A white cockatoo scans the inland with a sharp suspicious eye. Large flocks take off from the runways of cracked claypans and fields of sun-bleached plant matter broken by the harvest. The bird has ripped and tormented the plains with the beak of a dinosaur. From my base camp by the river's edge, I look up into flight feathers that are awash with yellow and white. I find my way into deserts through the wise black eye. Gnarled grey claws connect the bird to branches, where it screeches and cracks open gum nuts and tears off chunks of wood. Its giant beak grips the bark like a clam. The oceans have retreated from the deserts leaving behind this great bird. The beak and claws ground its flight into the river gums for the night. Otherwise this cockatoo would just keep flying, circumnavigating the weird continent.
Strange bird of the fartherest shore, its loudness falls into the silence. Its voice talking back at the early settlers, long after thirst and weariness had made them talk to themselves. Approaching Australia from the oceans, the forests blowing eucalyptus and its voice screeching out from that clean scent. Its voice before Australia was stamped into erosion, salt and dust. Its voice now in the sky above the cleared distance that it can never settle upon. Its stories as loud as deep thunder cracking through the clouds, as the weather changes suddenly. There is enough inland space to sing your loud stories into, powerful cockatoo, across the forests, deserts and open farmland. Your wisdom settles inside me and there are so many stories. If only I could fly. 'In good time,' the sky cries back beneath the breast feathers of the birds, 'in good time, in good time.'
My longing inhabits the open country. They are marauding suns, so that watching their great bright undersides disorientates. Which is the bird and which is the desert sun? Then comes the rain. The sentinel warning system goes off like lightning. The long distance flash of their sharp eye is followed by the screech that cuts into silence and threads the heart with longing. They are amongst the country's greatest achievements. The great storytellers, the migrating selves of the inland psyche. A society of jostling squabbling ariel intelligences, in huge trees that hide in the desert where they roost. I have come across trees so enormous out there, alive and dead and stubbornly wedged in the middle of flooded winter rivers, that I thought I was in another land.
Everything was bound for extinction, then they appeared like deep faith or something we could put our trust into. Their giant presence told us that there was much left to be grateful for on this earth in this life. The river gums fed the spirit of the cockatoos and soon became our purpose and our life's work. The cockatoos carry the hottest part of the day in the breasts, as they take their rest in the shade by the feeding grounds. They keep an eye on the rivers and the wind through the highest leaves. Stripping the leaves and bark, they make their natural mark and leave the trees behind, growing magnificent. They exhaust the food supply inside their throats where their voice screeches like a train jamming on its breaks through a tunnel. Just when you thought you were part of their community, they take off from the ground like plants and mountains moving into the sky.
They make everything 'earthbound' want to fly, the harsh raucous screech with the upward inflection. We all thought for that moment we could be like them, until we were left behind. The light is lifting off the land to become heaven. The birds' with sailors' legs like wood, dark grey, the naked wild eye adapted to oceans of arid scrub. They twinkle and perform like acrobats while the other birds leave the noisy terrain. I lifted my arms, in the presence of the entire flock that rose immediately into the air. My clothing lifted with them, as my heart flew away. The flock left that afternoon. Yet I remained on the ground by the brown river. The night was chilly without their white breasts in the trees. How many heartbeats could rest in one red river gum on a chilly night or as warmth amongst the frost on the gum nuts? The next morning the river banks were full of the voices of birds, but the high-pitched screech was absent. The territory of the cockatoo had been threatened and was invalid.
I walked into the bush where the bird smugglers had been. The white cockatoos were gone and the land felt like it had been ripped off and cheapened. After they had been everything that was beautiful now eluded me, just as it had eluded them. There seemed little more left than ghost memories, that had left or were in the process of leaving. The smugglers' greedy feral hearts struck through the land like fire with no restraint or opposition. They introduced themselves and quickly helped themselves to their unearned reward. The places in which to flee were diminishing to such an extent that the only place for the animals to go was back to the dreamtime. I couldn't follow them, so was left with this queer emptiness.
It was the kind of emptiness we will be left with when most of the earth's animals are extinct and we remember what it could have been like had we been more intelligent. It was the kind of loneliness that isolated the heart inside the body and caused acute physical pain, like when two people part after a thirty year marriage, saying to each other, 'I never really knew you,' or 'I don't know who you are anymore.' It made me doubt whether I had ever known the land at all, but it was due to the land rejecting my kind. 'But I'm not one of them,' I tried to explain. Soon the cockatoo flock became ethereal and out of reach. When it wanted no-one to follow it, none could follow it. This is the kind of land that retreats into its own secrets rather than put up a fight. You can kill a secret before you know it.
