Lyrebirds

In 2019, Sharon Edgar-Jones and Albert Burgman published their Wanarruwa: Beginner’s Guide, a book that works with the Wanarruwa people of the so-called Hunter River region of New South Wales to “repatriate and revitalise our linguistic identity”.1 On the book’s cover is a bird, luminous in purple, orange, gold and magenta. His huge tail feathers uncoil from his body, curling this way and that, wildly asymmetrical, as he fixes a gleaming orange eye on the viewer. He is what many of us know as a lyrebird.

There is no word for the lyrebird among the book’s lists of words salvaged from the wreckage of over two hundred years of hostile occupation, but this painting by Wanarruwa and Anaiwan artist, Saretta Fielding, suggests how far away his Wanarruwa name might be from the prevailing English one. The figuration of lyrebirds as lyrebirds hinges on an ideologically freighted imagining of other-than-human and other-than-European life that is coterminous and complicit with the colonisation of Australia. It also hinges on the fact that some people came genuinely to believe that the male bird’s tail (which mostly flops behind him, but in display splays wide open, inverted in a shower of feathers over his head), has the erect tight symmetry of a lyre. It seems that the first portrayal of the lyrebird in this guise, and the first discussions of the bird as a lyrebird, occurred on European soil, and were gradually shipped back to the places where lyrebirds were being hunted down, first as ornithological curiosities and later to use their tail feathers as adornments for hats. By the late 1840s, the belief that this bird possesses a lyre-like tail had pervaded settler Australian culture and continues to, but Fielding’s painting shows how differently an eye schooled in more than European cultural reference points might see this bird.

How the fable of a bird with the tail of a lyre could arise and be replicated is a story that itself might seem to find parallels in the lyrebird’s own practice of replication and repetition, or vocal mimicry, a practice into which commentators have knitted their worries about imitation more generally. Britain’s establishment of the prison camps of New South Wales coincided in England with a poetic culture that worried at the Enlightenment’s trenchant division between human and nonhuman/more-than-human semiosis, and that in turn attracted ongoing worry about the semantic emptiness of mimetic representations of “nature” and other imitative practices. Critiques of Romantic culture from the early nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, treat mimetic modes as a kind of shibboleth for sorting rational, meaningful, human song from irrational, mechanistic or organic nonhuman sound-making. Subscribers to this binary deplore a Romantic poetry that conjures affective experience seemingly resistant to paraphrase. Yvor Winters, for instance, criticises “Romantic nature poetry”, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s in particular, for its “implicit reference to a non-existent symbolic value”. Poetic language that is used “to embody a feeling”, but that can’t be paraphrased, he writes, is meaningless.2 Although F.R. Leavis does not articulate quite so clearly his objections to mimetic poetry, his description of Shelley’s writing as “repetitive, vaporous, monotonously self-regarding and often emotionally cheap”3 smacks of a similar objection to the mimetic mode: Shelley’s poetry is “repetitive” of its subject, re-enacting it rather than describing it. And it reproduces feeling rather than meaning; this, at least, is how I parse the words “emotionally cheap”, although they more obviously suggest that Shelley’s performance of emotion does not correlate with his real emotion (in this one might detect an echo of Plato, for whom all representational art is a form of “mimesis” that actively scrambles viewers’ access to truth by taking them further from the reality of things).4

In suggesting that the mimesis of Yvor Winters’ phrase “mimetic fallacy” (let alone “mimesis” as Plato uses it) has anything to do with the mimetic behaviour of lyrebirds, I might seem to be collapsing and confusing two senses of the word. One kind of mimesis might be supposed to be a matter of literary style, a deliberate disposition of form in relation to content, commonly opposed as a discursive mode to “diegesis”; the other is supposedly an instinctive copying, the programmatic work of a duplicating organism. But I both want to trouble this distinction and note that it has been troubled since long before I got here. When lyrebirds sing the song of another bird species, they are showing or enacting the story of that bird (as in mimetic narrative), rather than recounting it (as in diegetic narrative). Literary mimesis refers to the world it represents by copying it rather than “telling” it. Earl Miner has claimed, in a cross-cultural discussion of lyric modes, that “The first thing to be said about lyric poetry systems is that they are not mimetic”.5 But why not? It is no coincidence that Shelley describes another mimicking bird, Alauda arvensis, as a poet pouring her “full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art”.6 His representation of the mimicking skylark as a lyrical poet deliberately marries the idea of lyricism and re-presenting (that is, copying) sense impressions from the material world. He in turn imagines the affective materiality of (his) poetry as an attribute of the more-than-human world. In this he reproduces a tendency of Romantic lyrics to trouble the distinction between (human) mind and (nonhuman) organicism by representing the felt dimensions of the more-than-human world.

