Bird noticers

A curious new book from Libby Robin

Peter Menkhorst

What Birdo Is That? A field guide to bird people

by Libby Robin Melbourne University Publishing

$40

pb, 272 pp

Eminent ecological historian Libby Robin has produced a curious book that examines the changing interests and roles played by those Australians who ‘notice birds and feel they need our help’. She aims to examine the rise of the nature conservation movement in Australia, using ‘Australia’s bird-people’ as a sample of Australians with a love of nature.

The catchy title pays homage to Australia’s (and in some ways the world’s) first bird field guide, Neville Caley’s bestselling What Bird Is That?, first published in 1931 and found in a remarkable proportion of Australian households thereafter. I wondered at the use of the term ‘birdo’, which, in my experience, is not widely used.

Robin identifies three groups of bird-people to illustrate the range of interests and involvement: amateur birdos; professional zoologists; and birdscapers, who deliberately provide habitat for birds in their gardens. Of course, these categories are not mutually exclusive; many birdos are also birdscapers, and professional zoologists are frequently all three.

This book builds on Robin’s previous detailed history of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU), The Flight of the Emu: A hundred years of Australian Ornithology 1901–2001 (2001), but with the aim to focus more on people than institutions. However, that point of difference is not obvious.

While I understand that key Australian bird institutions were established in the twentieth century – notably the Bird Observers Club, the RAOU, and most government science agencies – the book never really comes to grips with the nineteenth or early twenty-first centuries. This bias towards the twentieth century is disappointing. Judging by the title and blurb, I was expecting a broader coverage of the impact of social changes on the evolution of bird watching, from the hardy field collectors employed by wealthy gentlemen to the current rapidly expanding section of our society who are passionate bird watchers and, increasingly, bird photographers.

If you have read The Flight of the Emu, many of the subjects and personalities will seem familiar; indeed, some chapters are essentially unchanged. Three pages covering the nineteenth century focus almost entirely on one man, John Gould. The final four chapters are based mostly in the twenty-first century. They wander between material of direct relevance to bird-people and bird conservation, and discourses on conservation philosophy, including cases of questionable relevance to the book’s aim.

A major shortcoming is the lack of attention to the impact of new technologies. Bird watchers have taken to the digital communication revolution with alacrity. Beginning with an email chatline Birding-aus, in the mid-1990s and now via numerous Facebook groups, Australian bird watchers enthusiastically exchange information and photographs about all manner of bird-related subjects. Respectful use of social media has led to greatly increased levels of knowledge among bird watchers. In recent decades, vastly superior optics and digital photography have elevated our capacity to identify species, sexes, and age classes in the field, resulting in higher satisfaction and, in turn, greater enthusiasm. Mobile phone apps such as eBird give immediate access to enormous databases of species locality records linked to GPS to provide instantaneous lists of species likely to be found in your immediate surrounds, no matter where you are on the surface of the earth. These billions of records were provided freely by mostly amateur bird watchers within the past twenty years. These revolutionary new tools have resulted in a boom in the popularity of bird watching, including among women, improving the gender balance in what had been a mostly male pastime. These new bird watchers inevitably become conservationists in their own way.

Robin is somewhat dismissive of ‘twitchers’ – bird watchers who will go to almost any length to add a species to their meticulously maintained lists of species personally sighted and identified. However, in this time of accelerating climate change, sightings of vagrant birds (individuals found well outside the usual geographic range of their species) are becoming more important as they may provide evidence of a species responding to fundamental changes to its habitat. As a group, the worldwide community of twitchers is possibly more aware of the rapid ecological changes now taking place than almost any other demographic. In Australia in recent decades, twitchers have played a critical role in rewriting our understanding of the diversity and numbers of seabirds that use Australia’s maritime zone and the species present on our island dependencies.

Robin also presents a sugar-coated view of the protracted, messy, and contentious reformation of Australia’s two biggest bird organisations during the early 2000s as they both struggled to survive in a changing society. Poor financial management, falling membership, low meeting attendance, and declining participation in organised field trips threatened both organisations. Eventually, in 2011, they amalgamated to form Birdlife Australia. The new organisation is heavily focused on conservation, as it should be, but it is less invested in other areas previously fulfilled, notably the social side of bird watching. While this has irritated some, at least Birdlife Australia’s future seems more certain.