'I'm not one of them,' I shouted out. But I was alone as I should be when the acute pain settled in me. When we are in a little bit of pain we want to be held and nurtured, but when the pain is intense we just want to be alone. It is a physical reaction, like someone that suddenly stubs their toe and yells, 'don't anyone touch me,' or doubled over to vomit, 'no-one come near me,' or when they are emotionally wounded, 'get away from me.' Even the grass becomes predatory and in very deep pain we know there is really no-one who can be trusted that much. In very deep pain we are a single life just trying to hold on. The morning air was ridding itself of the frozen night. It still had a chill to it, particularly in the shade when the wind picked up. I washed my face in some river water, in an enamel dish by the tent. The sun was glorious but without the great birds, I couldn't shake the feeling that the land was giving up its stories.
I walked along the river bank beneath the red gums. Their presence in the world gave me hope. They were heroic strong trees that hung on by their roots near the river. They were the resting place of the cockatoo flock before the smugglers had stripped the area. I was sitting at the base of one, when something inside the wood spoke to me, like the way bees or termites speak within wood. I turned and saw a hollow midway up into the tree and I knew what must be hidden there. I waited but nothing happened. I went to the hollow and looked inside. Deep in the warm nest were six white cockatoo fledglings. They had the bulbous grey eyes that built compassion within the heart. Their pink bodies were stuck by white feathers as though tiny pieces of straw were piercing their flesh like sticks. I wondered how long they would survive, before their parents felt safe enough to come back, or if they had been abandoned there to die.
I would give it a day before I took them to a wildlife refuge. I parted the soft pink bodies with my hands and buried behind them was something so odd that I almost lost balance. If I had fallen from that height it would have killed me. Amongst the cockatoo fledglings was a tiny winged being, partially wrapped in a stick and saliva cocoon. Had the mother cockatoo regurgitated this substance onto her? She looked at me as if she may have recognised something. Then her eyes lit up and she said, 'you want me to show you?' When eyes speak it is with the depth and moisture of a clear upstream pond, unlike the billabongs that hummed with flies and dried up during spring each year. A small hiss and swaying open mouthed sound came into her throat, as if the hungry sound had emanated from her shoulders and collar bone. I didn't know what else to do and wondered if I was dreaming. It was easy to dream out here.
The dead stillness coaxed one into sleep, where dreams became the only movement. She shouldn't be in the nest with the fledglings. This may have been the reason that these particular parents hadn't come back to feed their young. I reached in and carefully lifted her out of the tree hollow. She wasn't about to bite me, so I carried her down to earth. I thought if I put her in the sun, that it would dry up the mucus she was covered in. Suddenly it was like she was unfurling, trying to escape from a web, or a place in time she had come from. I watched her transformation on the flat grey river rock beneath the red gums. For a second I wondered if she was a cockatoo come to take me home in human form, but she was more like something from the ocean. By mid morning she had grown into the size of a large kangaroo. Her eyes said they would eat me if I came too close, but I felt I had to go to her, while at the same time letting her go.
She loped around on the dry earth, as if she had been given back her feet. She was more marsupial than bird, for although her folded wings rested gracefully upon her shoulders, she bore a huge soft pouch that she carried like a bag. I realised how lost I was when I wanted to go to her. Whenever she displayed her pouch to me, I wanted to climb into its warmth and darkness. I tried not to look too deeply into that orifice, fearing she may already have young inside. She spoke to me through the small hissings and the cries she had learnt from the cockatoo fledglings, her mouth opening as deep as a cave, but no sound apart from that faint rasping came out. I tried to feed her leaves and pods, but her huge hand came down on my wrist, until I thought she might break it. It appeared that she may have been grabbing for me out of fondness.
Soon she was a monster who turned her head to one side and looked down with affection. I was an orphaned baby animal that would hook onto the first thing that looked like a mother. This is what I did with her. I followed her around, desperate and awed inside. She had gained quite an affection for me in her moments on earth, and she approached the river gums and birds with such curiosity, that I wondered if she had been here before, or if I had caught her just passing through. This is how we spent the day. Her sunning her terrific wings on a flat river rock and smiling down at me, as if I was a pleasant insect of the earth that both fascinated and amused her. She was expanding and contracting into various shapes and sizes, her intelligence and moods changed direction and intensity with the breeze. It was so natural that I learnt to adapt to it without fear, the shifting sunlight and the shifting shadows.