In the poetic traditions of white Australia, the figure of the lyre has vied with the lyrebird’s imitativeness, making the bird a more or less fit avatar for the poet. For settler Australian poets, the lyrebird facilitates a discussion about whether Australian avifauna provide the kinds of poetic inspiration that the songbirds of Europe do, whether white Australian poets are working at a disadvantage that can be blamed on the prevalence of, say, rowdy parrots and the absence of nightingales – whether Australian birds are as lyrical and inspiring as the songbirds of England. Ultimately, they are asking if white Australian poetry is possible. In an essay of 1965, Judith Wright argues that a fully-fledged (white) Australian poetry would indeed be possible, if only settler poets could arrive at an accommodation with what she calls Australia’s “landscape”. Before “one’s country can become an accepted background against which the poet’s imagination can move unhindered,” she writes, “it must first be observed, understood, described, and as it were absorbed. The writer must be at peace with the landscape before he can turn to its human figures.” This peace, she suggests, is far from having been achieved: “in Australian writing, the landscape has, it almost seems, its own life, hostile to its human inhabitants.”7 Almost sixty years later, the settler trope of a hostile and inhuman landscape persists in Australian literature.

Judith Wright’s vision for an Australian literature that works with Australian landscape is at work in her poem “Lyrebirds”, first published in 1962. She makes no explicit reference to the lyrebirds’ imitativeness and instead focuses on their association with lyricism. She describes them as “the few, the shy, the fabulous, / the dying poets”. One bird bears “like a crest the symbol of his art, / the high symmetrical shape of the perfect lyre”.8 While Les Murray’s relationship to the landscape cannot be exactly opposed to Wright’s, it is a more fraught one: he oscillates, as Bruce Clunies Ross has claimed, from feeling the “difficulty” of the Australian environment, reckoning with “the way it drives some to despair and anger”, and “a deep love of the land”.9 Wright’s lyrebird poem works to establish a sympathy between lyrebirds and poets (a work still informed, I think, by a colonising impulse, despite Wright’s effort to recognise the violence of colonisation). Les Murray’s “Lyre Bird”, on the other hand, stresses the lyrebird’s role as a mimic. Murray deflates the association of the lyrebird with the lyre in the poem’s first word, “Liar”. The bird’s tail is, for Murray, mere “froufrou” (a reduplicative that perhaps reprises the bird’s duplication of song), and “a quiff”, both terms that indicate a frivolous and ornamental excess.10 This characterisation of ornament suggests the lyrebird’s feminised ditziness, and Murray’s lyrebird, apparently the poem’s narrator, engages in a kind of garbled prattle to match: his always rather opaque narration disintegrates into a series of near-homophones (“cattlebell” meets “kettle-boil” and the like). He cannot render a meaning that survives his obsession with sonic form. If this is Murray’s point, it is one he – ironically? – makes through his own adroit manipulation of sonic form.

That there is a tension between the lyrical and the mimetic perhaps seems obvious: one is associated with originating genius, the other with the opposite. The university (which like the penal colony of New South Wales is fundamentally an institution of the Enlightenment) derides what it understands to be imitation and celebrates what it understands to be originality. Breaches of “academic integrity”, a term that could refer to so many of the politically and ethically charged dimensions of students’ learning, in university policy documents denote variations on the theme of plagiarism. Concomitantly, the supposed originality of a supposedly original contribution to knowledge is regularly framed as more important than the beauty or utility of what is known, or its capacity to move. The reasoning mind analyses and describes; it does not re-present. But alongside the Enlightenment enthusiasm for the idea of the rational human as an originating genius, anti-rationalist poetics produced understandings of a poetry that could take dictation from nature. In this, European Romanticism anticipated some of the themes of the materialist relational ontology that has been more recently articulated and popularised by feminist theorists and process philosophers Jane Bennett, Vicki Kirby, Elizabeth Grosz, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad.