After pondering this book, I have concluded that my disappointment has two main sources: first, the disconnect between the impression created by the title and the publisher’s blurb and the actual content: second, my familiarity with Robin’s 2001 work leading to my assessment that updating of the shared content has been minimal and inconsistent.

However, readers without such a background will find a great deal that is of interest, backed by solid research and scholarship. This book will bring Robin’s insights to a new audience, but I can’t help thinking that it is also an opportunity lost. With its balance skewed to the past, this field guide is more a guide to the twentiethcentury Australian bird watching establishment than to the burgeoning world bird proletariat of the twenty-first century. g

Tuckson at the Drill Hall

pressionist,’ writes an early champion of Tuckson’s work, Daniel Thomas.

This achievement might seem belated in art-historical terms. By 1973, the international art world had moved on from abstract expressionism. The 1960s had ushered in pop art, minimalism, conceptual, performance and land art. But this misses the intriguing question of Tuckson’s very private compulsion to make art regardless.

Just a few months after his breakthrough show, Tuckson died of cancer at the age of fifty-two, leaving behind many hundreds of untitled and undated paintings and drawings. It is from this vast archive that the Drill Hall Gallery now presents a rich selection of drawings never shown in public before. (It closes on 18 June.)

‘When Tony’s son Michael Tuckson told us we could help ourselves and raid the plan chest, we thought we’d be panning for gold to find a few little glimmers of greatness. The residues passed over for earlier exhibitions,’ says Terence Maloon. ‘Instead, we discovered an abundance of wonderful things.’ Fellow curator Tony Oates elaborates. ‘We started with a drawer labelled “Abstracts” because we wanted to see a lineage in the works. We were about six or seven drawings in when we realised that these were not simply warm-up exercises to arrive at a painting.’

Ibump into two friends at the opening of SYNERGY and we peer into Tony Tuckson’s works, finding acknowledgments and hints of other artists: the red, black, and white palette of Philip Guston; Ian Fairweather’s shallow space and densely patterned linework hovering between figuration and abstraction; Cy Twombly’s intricate, repetitive gestures; the torn edge of a calligraphic Robert Motherwell brushstroke in fluid black paint. Despite this pictorial conversation with other artists, the works don’t come across as derivative; they look and feel like a Tony Tuckson, which is quite an astonishing feat.

The romance of Tuckson’s story is well known. In the 1950s and 1960s, his position as deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales eclipsed his life as an artist. Not wanting to create any conflict of interest with his role as curator of Australian art, Tuckson went underground with his own painting. Away from the pressures of commercial galleries, curatorial interests and the public gaze, he produced a large body of work.

In 1970, at the age of forty-nine, he held his first solo exhibition. According to Margaret Tuckson, his wife, he finally decided to exhibit because their house was too small for him to be able to look at them critically on the walls. ‘He had no thought of selling them, or whether anybody else would like them. He wanted to see them up,’ she said in a 1979 interview with James Gleeson. Also, by 1970, he had become curator of ‘primitive’ rather than Australian art – alleviating his ethical dilemma.

A second solo exhibition in 1973 contained twentytwo of the large late works he became renowned for. ‘He was promptly recognized as probably Australia’s best Abstract Ex-

The lexicon developed in these drawings underpins SYNERGY Whole series of the newly framed works remain undated; and yet there is a chronological flow. Clustered at the front of the gallery are early figurative works that pay tribute to Matisse, Picasso, and Dubuffet. From here, there is a process of dematerialisation. Figurative motifs such as the female nude, dancing figures, the laid table of a domestic interior, or two figures cavorting around a cocktail shaker subside into faint vestiges of formal compositional shapes in the more abstract works. The materiality of gesture takes over: the making of marks in symbiosis with the surfaces that hold them.

In one of my favourite series, the drawings take on the paredback simplicity and radiance of the late paintings. A handful of wavering vertical strokes of charcoal inscribe pieces of thick paper torn into irregular shapes, some almost vase-like ( Untitled, undated [TD 6628]). It’s easy to imagine that these paper shapes are informed by the bark paintings Tuckson was so familiar with as a curator. Like the barks, they are roughly rectangular but organically skewed. Untitled, c.1970–73 is a tall piece almost the dimensions of a standing human figure. Here, the charcoal marks are more cumulative and insistent, sweeping the length of the faintly discoloured paper like a life force. This sense of vitality, energy, and urgency permeates the entire exhibition.

