Riding the Black Cockatoo Read Free Page A

wall unit that took up an entire wall. The bottom consisted of cupboards containing Mum’s good dinner set and boxed pewter doodads – things given at births and christenings, things put aside for special occasions that never actually saw the light of day; the sorts of things that when you open them release the scent of four-decades-old air. There were photo albums here, and an enormous case of slides, a cantankerous old slide projector and a rolled-up, yellowed screen that had long forgotten what it was to be flat. The centremost cupboard had once snugly housed the television set; now, in this age of widescreen plasma, it housed Dad’s collection of football videotapes. Above the bottom cupboard level was a sort of buffet area on which sat my parents’ new TV, their stereo gear and record collection; and above that were two levels of shelves for books, framed photographs and prized pieces from Dad’s collection of curios.
    Dad had been a bush vet, a vocation which generously fed his appetite for collecting. Over the decades his profession had taken him into hundreds of the nation’s farmyards, outbuildings and machinery sheds. Amid the smell of bagged animal feed, fertiliser, diesel oil and cracked leather, his magpie eye would scan the gloom for dust-caked treasure hanging from rafters or half concealed beneath ancient tarpaulins. Over the years Dad had amassed a mind-boggling haul. He had scores of antique bottles on display around the house and many more in crates. There were convict-made bricks with the makers’ thumbprints still clearly visible; there were rusted handshears gleaned from shearing-shed walls; tobacco tins, branding irons, dingo traps, rabbit traps, and snakeskins as long as beds. He’d collected interesting pieces of stone kicked up in paddocks and cattleyards: thunder-eggs, chunks of petrified wood, clusters of quartz, even a baby-head-sized lump of coal. He carted home horse-driven ploughs and pre-Federation hand tools, a grinding stone the size of a car wheel, blown-out Model-T Ford radiators, kerosene-powered refrigerators, and rusted-out milk urns. There was so much stuff. He had a double-ended timbercutter’s saw the length of a small car which was thoughtfully displayed next to the metre-long, toothy-edged nose of a sawfish (not many families had one of those!). But it wasn’t all blokey stuff, he also had an eye for the delicate: fob and pocket watches, an exquisite pair of round-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that I liked to imagine once belonged to a Chinese spice trader, miniature scales for measuring gold dust, snuffboxes of carved bone, old pearl brooches and pins, silver matchbox holders and ladies’ pocket mirrors. At the height of my father’s mania, it was not unusual to wake up and find a horse-drawn buggy (without the horse) that he had lugged home from the bush and reassembled overnight in the front yard.
    Dad was a keen sportsman too, and there was a constantly fluctuating collection of rifles, guns and muskets. There were bayonets, a wickedly sharp Gurkha fighting knife, and an intricately inlaid samurai sword. There were the brass casings of artillery shells, and assorted bullets of every size. There were deer antlers, and the razor-sharp tusks from wild boar that he had dispatched on regular hunting trips.
    Show-and-tell days at school were never a challenge; my brother and I would just grab something – anything – from around the house. Even if we didn’t know what the object actually was, we could always make up a good story. My favourite was an old grinding iron from a flour mill; it was about the size of a cricket ball, black and mottled, and to the untrained eye looked like a small cannonball. I remember regaling my classmates with stories of how it had been used by Captain Cook’s crew to disperse ‘troublesome natives’ as they were preparing to land their longboats on the beach of Fraser Island. I told them my father had been on a fishing trip when it was