How much these vitalist poetics registered in the coastal prison camps of early nineteenth-century Australia is another question. Many scholars have noted the remarkable lack of a Romantic literary tradition in early colonial Australia. Paul Kane, for one, begins his Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity with the idea that “romanticism has had a profound impact on Australian poetry by way of an absence”.11 But that absence overlaps with the vital presence of an Australian indigenous philosophy that elaborates the intra-active agency of the more-than-human world. As Alison Ravenscroft has written, “In Australian Indigenous materialisms ­– at least to my stranger’s eyes – ‘human’ and ‘inhuman’ are so extensively, elaborately, and constitutively entangled that the very terms human and inhuman, culture and nature, body and ground as conceived within a Western-oriented epistemology start to tremble, if not fall.”12 To ignore Indigenous materialisms in any origin story of “new” materialist philosophies, is, as Ravenscroft argues, another act of colonial erasure. She quotes Amiskwaciwâskahikan scholar Zoe Todd’s frustrated recollection of waiting through a lecture by Latour for him to “credit Indigenous thinkers for their millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations, and with climates and atmospheres as important points of organisation and action. I waited. I waited. … It never came. He did not mention Inuit. Or Anishinaabeg. Or Nehiyawak. Or any Indigenous thinkers at all.”13 There have been many attempts to explain the belatedness of the emergence of anything resembling a Romantic literary movement in Australia, the better part of a century after its high moment in England. The echoes of local indigenous ontology in Romanticism’s anti-rationalist vitalism may have been enough for the colonists of the early nineteenth century to reject Romanticism’s modes of thought and expression in decades where their dominion was far from assured. The prevalence of Romantic culture in Europe and its relative absence in the colonial population of Australia may explain how the lyrebird came to be a lyrebird in Europe while early colonists continued to refer predominantly to the more prosaic “native pheasant”.

It is unclear exactly who or what inaugurates the tradition of the lyrebird. In Penny Olsen’s inimitable compendium of early lyrebird portraiture, the earliest depiction of a lyrelike tail occurs in Pauline Knip’s Oiseau-lyre of 1812.14 The first instance in print of the bird as “lyrebird” that I have found is by a French critic of Knip’s painting, who notes in 1812 that Knip’s work, hung in the Galerie des Peintres Français and titled there Manoura Magnificat, is of a “oiseau-lyre” (this review may be the origin of Olsen’s caption for Knip’s painting, as Oiseau-lyre does not seem to be Knip’s own title, although the conceit of the tail as lyre clearly informs her painting). For this critic, Knip’s bird spreads his tail like a peacock and bears “la plus exacte resemblance avec une lyre”.15 Knip’s lyrebird is eroticised (well before Darwin clarified the idea that extravagant, ornamental features in the bodies and voices of birds had been drawn out by the erotic preferences of their foremothers).16 We see Knip’s bird from behind, his round downy rump at the fore of his portrait. His outer-tail feathers (the so-called lyrates) project, lyrelike indeed, up from this rump, and he looks back at us – as it were over his shoulder – so that his eye meets ours through the gauzy fan of his filamentary feathers.

Knip was likely working from a specimen in Paris (the first lyrebird corpses reached England in 1799; by 1803, there seem to have been several specimens in London, and at least two in Paris). Major Thomas Davies, writing to the Linnaean Society in 1801, named the bird Menura superba (“menoura”, literally “moon-tail” in Greek, might refer to the arguably crescent-moon shaped markings on the lyrates).17 As is common in early nineteenth-century ornithology, the man who named the bird had never actually seen one alive. Rather he happened to find a dead one in the possession of Mary Howe, the daughter of Admiral Lord Howe, and got further information from correspondence with Major John Hunter, who in turn, being too old for forays into the forests of New South Wales, was depending on the information of an unnamed informant, or possibly two informants – who called it a pheasant. Although the conceit of the lyre came to circulate soon afterwards, as we can see from the review of Knip’s Manoura Magnificat, it does not seem to have caught on so soon in the lyrebird’s own country. The 1813 Thomas Skottowe manuscript, held in the Mitchell Library, includes a portrayal by convict T.R. Browne of a lyrebird with the caption Mamura superba. Skottowe notes that it is “commonly called the mountain pheasant”, “remarkable for the beautiful plumage of its tail”. “It is said … to possess a sweet note by those who have had the pleasure of hearing it”, Skottowe writes, suggesting no insight into the bird’s repertoire of imitations. He concludes his account with the words: “Native Name Golgol”.18