These minimalist drawings contrast with the bulk of the other works, many of which are executed in gouache on newspaper, an archivally unstable material that can also seem abject and ephemeral. Yet Tuckson produced hundreds of newspaper pieces, suggesting that they sustained and engaged him beyond mere rehearsal. In some examples blots of fluid black paint almost obliterate the newsprint; in another (Untitled, undated [TD 2472]) which Margaret Tuckson put aside for herself in a roll of drawings, restless feathery gestures, dabs, and dashes are dispersed across the surface, transparent here and delicate points of calligraphic blackness there. These pieces indicate how important calligraphy was to Tuckson, as a series of more explicit homages to Chinese characters and ideograms in SYNERGY shows.

In his newspaper works, Tuckson often preferred the classifieds section – the situations vacant and real estate with less obtrusive text than the headlines. He also preferred the yellowish tones of aged paper. These elements provide a textured, light-filled ground for the brushwork, which responds in a process of ‘call and response’ as Oates puts it. In the same way, unprimed masonite provides a warm ground for the paintings.

More radically, Oates proposes that the bi-fold sheets of newspaper with their pale central seams quite possibly informed the diptych format Tuckson came to favour. Once he makes this observation, it is impossible to unsee it. The organising vertical line between two sheets of masonite in the paintings and the newspaper seams mirror one another

A handful of well-known paintings such as Pink and White Line, 1970 [TP70], lend gravitas to the exhibition. They remind viewers of the lyrical late period when something shifted in the scale of his painting, the expansiveness of his brushwork. They hint at a culminating force, helping visitors to apprehend and appreciate the ‘slighter’ works on paper.

These paintings also prompt the question of how Tuckson arrived at his late transformation. Was it because he finally managed to see his work up, or because he embraced his public persona as artist? Or did he feel intimations of his illness? In an article in The Conversation, Tuckson’s colleague Joanna Mendelssohn describes his face as deeply etched with pain during his final year. Did pain somehow inform his late flowering, or is that too romantic a notion?

‘Tuckson is one of those divisive artists,’ says Maloon. ‘People have been visiting from interstate and rhapsodising. Others have no time for it at all.’ I’m in the rhapsodising camp. I first encountered Tuckson’s work at Maloon’s earlier exhibition Tony Tuckson: Themes and Variations (Heide, 1989). I was still painting then and became obsessed with Untitled (Brown and Grey), 1973, spending several weeks trying to emulate the horizontal brushstrokes, shallow latticework, murky pinks, and bold restraint in his gestures. The same painting is hung here again like an old friend. For me, as for other Tuckson fans, this is a must-see exhibition both to reacquaint oneself with familiar works and to encounter new ones.

And what about for those unfamiliar with his work?

Denise Mimmocchi, in Tony Tuckson: The art of transformation, describes how Tuckson once responded to a friend enquiring about a late painting in progress. ‘It’s about this,’ he said, referring to the curtains in his studio drifting in the breeze. Then he added, gesturing beyond the curtains, ‘And everything out there.’ Through a gap in the fabric, his visitor could glimpse bushland surrounding his Sydney home. But there is nothing pictorial about that painting with its fields of yellow and slit of unprimed masonite, Untitled 1973 [TP198a], held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Tuckson’s comment remains both emphatic and enigmatic. It is worth visiting SYNERGY for some intimation of whatever he meant by everything out there that so compelled him. And for the sheer pleasure of experiencing these works. g

Saskia Beudel is an author and a current Copyright Agency Fellow.

Bataclan

Remembering the 2015 Paris attacks

Jimenez avoids any direct representation of the attacks, and there is no inclusion of actual footage. Instead, the film uses more subtle means: the scene of telephones in the empty command centre ringing one by one conveys the magnitude of the situation on the night of the attacks effectively. The use of footage shot on mobile phones and police drones as well as CCTV not only shows the extent of police surveillance capabilities but also adds to the overall docudrama effect.

