The Daintree
Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti
on Unsplash My dad liked watching cockatoos throw conkers on people’s heads. They were the teenage boys of the skies, he said, a whooping, hollering brat pack, infectious with the joy of claiming public spaces.
Every night before bed when I was a kid, he sat by the night-light. Tell me stories with birds in them, I asked.
When it stormed, he told me about Thunderbird. Some indigenous North American tribes believed the heavy wing beats of this powerful, supernatural bird stirred the winds and caused the thunder. He showed me the pictures of heavy, carved wooden sculptures painted in bright colors with their wide, hollow eyes staring out of the pages.
These birds could shape-shift, he said, as I snuggled deeper into my blankets. In the pictures they stretched their beaks open, revealing human heads inside, like a mask. They swooped down from the skies and taking their human form captured and married the beautiful women from the earth.
Watch out, one might come for you, my dad teased, and kissed me