In 1834, a thirty-year-old physician and fellow of the Linnean Society, George Bennett, would introduce his discussion of the lyrebird in his travelogue, Wanderings in New South Wales, with a short catalogue of names ascribed to the lyrebird: “The ‘Native or Wood-pheasant,’ or ‘Lyre bird’ of the colonists, the ‘Menura superba’ of naturalists, and the ‘Béleck, béleck,’ and ‘Balangara’ of the aboriginal tribes”.19 Bennett goes on to explain that “the tail of the bird bears a striking resemblance, in its graceful form, to the famous lyre of the Greeks, from which circumstance it has received the name of the ‘lyre bird’ of Australia”.20 Bennett is mistaken on a number of fronts in his discussion of the lyrebird: he is mistaken in believing that the birds lay their eggs in tree hollows, and also about the colour and number of their eggs. His two “aboriginal” names for the bird are a frustratingly inadequate sample from among the languages he must have overheard. But about the tail’s resembling a lyre? By now, this was clearly established as a matter of fact.

Anyone versed or immersed in Australiana will know this fact. The lyrebird with tail-as-lyre appears everywhere, even on many of the fibrous plaster ceilings surviving in Sydney from the early 1900s (complete, strangely, with peacock crest feathers).21 Such representations, minus the crest feathers, are almost certainly copies of what is probably Elizabeth Gould’s illustration of the lyrebird for John Gould’s The Birds of Australia, published in seven volumes between 1840–48. The male bird’s tail projects straight upwards from his body; the lyrates curve symmetrically, meeting at their tips to then curl a little outwards, and the finer filamentary feathers seem to suggest the parallel strings of the lyre. Gould claimed the lyrebird as the emblem for Australian birdlife, as Jonathan Smith notes, and it appeared on the cover of each of the seven volumes and of supplement volumes of Birds of Australia.22 Gould’s depiction was almost certainly taking dictation from the work of a taxidermist who was in turn influenced by another commentator or specimen arranger. In its turn, published in perhaps the most culturally significant work of nineteenth-century colonial Australian natural history, Gould’s lyrebird was immensely influential on subsequent lyrebird depictions. Jonathan Smith discusses Gould’s identification of the lyrebirds with Queen Victoria and Albert, after whom John Gould named a species of lyrebird ­– the Menura alberti which still bears that name and the Menura novaehollandiae (at that point called the Menura superba and renamed Menura novaehollandiae victoriae by Gould). Smith argues that in producing the lyrebirds as fitting avian representatives for a royal couple who strove to project an image of “exemplary married domesticity”, his representations of the birds “depended on suppression, reconfiguration, and even invention of evidence”.23 Although Smith mentions that the Goulds’ lyrebird tail is figured “with rigorous bilateral symmetry”, he doesn’t cite this as a particular example of the Goulds’ reconfiguration or invention of evidence (he is more interested in the contrivance involved in producing the “informal, unsymmetrical domestic pose” of the male and female that stand and sit side by side as if in a Victorian family portrait).24 But the position of the displayed tail in Gould’s drawing, as ornithologist A.H. Chisholm points out, is not in a living lyrebird’s usual display position.25 One or both of the Goulds, Chisholm suggests, worked from a British museum display undoubtedly prepared by a taxidermist of the early 1800s who had never seen a living lyrebird and was swept up in a tradition of conflating male lyrebird display with the shape of the lyre.

The history of the European and colonial representation of lyrebirds is a history of copying. Figurations of the birds hop ekphrastically across media, between paintings and etchings, travel narratives and ornithological literature, between the arrangement of the dead birds’ bodies and the very naming of the birds. Somewhere in this process, the conceit of the lyre inserted itself, a conceit that depended on the misapprehension that the bird held his tail upright with its thickest feathers in the configuration of the arms of a lyre, connecting at the top to form the semblance of a lyre’s crossbar. Having inserted itself, this conceit was copied.

