One of two new artists’ books for 2021

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Something reverberated
20 page concertina artists’ book, inkjet print on Canson Arches 88 310gsm, with accompanying narrative (by Gracia Haby), housed in a Solander box (by Louise Jennison) with original watercolour cover on Saunders Waterford Aquarelle 300gsm white hot-press paper
Printed by Arten
Edition of two

As the fronds of Something reverberated dry on the working table, please enjoy this stroll. With heartfelt thanks to Dr Anna Welch for proofreading the following.

There were once trees growing under the roads. There are still creeks flowing beneath the directional pathways we’ve imposed. Patches of green remain, here and there. Pieces of what was, though dimmer, diminished. A jigsaw forest that hints at what could have been, should have been, and echoes the sprung rhythm words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been”[i].

Elevation gain 243 m; length of loop 6.7 km.

The green patch on the map had looked sizable, but it turned out to be less so. Ringed by roads that flatten the ancient connections of nature’s web beneath the value systems of efficiency, profit, and ownership: the remaining forest. One continuous tract of land no more, the small, remaining forest holds on. I walk to peel back the roads and see what’s beneath, what the world looks like from a different vantage point. “Deep in the woods, I tried walking on all fours. I did it for an hour or so, through thickets, across a field, down to a cranberry bog”[ii], in the spirit of Mary Oliver. I walk to lose the world beyond.

When I reached the middle, and fell in step with the forest, it felt to have no end. It holds ancient noise, and surface roots to trip or catch you. A floor of fronds and rich, dark mud, the reason for the ‘Slippery when muddy’ signage at the beginning of the path. Here the world is different, if you let it be. An Eastern yellow robin (Eopsaltria australis), the ‘dawn harper’, flitted in the gloved green hush of Slender tree fern, Silver wattle, Small leaf bramble[iii]. When I loosened my focus, their movements alerted me to their presence all around me. The forest was inhabited by all sorts of birds, darting, calling, neatly punctuating sentence after sentence.

I saw the trees that had fallen in a recent storm lying long and flat against the earth. In this state of change, at their bright yellow ends, it was possible to count their inner rings. The smell of resin was strong. Next time I pass, they’ll be darker and damper and in the process of being claimed by lichens and mosses. Long logs at right angles to their kin, the Mountain ash, still reaching skyward.

I looked for display mounds of bare scratched earth. I looked at my own limbs, and wondered what musical instrument they might resemble if I were removed from this setting and seen lifeless elsewhere, just as European taxidermists once thought the tail feathers of the lyrebird formed the stringed instrument from which their English common name is derived. In the shape of the letter U? Why?

‘Berry lid’ is an anagram for ‘lyrebird’. Thoughts, like the forest tracks, lead to places I don’t always expect.

I listened for the lyrebird.

The guidebooks all agreed; they described the song of the Grey shrikethrush (Colluricincla harmonica) as mellow and liquid, with a typical song phrase consisting of 4–8 notes, often beginning with 2–4 repetitive notes.

The Laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), they chimed in unison on both the page and screen, a raucous cackle.

“We-we-we-tu-whit”. The song of the Golden whistler (Pachycephala pectoralis), a series of loud, sharp whistles, that often ends with a whipcrack-like note.

The “wirra-wirra”, with the emphasis on the first syllable, of a juvenile Pied currawong (Strepera graculina).

The whistle and whipcrack call and the 1–4 notes response of Eastern whipbirds (Psophodes olivaceus) hidden in the undergrowth.

All of these gurgles and whistles, bubblings and complexities, the Superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) mimics. The lyrebird hears them in the surrounding forest, and in doing so polishes their melody of mimicry. A forest garland of brilliant twittering they learned firstly from their parents, “like a genetically inherited trait”[iv], ensuring little change in the repertoire. Their song is one passed down the line. Their song is one learned and constantly finessed.

They can mimic the sound of car alarms, the chainsaws of foresters, the barks of canines, and the click-whirr shutter-snap of cameras too. Or rather, Chook[v] did at Adelaide Zoo and since went Sir David Attenborough viral. He hatched at the Healesville Sanctuary, and lived his less-wild life in captivity. As the panda sanctuary was built around him, he learned the call of the hammer and drill. A lyrebird is a superb mimic. But I needn’t worry that they’ll add my sound to their composition next time I pass through the forest[vi]. Their green reflection, in this regard, is complete without my intrusion. They can, after all, replicate “the chuckle of a flock of Crimson Parrots”[vii].

