![]() He grew bored living in the house, and would let himself out of his cage to destroy stuff. If I pointed out that what he was listening to passing in the sky was an aeroplane, he would repeat the word straight back to me.Īlexis Wright, winner of the Miles Franklin award and the Stella prize. And all the while he was learning to speak very good English. ![]() If I was having a baked-bean or cheese-and-salad sandwich on a plate or cracker biscuits, then he would have to have the same too. ![]() If I was having cereal for breakfast, he had to have the same in his bowl. If I was having tea, he had to have his own small cup. It got to the stage where he had to have everything I ate or drank. It was from my shoulder that he begun to fully rule his new world. He then begun to sit on my shoulder, where he liked to groom strands of my hair, while watching the words of stories appearing one by one on the computer screen, and the world going by outside the window. We could not bear to see him in a cage so he became free range, and he sat beside me on the back of his own chair as I wrote. He did not care much for the rest of the family though, and his behaviour towards them was unpredictably lovable or full of jealousy, with wings expanded, screeching and hissing – especially if they got too close. We became the best of friends and he never bit me again. One day, about six weeks after he arrived in our lounge room in a big cage and simply within no particular moment, instead of trying to bite me as usual, he let me pat him. He took a keen interest in everything I did and ate, who I spoke to on the phone, the endless trail of visitors and, probably, he picked up all the local intrigues of the crazy ins and outs of Northern Territory politics, the confidential strategic thinking in Aboriginal campaigns, and whatever conversations were going on. The little king spent his days watching me with his beady black eyes while listening to either classical or country and western music, and while I wrote my novel Plains of Promise. In other words, he was the boss and I was his slave. Somehow I managed to clean his cage with all the newspapers he ripped up without having my hand bitten off while he was going completely bananas, and then I brought him fresh gumtree foliage to beautify his home, which he destroyed along with the newspaper, and gave him saucers of cut-up fruit, vegetables, seed and water. Every day I talked to him, paid him many compliments for his extraordinary beauty, and gave him the name of Pirate. He hated everyone and hissed like a mad white ghost whenever anyone went near his cage. Within days of arriving in Alice Springs he came to live with my family as a basically wild, and seemingly untameable, rebellious adolescent. This wild young cockatoo was taken to central Australia, where the skies would eventually be large enough for his freewheeling temperament to roam. As a fledging, so I was told, he was rescued in a relocation of sulphur-crested cockatoos from the vicinity of Tullamarine airport, so that he would not end up being a bird-strike victim caught up in a jet turbine of one of those long-haul international Boeing jetliners taking off at about 180mph to Hong Kong, London, Paris or wherever else these people carriers fly to on the planet. This is a story of Pirate, Australia’s proper number one rex regum et volucres, king of birds.
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