stared at me blankly. If I left it there it was only a matter of time before a cat made breakfast of it. Maybe that’s why my step-father shoots the feral cats.
And neither was the wildlife rescue service, apparently. So we walked. The bird stopped biting me. I took it for coffee. I took it to the park. We had a chirp and a chat. It sat on my shoulder. I tried to let it go on an oval and teach it to fly. But it just hopped after me. This wasn’t going well. I was closer to Dalton’s house than my own by now. I’ll just go there with the bird, I thought.
Dalton (named like the china, but nothing as fine as china) wasn’t there. His housemate let me in and went to work and I thought I’d just chill with my multi-coloured friend until Dalton came back, or until I came up with a better plan. I was very sleepy, and I couldn’t just put the bird out in the backyard to be shredded to pieces by feline fangs. So I hopped into Dalton’s bed for a snooze and the Rosella hopped in with me.
Unsurprisingly, he was not so impressed when he came home to find a bird in his bed. Which I thought was a bit harsh. But I was okay, I had bigger Rosella things to worry about. And it was probably a good indicator of future lack of compatibility. He said I could sleep in the bed but the bird had to go.*
Last week, my Mum came to visit. I let her loose in my eclectically spaghetti sprawled little suburb for a couple of hours and she came back from the op-shop with some ornamental birds – two blue budgerigars and a rosella. We named the rosella after my sister, who lives in New Zealand. She came in my Mum’s handbag with us for the week and we positioned her in places for photos wherever we went, pretending my sister was with us. On the beach, in the car, out for coffee, at the dinner table.
I have a cousin who once called to say her fish tank was full of tears and had spilt into the back of her car and it was flooding. A wasp was also talking to her. We sent her a photo of the rosella. She loved it. The people who don't understand normal, often understand the most absurd. Which rhymes with bird.
Even when it feels like the heavy night won’t lift and will make your legs collapse from beneath you, you can put a rosella in your handbag. Sometimes there’s nothing more to do than hop into bed with a bird**, and laugh at yourself so hard you fall off your perch.***
*The rosella eventually went to the vet
** By bird, I do not mean a female. But if there are two consenting adults, then that is okay too.
***Not in the metaphorical dying sense.
A Dreaming about Rosella is one of tragedy which triumphs with love as the ultimate victor. A couple run away together; although she is promised to a wirrinin (magic man) who wreaks his revenge and kills her man. She is so in grief the jealous wirrinin goes to strike her. The Great Spirit intervenes and she is instantly transformed into the first Rosella. She then flies off to the Land of the Dead to reach her lover before he crosses into it. In a race against time, she reaches him. Today, Rosellas still mate for life. Rosellas embody eternal love.
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