Under a hotter Sun; Kaneki

While I gathered the warm, dry grass to mulch the garden beds, the music of Beethoven’s sixth Sinfonie from within the house wakened my senses already seduced by the sweet smell of the sun-dried hay. I felt this serenity transcend, a brief glimpse of sheer happiness.

This music composed to the core of the European landscape impressed itself, moulded its sounds in harmony to the Australian land.

Kaneki, an aboriginal word for yellow crested Cockatoo, was sitting on the highest branch of a Bloodwood tree. He cocked his head and looked down, gave an approving squawk, shook his pristine white plumage and settled back to his afternoon nap.
We rescued Kaneki from a life in a tiny cage in a dark corner of a hardware shop in Maclean. He was sitting in his cage teased by children with little sticks while we were shopping there. We thought this beautiful bird looked so infinitely sad. We asked the shopkeeper how much he wanted for the bird. He said how much do you want to pay.

We said we could pay ten Dollars and he said done. We thought that he was probably glad to get rid of him. Anyway we were happy to take him home and give him a better life. He didn’t even have a name so we gave him the name Kaneki.
He settled quickly at our place.

At first, Peter made him a long ladder up to the Bloodwood tree. First he had a chain but when he was accustomed to this area we took the chain away. In the morning we took him out of his cage and let him go up the ladder on the tree. All day he was sitting on his tree throwing down leaves and small twigs. In the evening we would call up to him, Kaneki come down, we actually said it in Swiss dialect “chum aba” to him. First he would bombard us in disgust with leaves and twigs but in the end he always came down into the cage to spend the night. Flocks of yellow crested cockatoos would come and visit him. They settled on the tree like big white flowers. Kaneki never flew away with them. Until it happened that he met this really nice looking cockatoo lady. She visited him on his tree and sometimes he flew away with her but he always came back. But then after the marriage his absence from the Bloodwood tree grew longer and longer.

When we saw a flock of cockatoos flying above our garden we would always sing out his name Kaneki. Sometimes he would quickly settle on the Bloodwood tree, but with time he forgot his tree and he forgot us.

Copyright T.S.

Photo T.S.