There have been nuanced treatments of the November 2015 Paris attacks, including the docuseries November 3: Attack on Paris (2018), the excellent En thérapie (2021), and Mikhaël Hers’s sublime human drama Amanda (2018), which looks at the aftermath of terrorism in an understated fashion. November (Palace Films), directed by Cédric Jimenez (Paris Under Watch, 2012; BAC Nord, 2020), is not to be counted among these. However, the shift from the attacks themselves to the ensuing investigation (and from the victims to the police response) does offer an interesting cinematic perspective.

The Paris attacks are France’s most deadly terrorist incident. One hundred and thirty people were killed and more than four hundred injured when terrorists targeted the Stade de France, cafés and restaurants, and the Bataclan theatre.

November is set over the five days immediately following the attacks, when French police (in particular the anti-terrorist sub-directorate) were scrambling to track down the terrorist cell responsible, to avert another attack. The film opens in Athens some time before the attacks. French counterterrorism agent Fred, played by Jean Dujardin, is closing in on a key Islamic State operative hiding out in the city. His mission fails, the operative escapes, and Fred returns to Paris. When the same cell carries out the attacks in Paris, Fred feels more than a little responsible and has a lot riding on bringing the perpetrators to justice.

November is ostensibly a thriller, and it is thrilling, grabbing you by the throat from the outset, relaxing its grip only occasionally to indulge in pockets of melodrama. It is not, however, a thriller generically speaking; it belongs to the genre of policier or police procedural film, of which there is a rich history in French cinema. False leads and dead ends heighten the suspense, and the raid scenes, in which rows of black-clad tactical response units creep silently along walls and break down doors, are tautly shot. These sequences are reminiscent of the French police raids from Gillo Pontecorvo’s landmark film Battle of Algiers (1966). Where Pontecorvo famously described his film as an instruction manual for how terrorism can be used to achieve political ends, November often resembles a training video for anti-terror squad recruits, treading a fine line between objectivity and propaganda.

November tries not to muddy the waters of police procedure with politics, but there is nonetheless a not-so-subtle validation of French republicanism, which borders on patriotism. There is little nuancing of the French situation, which might have hinted at something greater than a goodies-versus-baddies scenario. The film is at pains to point out that France is an inclusive and harmonious country and it does this primarily by showing a multiethnic and multi-faith team (both men and women) working together to defeat the evil Islamic State. There is no reference to the fact that the attacks were in part a response to the French involvement in air strikes against Syria, and there is only a passing nod to France’s colonialist past, in a brief sequence shot in Morocco. The film ultimately descends into a parody of itself, with an ending that recalls Hollywood films like Independence Day, a shallow celebration of state power and military muscle with a central hero giving a platitudinous speech to the glory of the French nation.

A rather undemanding script solicits solid if one-dimensional performances. Dujardin’s Fred has a job to do and gets it done, after a fashion, in a kind of ends-justifies-the-means approach which does not sit well with his young protégée Inès, more sympathetically portrayed by Anaïs Demoustier. Lyna Khoudri is excellent as Sabia, a young Muslim woman caught between her religion and her duty to her country. Her relationship with Inès forms the emotional centre of the film, which otherwise proceeds in a rather tactical fashion. Indeed, the most interesting thing the film does is to tentatively, almost in spite of itself, present these two women as the answer to the ‘violence begets violence’ that is the clash of two patriarchal systems. Their bond transcends cultural and religious differences to reach a kind of humanity which is lacking in the systems each represents. The wonderful Sandrine Kiberlain is somewhat underutilised, reduced to facial expressions showing the tragedy and horror of the events and the occasional operational suggestion shouted down by her male colleagues. Dardenne brothers regular Jérémie Renier is Marco, the head of the command centre who conveys with a tight-jawed grimace the unpleasantness of the whole business.

As both a thriller and a procedural film, November works, though it does raise questions about the extent to which it is appropriate to subject such a socially complex traumatic event to the thriller format. Perhaps there was a missed opportunity here, for critique, for reflection. But this is not Jimenez’s style, as his previous films show, with their preference for police procedure, men being virile, grand stylistic effects, choreographed action sequences, and pomp and pageantry. Perhaps November works best in a complementary sense, when watched in conjunction with the film and television work mentioned above. It has its place among these more reflective works, which can provide the film with the broader social context and emotional core it lacks. g