One night I had a strange dream. I dreamed the pet pink and grey galah of my childhood gently lifted the little gate on her cage with her beak, and hopped out on to the ground. Her clipped wing forgotten or perhaps no longer relevant, she soared straight up into the subtropical sky over Carnarvon, the tiny town almost 1,000km north of Perth where I grew up, and flew in a giant circle overhead. On her way around, she dipped down to tear a petal from a hibiscus shrub and, with petal in beak, gave me a nod, as if to say thank you, or perhaps just “see you later”, because once she’d made a full circle she flew off into the distance, into freedom.
I woke up in a soulful glow suggesting creativity and alchemy.
I was about five years old when my parents acquired the baby girl galah with her pink eyes, vigorous dance moves, biting potential and propensity for ear-splitting loudness. We tried to teach her to sing:
Skippetyhop to the grocery shop
To buy a box of candy
One for you, one for me
And one for sister Mandy
Much to her own frustration, she never learned to get beyond the word “box”. To buy a box, to buy a box, she’d mutter to herself, before breaking into a frustrated shout: “BUY A BOX! BUY A BOX!” and then, hanging upside down from the top of her cage, throw her head back and forth screaming “ABOXABOXABOX”, giving way to generalised screeching.
She gorged on the drying sunflower head we grew from one of the seeds in her bag of mixed birdseed. We hosed her down under a fine spray on really hot days. She sank her beak into cuttlefish shell we collected from the beach for her. She was the star of my sixth birthday party. There is a blurred, water-stained photo of children all gathered around the cocky cage.
She learned to call “DEBBEH! DEBBEH!” copying my mother trying to get the attention of my sister, Deb. She made a dock-dock-dock noise which we finally worked out was the sound of ladies’ shoes on the concrete floor as they passed her cage on the way to the toilet during fittings (Mum was a dressmaker). Her pièce de résistance was a beautiful rendition of the flushing toilet: “FLLL-USH!”
In those days I had an intimate relationship with Myrtle Skippetyhop. We sat close up, face to face. I knew the feel of her scaly feet on my fingers, the dander on her skin, the feel of her feather quills down where they entered her skin. She’d look into my eyes with her one eye (the other being on the other side of her head, out of view) and gently whisper, “Scratch?” And I’d carefully – biting was always a possibility – reach my index finger into the cage and scratch the skin around her ears. She’d purr like a cat.
Then the novelty wore off. We became more inconsistent in our attentions. As an adult, looking back, I see how much time she must have simply sat on her perch in her small cage, waiting for something interesting to happen. Sometimes, as wild galahs flew overhead, she’d join their calls, as if trying to rejoin the flock.
When we left Carnarvon after the end of my last year of high school, we gave Myrtle Skippetyhop to a family who’d once brought her back when she’d escaped. Those kids had loved her, had cried when they’d had to give her back. We told ourselves she had a good life after us, perhaps a better one.
I had the dream about 10 years after I’d left home. Knowing a galah intimately, personally, I’d never particularly responded to the dismissive Australian attitude – taking their beauty for granted, calling an inept driver a flaming galah – but I’d moved on. Galahs were no longer here nor there. But now, with this dream, they came back in shimmering focus. If I saw a galah, I’d remember the transcendent feeling of that dream, of that soaring into the sky, petal in beak. They became my good luck charm. They seemed to appear exactly when I needed them.
In the 1990s I had a job with a small video production company and we were trying to film a heavy metal band into the night at the Brown Jug Inn in Fairfield in western Sydney. It was a stressful, deafening night. We had to stumble out into the dark car park to hear ourselves think and decide on our next moves. I remember standing in the car park, tired, stressed, ears ringing, feeling disappointed in my life, not sure if I was doing it right. And then, around the corner of the pub, walking through the car park at 1am, came a man with a pink and grey galah on his shoulder.
I watched as he walked past, said hello. The galah looked at me. I had a rush of feeling that all was well with the world. That my life was my own particular life full of its own meanings, its own symbols. All I had to do was follow the pink and grey trail.
