Textual Encounters of the Bird Kind: Dal Stivens and the Night Parrot

Abstract

So often literature provides us with metaphors and allusions to enrich our lives, though sometimes, just ever so occasionally, an event occurs in the outside world that offers up an intriguing analogy to revive a text that has been forgotten. Despite winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1970, A Horse of Air and its author, Dal Stivens, have faced an extinction not dissimilar to the object of the novel’s allegorical search: the Night Parrot. The rediscovery of the latter in 2013 in far Western Queensland presents an intriguing analogy for the revitalisation of the former’s important work. Last definitively seen alive in the 1870s, the Night Parrot remained for over one hundred years alluring yet unfindable, akin to a flying thylacine, forever fluttering beyond reach: it was the ‘white whale of the bird-watching world’ (Carvan); the ‘avian nut that refuses to crack’ (Olsen 1). Likewise, although Dal Stivens was once one of Australia’s most visible and prolific (albeit enigmatic) writers, since the 1987 republication of A Horse of Air, and his subsequent death in 1997, both the author and his novel have slowly receded into the obscurity of the remote interior. Despite inspiring writers, poets, filmmakers and naturalists alike, Stivens’s influential depiction of the Night Parrot remains critically and popularly underappreciated. This paper proposes to use the rediscovery of the Night Parrot in 2013 as the impetus to revive Stivens’s finest work by examining his textual encounter with this inscrutable bird figure.