In 1774 an Otaheite man, Tupia, was taken on board ship by Captain Cook. With him was his pet Rainbow Lorikeet. Tupia died on the trip but the parrot lived for many years in London . The bird figures in Peter Brown's New illustrations of zoology , 1776 and is thus the first image in a European book of an Australian Parrot. I have parroted this illustration and drawn a modern day Lorikeet looking at it. Nearby is a Smoker or Regent Parrot - the subject of several of Shaw Neilsen's poems and now rare and endangered. And in the middle of the painting, I have painted another threatened bird – the South-Eastern Red-tailed Black Cockatoo.
In this work, the birds move about in the foliage with a background of sixteenth and seventeenth century maps of the earth annotated with titles like Terra Incognita and Terra in Periculo. Curious elisions and shifts in the cartography hint that disturbing things may be happening. It may be that the map is being pulled from underneath the parrots in a similar way that increased temperatures caused by global warming may force them to move north or south – leaving far behind the feeding grounds and habitat they need to survive.
From an account of the making of the work by John Wolseley
|
A history of parrots, drifting maps and warming seas Watercolour and carbonised wood on paper. |
|||||||||
|
Carbonised wood, watercolour, coloured pencils on paper. |