What, if anything, does this copying have in common with the lyrebird’s copying? Lyrebirds are accomplished samplers and reproducers of the sounds of their auditory environment, in ways that both resemble and at times interact with and reproduce human cultures of transmission. Alec Chisholm recorded in 1960 “some queer consequences of the bird’s mimicry. One example relates to the interruption of the timber-men’s activities because a Lyrebird imitated the mill whistle. In another instance an enterprising bird threw a group of survey workers into confusion through imitating (at the wrong time) the code of shrill signals issued by the foreman.”26 David Attenborough’s documentary of 1998, The Life of Birds, includes footage of lyrebirds performing the sounds of camera shutters and chainsaws, besides a suite of other bird songs, suggesting that even if the lyrebirds’ impulse to reproduce sounds might be relatively static, individuals are highly responsive to changes in their acoustic environments. Alongside this capacity for rapid musical adaptation is evidence for the persistence of lyrebird song culture. In 1934, twenty-one lyrebirds from mainland Australia were released in Tasmania’s Mount Field National Park, which was designated a settler sanctuary for the species, understood to be endangered by the galloping destruction of mainland forests. Thirty years later, Tasmanian-born descendants of this settler population were heard singing a song associated with the whipbird, a species unknown on the island.

In late August 2021, three months into Sydney’s COVID-19 delta-variant lockdown, a lyrebird captive in Taronga Zoo was recorded in a song that, as one journalist reported, “perfectly mimics the ear-splitting wail of a crying baby”. Echo, as this bird is named, was also reported as having “mastered a rendition of the Sydney zoo’s fire alarm, complete with the ‘evacuate now’ announcement”.27 The zookeeper’s recording of Echo’s uncannily evocative rendition of a baby’s cry made its way online. In the relative hush of a zoo evacuated of its normal human babble, Echo had been, it seems, remembering, rehearsing and honing his quotation of preverbal human emotion. His recollection in tranquillity, if that is what it was, made for just the kind of footage calculated to go viral on sites where it provided a wondrous distraction from endlessly refracting reportage on the theme of an actual virus. Within the week, the human recording of this lyrebird’s anthropophonic recitation had been shared and replayed hundreds of thousands of times on social media.

Echo’s name recalls another Echo, the tragic figure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the nymph who is cursed by the goddess Juno “to sport with ev’ry sentence in the close”, to say nothing that is not a repetition of the closing word or phrase of what someone else has said. Despite this formidable restriction, Ovidian Echo’s utterances are remarkably salient to the situations in which she finds herself. She falls in love with the young Narcissus, who is in turn besotted with his own reflection, heartbroken that its replies to his claims of love are inaudible, and disgusted at Echo’s interest in him. When Narcissus cries to his reflection, “Ah youth! Beloved in vain!”, Echo responds (aptly) with the same words. As Narcissus dies, lovelorn, sighing “Farewel” to his reflection, Echo sighs back, “Farewel”, as she might be expected to.28 In Ovid’s and his translators’ handling, Echo’s echolalia generates sounds that denote something often very like what she might actually want to say. Her compulsive vocal imitation, coupled with the conditions in which she speaks, means that what she does say might seem either semantically void or expressive of what a sympathetic listener would imagine her meaning to express. It creates an epistemological problem for the listener: how can we know how meaningful her speech is? Can her compelled copying also constitute an intentional engagement with the sounds made available to her in her environment?

Is there perhaps even a sense in which Echo may have participated in shaping the sonic field from which she will excerpt her sounds? In her 2019 study of sex, mate choice and cognition in Australian native birds, Gisela Kaplan tells the story of a co-evolutionary partnership between the superb lyrebird and the Antarctic beech forest of the so-called New England National Park. The lyrebirds have grown the forest into what it is through their constant interference with the forest floor, Kaplan shows; in turn, the shape of the forest contributes to the lyrebird’s success in his erotic performance art. The absence of undergrowth means that “a displaying male lyrebird would be visible from some distance, having no shortage of suitable display areas”.29 “The forest also produces,” Kaplan writes:

