This beautiful piece is about the loss of birds, of wonder and of boyhood in Anson’s home place – the northern plains of Victoria. I think the opening image: “Jigsaw pieces of new silence begin to join” is as poignant a metaphor of environmental loss as I have read.
To match the quiet mystery of the article is one of my favourite photographs, of a Bush Stone-Curlew, as mentioned in the piece. The photograph was taken by Don Hunt for an excellent little book called ‘The Bush Stone-Curlew in Northern Victoria’2 (see Photographs section 1.8.6). At first glance you can barely see the Curlew, so well hidden is it in its scrubby environment, but then you see its wild eye and the whole image materialises like a pointillist painting. It seems to be a bird as much of the imagination as of feather and bone.
1 Cameron, A. 2015. The Cry of a Growing Silence. The Age, August 15th.
2 Sleigh, S., Williams, L., and Stothers, K. 2010. The Bush Stone-Curlew in Northern Victoria – Conversations and Conservation. GBCMA, Shepparton.