Manna gum, Blackwood, Tree everlasting[viii], teeming. The forest was bordered by roads, but it was still ancient, deep down, in the parts we allowed to remain.

When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

[i] Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Binsey Poplars (felled 1879)’, Poems and Prose (Indiana University: Penguin Books, 1953), p. 39.

[ii] Mary Oliver, ‘Staying Alive’, Upstream: Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), p. 19.

[iii] Common names for Cyathea cunninghamii, Acacia dealbata, and Rubus parvifolius.

[iv] Ann Jones, ‘Lyrebird legends abound, but not all the stories are true. Let’s sort fact from fiction’, Off Track, ABC Science, 30th July, 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-28/lyrebird-myths-busted-bird-calls/11342208, accessed 4th July, 2021.

[v] “This is a very famous segment of a very famous series called Life of Birds. It stars David Attenborough and it is gorgeous. And it also leads you down the garden path a little, using the magic of television. According to analysis from Dr Hollis Taylor from the University of Sydney, the bird in this clip is actually at least two birds, both of whom were raised in captivity. The main one, who mimicked drills, hammers and construction sounds was Chook…. [He] would also call out to himself — saying “chook chook” like a human might say, and he’d also whistle like an old man. The keepers at the Adelaide Zoo said everyone was very impressed with Chook’s singing ... except for the female lyrebirds, who never once agreed to breed with him based on his anthropogenic mimicry.” Ann Jones, ‘Lyrebird legends abound, but not all the stories are true’, Off Track, 2019.

[vi] “To observe him you must study his movements, learn of his runways, the position of his dancing and scratching mounds, and you must learn to crawl on the ground like a beetle and wriggle along like a snake; but above all you must have plenty of time and patience.” James R. Kinghorn, ‘The Lyre Bird at Home: A New Gallery Group for the Museum’, The Australian Museum Magazine, Volume 4, No. 1, January–March 1930, pp. 2–7.

[vii] From a listing on Antipodean Books, New York, a 1932 recording, The History and Song of the Lyrebird, Australia’s Greatest Songster is described as “‘....the first record of the Lyre Bird ever made in the native haunts of Australia’s premier songster’. Recorded by Herschells Pty Ltd. Sound Picture Producers Melbourne in the Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria, Australia under the supervision of Mr. Ray Littlejohns, member of Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. Dialogue by Mr. Alfred L. Samuel. Record in fine condition in very good printed yellow/orange jacket, illustrated with a drawing of a lyrebird. From the wrapper — ‘His mimicry is almost uncanny and in addition to his wonderful repertoire you will hear above the roar of the wind in the forest, perfect imitations of — the Butcher Bird, the Kookaburra, the Australian Thrush, the Whip Bird, the chuckle of a flock of Crimson Parrots, the Pilot bird, the Black Cockatoo, the Honeyeater.... You will also distinguish what appears to sound like a man hammering a fence, a water pump in action, a Dog barking the warning cry of a White Cockatoo, the chuckle of a domestic Fowl and a man whistling for his Dog.’ From the library of Theodora Cope, one of the founders of the Cornell Ornithology Laboratory, who photographed birds throughout the Southern Hemisphere with her father Francis Cope in the late 1920s. Jacket with some corner bends otherwise very good.”

[viii] Common names for Eucalyptus viminalis, Acacia melanoxylon, and Ozothamnus ferrugineus.

References:
Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way: a look at how birds talk, work, play, parent, and think (Scribe Publications: Brunswick, Victoria, 2020)

Walter E. Boles, The Robins and flycatchers of Australia (Angus & Robertson Publishers: Sydney, 1988)

Alexander H. Chisholm, Mateship with Birds (Scribe Publications: Brunswick, Victoria, 2013)

Nicholas Day and Ken Simpson, Field Guide to the birds of Australia, 8th edition (Penguin Books Australia: Camberwell, Victoria, 2019)

Peter J. Higgins, John M. Peter, and William K. Steele, Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds, Volume 5, ‘Tyrant-flycatchers to Chats’ (Oxford University Press: Melbourne, 2001)

Ronald Strahan, Cuckoos, Nightbirds and Kingfishers of Australia (Angus & Robertson Publishers: Sydney, 1994)

Peter Wohlleben, The Inner Life of Animals: Surprising Observations of a Hidden World, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Vintage: London, 2018)

Image credit: “On the tourist track, Sherbrooke, Fern Tree Gully, Victoria” Valentine & Sons. postcard, ca.1900, 8.7 x 14 cm, State Library Victoria