Kaplan’s account of literal echoes of course itself echoes the lyrebird’s own echoing, his vocal mimicry of the sounds he has selected from the forest. Kaplan’s rendering of the co-evolutionary temporal loop here, the back-and-forth through evolutionary time between a bird and a forest, recalls, too, the complex looping chatter of sexual selection, a co-evolutionary relationship negotiated around aesthetic and erotic desire, occurring between lyrebirds, or proto-lyrebirds, even as the lyrebirds themselves evolve with the forest. The phenomenon of sexual selection also raises questions about the quality of intentionality in biological processes. On the one hand, it offers a radical account of animals’ agency in shaping their species, a radical account of animals practising what we might think of as “culture”, expressing their preferences for certain songs, colours and shapes. On the other hand, their preferences are structured by the interplay of their bodies and constrained by the array of options presented to them. Then again, whose preferences are not?31

The lyrebird’s song brings together the deep time of lyrebird evolution and the immediate present tense of a bird’s individual life and acoustic experience. In her essay “On Writing Carpentaria”, Alexis Wright discusses the complexity of that staggering novel’s effort both to “understand the idea of Indigenous people living with the stories of all the times of this country” and then to embrace all these times within the singularity of a novel.32 Carpentaria, as a result, is:

Alexis Wright is like so many writers on this continent in reaching for the lyrebird in her discussion of her own writing. But unlike in the many lyrebird poems of white Australian poets, the lyrebird attribute for which Wright reaches here escapes the conventional European figurings. This lyrebird is neither a mere mimic nor a poet because his tail is seen to look a bit like an ancient Greek stringed instrument. His capacity to sing several tunes at once, brought into comparison with Wright’s project of rendering all times simultaneously, exults the complexity of lyrebird song and suggests the ways in which his bringing together of songs past is also a renewing.

* * *

One late twentieth-century morning, as we staggered out of one of Bruce Gardiner’s lectures, my friend proposed a computer program into which one would be able to input a poem and then print out a fully-formed Gardinerian textual analysis. It was a joke, of course. For one thing, neither of us had used a computer for anything more sophisticated than typing up our handwritten essays and playing Tetris. But also – and this was the point of the joke – Bruce Gardiner’s readings were inimitable, irreducible treatments of language and culture. Irreducible, even, in some crucial way, to the page. They took place in time and space, in Bruce’s famously on-theme clothing, in the ear and eye and then the mouth of his students. The lecture we had just witnessed had culminated in Bruce’s suggestion that the assonance in a poem by Yeats evokes the throbbing of a contracting uterine sphincter. Unbidden, fifty students had begun quietly, then noisily, imitating Yeats’, that is to say, Gardiner’s, syllables, testing out the feeling of “oo”, “oo” made strange in their own mouths.

I was an undergraduate student who had clung grimly to the practical criticism and literary canon of my high school English teachers when I stumbled into Bruce’s subject, American Claims: Indian, Settler, Slave in 1998. By the end of term we had read Toni Morrison’s Sula, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Iroquois and Nabajo song cycles, Leaves of Grass, Jean Toomer’s Cane: this subject would take us, in other words, deep into the trouble of Americanness. But we began – and this was Bruce telling the truth of that trouble, but telling it slant – with poems about hummingbirds that he had anthologised, a collection that we read like we would read the specimen case of jewel-bright formaldehyded birds he had procured from somewhere (the Zoology department, his personal archive?) and brought to class. We watched a fragment of a brand new David Attenborough documentary on VHS, footage of tiny bright birds fibrillating around the flowers they suck from, and Bruce told us that the voice-over of Attenborough was the disembodied voice of the Angel Gabriel, whose job it is to justify the ways of God to Man (a characterisation of Attenborough that’s been waking me up at night now for a quarter of a century).

This year I am teaching a subject that reckons, a bit, with the trouble of Australianness, with (to borrow from Bruce’s description of American Claims) the genres and themes through which peoples lay claim to lands or declare themselves (or refuse to declare themselves) “Australian”. We begin with the so-called “lyrebirds”. Students are given many of the objects discussed in this essay: late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonists’ accounts of the Menura superba; twentieth-century settler-colonists’ poems in which either lyrebirds are romanticised as poets or poets are chastised for romanticising lyrebirds as poets; recordings of the birds’ song repertoire (one narrated by the Angel Gabriel himself); visual materials ranging from a Gadigal engraver’s pre-colonial depiction to the impress on a now seldom-seen ten cent Australian coin. I don’t replicate for my students Bruce’s rhetorical splendour, or his agile chasing of theme and form across genres, or the careful excavation of identity-making and claim-laying work that his hummingbird seminars offered, but it’s not for want of trying.

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