There were many changes in her but the pace was slow, bordering on eternal. Her skin was chameleon and tropical, like one of those lizards that shoots down insects with its long and sticky tongue. When I had found her she was the size of a white cockatoo fledgling. Then she grew into a red river gum. Now her wings baked and the sweat dribbled down her smooth dark legs. She was adopting the characteristics of the flat river stone. I wondered if at night she might not cool and contract, peeling like an onion. I waited for her to be my mother, but I loved her just the way she was, within all her transformations. There was something joyful about her presence, as if she had been let out for just a moment in time. Her age and origin puzzled me, but I had already learnt to move quietly through the many secrets of the bush, and only to receive what was offered.
When the skies offer me rain, I receive the sight and smell of rain. The depth of the rain could transform a land into carpets of flowers or fields of hurried soaking brown floodwater. Rainy weather could wet my layers of clothing through and through in seconds, then nothing for years. This was the sort of rain that the land waited for. There was the sensation of dormancy, of matters not revealed. I could have spent all my life on this particular river bank, in this section of bush and still only begun learning upon my death. There were so many mysteries, both stillness in movement and movement in stillness. If she stayed on I would never go back into town. This day filled with joy was the longest happiest day of my life. I felt sheltered and content. I felt like I need go no further and everything I had found was here within this gentle creature. She untangled her long dark mane with her claws after swimming in the river. But since touching the water her eyes became sad, as though she had remembered something from a past life.
The current of the Darling River brought the night air chill to the land, that was determined not to lose its sun. The river was the first to warm and the first to become cold, the dry land following its trend and tendency. I told her that the end of the day could sometimes bring on nostalgia or melancholy, either for the lost morning or times past, but that it was okay because the sun would rise tomorrow. Then I saw her first fear. It was the shade of a goanna in the sun, transparent cream and lime. A tear flew down her cheek. 'Don't worry,' I said. 'Everything returns.' I pointed into the branches of the white box trees to the east. She lived fully beneath the sun and appeared to be relishing each moment, as though it would soon disappear and as though it was something she had never seen before and would never see again.
Maybe when I found her in the tree hollow she had been born there and had never seen the sky. She was as all young birds will one day be, as they see the sky and live within its expansive space and lack of borders like their parents. Perhaps she was like the white cockatoos I had followed across the continent, my eyes in their tiny heads. I asked her if she had come here to collect my spirit and if she would leave with the great white flocks. But she was apart from anything else about this land and she would have no more of this curiosity and concern. Hers had simply been a quiet and contemplative day by the river gums on the banks of the Darling. It was the longest and simplest day that two beings could spend together without fear, even if I had wanted something that she would not give to me. I was deeply attracted to her, but she seemed to be always somewhere else.
It was as though she had lived for a very long time, but just not in this particular place. A feeling of separation came upon me, as she began to look around for something more than what I could offer her. The power of the sun diminished, as it moved down beneath the branches of the trees. The chill of night came around the bends of the river like a mist settling in. She grew restless and sad. I had no way to help her and it felt as if the sun was abandoning us both. Suddenly she lay down on her back and grabbed the wet mud and began to plaster it onto herself, over her knees, chest and pouch. She closed her eyes at intervals and locked her elbows into the smooth grey mud as if she was in a straight jacket. She was trying to lock herself in. She was trying to build a cocoon. She was leaving. 'No,' I cried out. 'I don't want you to go.' I was old enough to know that I needed someone to care about me and for me to care about.
She was everything I had dreamed of in this desolate place. It had all come together in her presence. Past and future met, until there was only the present for either of us. I kneeled before her beautiful folded wings, her dark brown body like a mansion. I cried. It was more an announcement to the world than to either of us. She read my mind so there was no need to talk. As for her speech there had always been something disquieting about it. She had never really spoken to me, except through the mouth of a hungry bird. I began to wonder whether she existed. It seemed like she was on her way to somewhere else. Was it a subterranean land that she was heading towards? Had she been caught up in a sticky web inside the gum tree accidentally, prolonging her life and delaying her journey? There was all the time in the world to answer this and yet now there was no time left at all.
The cockatoos have not returned to the smuggled land all the long warm day. The cockatoo fledglings called out from the tree hollow to my heart. I knew that they would be hungry. Her oncoming departure and the emergency of the small birds told me that it was time for me to resume my work in this world. Once she disappeared around the bend of the Darling River, she would vanish into the subterranean currents of the Great Artesian Basin. I knew that she was headed underground, but her wrapping told me that she would open elsewhere. I wasn't sure whether she was taking the right direction, but how much had I really discovered about rivers in my brief lifetime? These brown rivers led you nowhere and to beneath themselves. They were not merely the retiring shaggy remnants of an inland sea. They were not like the white capped aqua ocean that chopped up coastal spray and birds into the edge of the dry continental air. They would teach me all I needed to know about myself. They were brown snakes entering the earth.
