More on Parrots

Below are answers I gave to a series of questions sent to me (mid 2015, I answered January, 2016) but never presented or used in any specific way:

*parrots have always been 'central' to what i do for three reasons:

(1) they were always around me at wheatlands farm - i loved them and yet i shot them as a child and that contradiction was one of the driving forces that led me to animal-rights activism and veganism (see a recent animal-rights poem just up at [this blog].
(2) as a child i also trapped them out on the big farm my father managed near mullewa, and then incarcerated them in cages down south. watching their tragedy unfold awakened me to what i was doing. i was saturated in the suffering i had caused.
(3) they have become more than symbol to me, more than 'transitional objects', they are real accompaniments to my life in the wheatbelt and i to theirs. i feel an advocate for their rights, and try to create space for their nesting and lives.

*i spent many years of my childhood living in mount pleasant by the river, though we spent as much time as possible on wheatlands farm. we then later moved to geraldton. and i spent time, with my brother, up north with my father on access visits and holidays, and also on the farm near mullewa he managed. i have lived in fremantle and south perth (twice), i have also lived in northbridge and for a time in the globe hotel (gone now) in perth. i wrote a series of city-dwelling poems which were published as a chapbook by vallum. they are entitled 'inner city poems'. more of my suburban poems - always about space - are to be found in the book i did with robert drewe entitled sand (fremantle press). the wheatbelt has been the main focus and living place of my 'australian' life, but i have (long ago) spent periods in the city. i lived on the streets for a considerable time when i was alcoholic/addicted for those many years. twenty years sober now. i associate the city with lostness, confusion and confinement re space because of the cycle of self-abuse.

*i think birds are a spatial release for suburbs - they are hope and transcendence. when i wandered the dark lonely places of suburban enclosure (consider john clare and enclosure), i literally communed with birds by way of sharing. i sought to protect them and they gave back. 'introduced species' of birds make their place where native birds have been destroyed, and they in turn enrich the ecology and allow for other birds to co-exist. people who shoot pigeons and rainbow lorikeets etc in the suburbs are an outrage - in the context of 'invasive species'. what a cheek! aviary escapees, native species (especially the wonderful carnaby's) and other species that have gained traction, should be protected and nurtured. for themselves, primarily, but also because they offer understanding of the world at large, realign and free the spatial constraints of the city, and show that there is more to the world than 'owning' animals and owning space. suburbs are about control - birds break down that control in non-violent liberating ways, they can share, why don't we?

a poetics of bird-spatiality in the city.


john kinsella