Nadine Williams

Kookaburra’s special song

Kookabura’s first visit

Remember the childhood song “Kookaburra sits on the Old Gum Tree…Merry, Merry King of the Bush is He….’’. The words flooded back this week when a kookaburra descended upon the gums surrounding the new garden and sat on a low-hanging dead branch. The interest in this snippet is that in the eight years I have stayed at Belair and the last five years when I have lived here, we have not seen a kookaburra close-up.

There are plenty so high in the trees it’s almost impossible to spot them and they laugh their merry heads off.  Their chorus is a part of the cabaret of birdsong in Belair.   Yet for the past three days, the kookaburra sat upon another branch of the same tree for some time before flying to the new garden fence, no more than three metres from the house. I snapped the beautiful bird so many times and took meat out to feed it, but it kept its distance.

It so happened, that the first time I saw this magnificent bird on the dead branch, former Adelaidean, Sue Mapp, who once ran the Variety Club in Adelaide when she was Sue Fraser, was attending the Wicked Women media members’ Christmas lunch here (see Life and Style by Nadine Williams).  Sue wasn’t at all surprised by the visit. “In my  Sydney home,  a kookaburra comes to my feet to eat the meat I drop there, but it won’t let me touch it,’’ she said.

What interests me now in reflection, is that this bird did not cackle or laugh at all, unlike the song which says …”Laugh Kookaburra, laugh Kookaburra, Gay your Life Must Be.’’  Instead, it sat silently for 10 minutes each time on its selected branch and this morning it rested for five minutes on the fence post.  It fascinated me and I share that photograph with you.

Kookaburra on the old gum tree

DAY FOUR:  Goodness! The kookaburra has returned this morning and this time only momentarily sitting on his favourite branch until it swooped towards the window where I sat and swept up over the roofline.  He returned a few minutes later, and this time, his cackling cry aroused me from my meditation to watch him laughing merrily.

My mind is filled with thoughts about that kookaburra’s visit – four days in a row – the foremost one being to remind me to laugh more and to be gay and that life is such a gift to enjoy such moments.

However, I also remember the special relationship Olivier had with “Eric’’, the frog-mouthed owl and here I take an excerpt from my memoir From France With Love.

I was writing about Olivier’s collection of beautiful and fascinating objects.

“He never had his own room in childhood but he has certainly made up for it since. An array of precious objects sit on the windowsill in his study. The room stays under the watchful eye of “Eric”” a stuffed tawny frogmouth owl that was once Olivier’s pet. He saved the bird as a chick and it happily cohabited at Belair well into its adulthood. “We think Eric simply died of a broken heart,’’  he told me later. “He was left alone in the house nd the children called in  to feed him each day on a roster system. Then one day he was dead. The children put him in the freezer and when I got home I had him stuffed. I loved Eric. He had lived his life on my shoulder.’’

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