OUTSIDE the window, on one of the shortest days of the winter, I hear a sudden commotion: startled squawks and the beating of tiny wings.
It is a concatenation of goldfinches, squabbling at the nyjer seed feeder. Such tiny birds to be kicking up a racket; it’s unusual in Ireland at any time of year, let alone the quiet fastnesses of the winter solstice. It makes me smile – and, for a second, out of the blue, transports me all the way to sunny Australia. The first time I walked in the park near my daughter and son-in-law’s house in the western suburbs of Sydney, I was jetlagged and had a scratchy headache. So I logged the sounds coming from the trees as artificial. Bells of some kind, put there by the local council, no doubt (I grumpily calculated) to make it a more appealing place to walk. It took a couple of days to figure out that it was birds. Bell miners, to be precise – unassuming little birds which spend their days in eucalyptus trees and ring from dawn to dusk.
As my head returned to something resembling sanity, I discovered in this park an almost orchestral selection of extraordinary voices. Two kookaburras in a tree can notch up as many decibels as a family of hyperactive monkeys. Another bird – could it really be a bird? Yes, it’s an eastern whipbird – sounds like somebody stretching an elastic band, then letting it go with an exultant but weirdly musical pop.
And then there are the magpies. On this side of the world, magpies do that irritating football-rattle thing which nobody but the most dedicated magpie researcher could consider attractive or interesting. But Australian magpies sound seriously cool – like a bunch of daleks having a book club meeting. They don’t have a call, so much as a low-pitched electronic purring.
The creek, meanwhile, turned out to be home to a collection of sturdy frogs, the path alongside it haunted by lizards large and small. You’ll be strolling nonchalantly along when there’s a sudden rustle and slither in the bushes by your feet.
“Snake!” goes your finely-tuned (or jetlagged) evolutionary subconscious, causing you to jump back to a safe distance – only to see a tiny lizardy tail disappear beneath a stone. On my most recent visit, a creature the size of a cat was sunning himself on the tarmac as I approached. He looked at me. I gaped at him. Then he was gone.
Ah, well, you may be thinking. That’s the Australian bush experience for you. Except that we’re not talking about a very bush-y place at all. Castle Hill Park is more Dalkey than Daintree Rainforest. It’s surrounded by wide, well-manicured streets full of graceful houses, immaculate gardens, and The Towers shopping centre (think Dundrum, double it, and add a couple of extra wings). My daughter and son-in-law’s house is on Tuckwell Road, for goodness’ sake. It doesn’t sound like the middle of the jungle, does it? But there are roads nearby with very different names. Yaringa Road and Ulundri Drive hint at another culture altogether; the indigenous aboriginal culture which has all but vanished from this part of the Australian capital. Scratch the affluent surface and you’ll find a violent, often vicious, history. These quiet streets were once the centre of a protracted, bloody struggle between the white settlers and the nomadic native tribes. In the 19th century, Castle Hill Park was the site of Australia’s first lunatic asylum. When we sit drinking espresso and eating chocolate cannoli in the shopping centre, we’re sitting on the ground where the Irish led a rebellion against their British military bosses.
Australia is still struggling – as we all are – to come to terms with an often unpalatable past. Meanwhile, however, far from dolling up the park, the council of Baulkham Hills shire is doing its best to preserve a tiny slice of precious woodland habitat from the depredations of the prime real estate predators who prowl the area.
On the other side of the road, in the back garden of my daughter’s house, there’s a totally different cast of bird characters. The trees are full of red and green parrots, and cockatoos swoop down to drink from the pool, dipping their crested white heads and scooping up elegant mouthfuls, apparently heedless of the fact that the water is full of the salt and other minerals my son-in-law regularly and carefully measures in to keep it fit for human recreational purposes.
The call of one particular bird has become the soundtrack to my visits Down Under. It took me three years to identify it. Internet searches, CDs, books, lurking in the bushes with a tape recorder like an incompetent David Attenborough: all failed.
It took a casual inquiry to my son-in-law’s father, who has been a gardener in Sydney for over 40 years and is an expert on local plants and wildlife, to solve the mystery. A pied butcherbird. The words were music to my ears.
Now I can listen to the butcherbird whenever I want. Close my eyes and imagine that instead of the depths of an Irish winter I’m lolling around the pool, Christmas dinner in one hand, sunglasses in the other. Such is the power of birdsong to conjure up landscape.
But first, I’m off to put out more nyjer seed before those goldfinches end up as a tattered clutch of feathers on the patio.