Providers

A bloke I know classifies all birds as either shitehawks or dickybirds. Who knows, perhaps he doesn’t believe it either. Problem is, the line keeps shifting. Too many birds just don’t fit these categories. Take the shearwater. It flies fifty thousand kilometres a year in an endless quest for summer. Small it may be, dickybird it ain’t. The gannet is a problem too, a great big bird but no shitehawk. More a provider. Always looking for food, but greedy, never! Wide its wingspan, sure its flight and distinctive the creamy custard-yellow head with heavy mascara and blue-grey eye-shading on the concorde profile. This sets off to perfection the milkwhite body and wings tipped with black. It floats forty feet above the waves and its prey, the whiting that school on the shoals of Port Phillip Bay. Watch the wings snap shut, the head lock on dive and down it arrows into the sea, leaving a great plume of water that arks its entry point. Effortlessly it rises and heads off. The Pope’s Eye, or the Annulus if you consult Her Majesty’s shipping charts, is a small semi-circle of rocks breasting the Rip into Port Phillip Bay. The sea pounds the outside, but inside you rest in a forty-foot lagoon of clear bluewater – a wonderful anchorage, just the rocks and the surge of the sea. Often it is quite deserted except for the gannets. There is a jetty high on one side, standing some fifteen feet out of the water, built so that coastguards can service the navigation lights. There is not an inch of space that is not covered with gannets. When it comes to nests gannets are minimalists. The egg is kept warm under beautiful blue feet. The young just squat on the deck waiting for the return of the foraging parents. In they come, full of fish, circle, attempt a landing, find no space, circle again, brushing the heads of neighbours who kind of move up, protesting loudly, and finally down they plop, those magnificent pinions suddenly awkward things to be tucked away. This is high-rise living hugger mugger. Parents, fluffy chicks, moulting adolescents, new-feathered young adults, harassed parents, all shift, pulse and screech as each returning feeder demands his or her space in the colony. But for loving you need a place apart. Ten feet from the high-rise on their special rock, watch this couple discovering the unique gannet beauty of the other. He says I love you by twining his neck around hers. She clicks her beak in agreement. She explores the delicious sensation of sliding her neck over his and taking in the back – what a back! – then brings her head right round again. Sinuous intertwining bliss! But an itch on her left breast brings her head down to do a delicate bit of preening. He, not to be outdone, twines over and above her and preens her, beak to beak, in such outpourings of love that what female gannet would not murmur I do I do? To one side the shifting, squawking, quarrelling result of all this preening, but even there gannets mean love. I have a question: why, when gannets fall in love and fairly simply get on with their gannetting, do we do it so hard? Why do dickybirds fall for shitehawks most of the time? This still stumps me. I mean, shitehawks swallow dickybirds; do dickybirds like being swallowed? I first met My An in the class of English migrants. I was teaching at weekends to supplement the miserable wage I was earning as an articled clerk. She was small, dark, with a shining head of hair that I longed to touch, just stroke. Her English pronunciation was unintelligible, but her book know ledge of English very good. I decided that the basic phrases with which I was helping the others were not the way to go. She needed conversation and I, John Francis Thomas, was going to supply it. We would have lunch on Saturdays. Well, you can guess the rest. First it was restaurants, but that got too expensive, then it was simple Vietnamese food, then Aussie barbecues, then bed, and finally the altar – or at least the magistrate’s office. Her story was not unfamiliar in Australia. Back home a large devoted family, abject poverty, the soldiers, the political see-saw, guns, near-rape, escape, the harrowing journey in a leaky boat, the pirates, the internment camp, the flight to Australia, the hostel, the searing unbearable loneliness, and then, Me. Poor little dickybird – how could one not whisper those reassuring words, those promises to look after, to take care of, to blot out memories so harsh, so unspeakable, to prove that here was one man who would make up for all those others, would transform her life? I believed it. So did she. But can any man truly guess at the horrors that made her scream out at night? Sure you can hold her close, soothe the body that sobbed in your arms, but what could you do against the pain, the terror that wasn’t there? Outside the clink and hum and rush of a Melbourne morning, inside hollow-eyed depression, and blankness. l started to lose faith in my ability to protect her. She lost the baby. There would be no more. Tentatively one day she asked me about adoption. Her sister’s child. Bring it out. A boy. Sure, I said, why not? Oh, the transformation! My bird hummed, and painted and sewed, and I knew someone in Immigration, didn’t I, and then the nervous wait at the airport, and Sam became our first. There followed Emily (second sister’s), Luke (an Aunt’s), John, Ann and Peter (all first sister’s), and the last little imp, her youngest brother’s orphan, my beloved Tim. And of course her mother, to help. And then her father was found, and two uncles. We got bigger and bigger houses in poorer suburbs as my practice did not expand at the same rate as my family. She was so busy now that there was little time for play, and no privacy. And like a fool I took it. For fifteen years I took it. Stayed on the platform doing what all platform dwellers so. One day at the end of a particularly long and chaotic family argument conducted in a mishmash of English and Vietnamese, I lost my temper. I rode my rage to its exhausted conclusion through which the family sat, silent, embarrassed for me. I bet you only married me to get your blasted family out, I spluttered. Bending my head in shame at the unworthiness of this thought, I glimpsed a fleeting expression of pride in the upright carriage of her head, pride but a little fear as well. A chasm yawned. Then we both knew and from that time she cease to pretend that I was anything other than her provider. The shitehawk kept her side of the bargain, all right. My meals were cooked, the house quieter, but, you know, I miss my dickybird. So now I come out here in my boat. Alone. And watch the gannets.

Colleen Isaac

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The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

Mothers of the Mind: The remarkable women who shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath by Rachel Trethewey

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

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