Understory
Recently, chirruping
Bird’s Eye View: Perspectives on the Art and Science of Ornithology
Presented as part of Melbourne Rare Book Week
Museum Theatre, Melbourne Museum
Saturday 20th July, 2024
Below the canopy, find a patch to pause, rewind to another time, and press play. For those who could not make it to Bird’s Eye View: Perspectives on the Art and Science of Ornithology, presented as part of winter’s Melbourne Rare Book Week, you can now watch the recording of our conversation with Dr Karen Rowe, Rebecca Carland, and John Kean, at the Melbourne Museum.
We still have a editions of our “they’re not even parrots” zine made especially to celebrate this event, Turn a bird, available through our online store.
On the topic of post-haste, skip over to Fjord Review to read my response to Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Horizon, currently at the Playhouse.
And on the topic of birds, we are delighted that are artists’ book, Restoring corridors, is currently on display at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery until the 24th of November. One of seventy shortlisted works for the 2024 National Works on Paper, it includes an Eastern rosella attributed to Louisa Atkinson, and a Gould’s Burrowing bettong, among many. We are chuffed this work was selected, and we are looking forward to seeing the work installed at the opening this Saturday.
2024 National Works on Paper
Saturday 31st August — Sunday 24th November, 2024
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington, Victoria 3931
11am–4pm, Tuesday–Sunday
(Closed public holidays)
Pictured below, delivering Restoring corridors between MIFF screenings in August; mail art from Sarah Bodman and Linda Parr, as part of UWE’s In Praise of Birds for World Book Night 2024 (including @chrystal.cherniwchan & Craig Tattersall, and pigeon post stamps by @stephenfowler_rubberstamper); a suitably, beautifully winged 4X4 by @pasadenamansions; our new back garden enclosure (in addition to ropes, shade cloth, safety net, and other essentials) for the Grey-headed flying foxes in our care at Tiny but Wild, as part of our successful City of Yarra 2023/24 Climate Action & Environment Small Project grant; Celeste, Lute, Sylvie, and Linus, and a delivery of Koala Clancy browse, to get them acclimatised before their September soft-release; and our a nighttime walk in the company of Brush-tailed rock-wallabies and Eastern barred bandicoots at Mt Rothwell, Victoria’s largest feral predator-free ecosystem, with a focus on Victorian species with a particular emphasis on species indigenous to the basalt plains grasslands, habitats and woodlands.
Smitten with Gould’s miniatures (Notes on aquatic birds of Australia, unpublished), and inspired by Historie naturelle des perroquets, explore further:
George Shaw, Zoology of New Holland, London, James Sowerby, 1794 (page by page on the Biodiversity Heritage Library)
John Gould, The Birds of Australia Vol. IV, London, published by the author, 1848
A chromolithographic print made after an original watercolour by James Whitley Sayer for Rev. J.J. Halley's A Monograph of the Psittacidae or Parrot Family of Australia (1871)
Image credit: European roller (Coracias garrulus), Golden-crowned kinglet (Regulus satrapa), Newton’s parakeet (Psittacula exsul, last recorded sighting: 14th of August, 1875), and Red-cheeked cordon-bleu (Uraeginthus bengalus) within a postcard collage within our artists’ book, Looking for green, remaining hopeful, 2024.
