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This paper surveys textual references to the Australian pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis). We begin with my initial encounter with this songbird (in re-worked excerpts from the book Post Impressions), and then expand our review to aboriginal stories, historic ornithological reports and field guides, informal stories, archival Australian periodicals, children’s literature, literary references, and composers’ texts. Many of these reveal the tension between the superlative pied butcherbird vocal abilities and their ferocious hunting prowess. The paper shuns neither anecdote nor anthropomorphism as it attempts a new mode of interspecies narrative. I argue that anecdotes can contribute to an understanding of this understudied songbird. In inventorying pied butcherbird textual references, we find that our stories about them are ultimately stories about us as well—anthropomorphism seems to be an innate human proclivity. Reflecting on the lives of animals is of psychological, intellectual, and metaphysical significance for humans.
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Last amended 6 Mar 2014 13:45:18
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-131836-20120507-0833-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aslec-anz/article/view/2192/2708.html
Anecdote and Anthropomorphism : Writing the Australian Pied Butcherbird
Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
Subjects:
- Pied Butcher Bird Flute Solo 2008 single work poetry
- The Butcherbird 2007 single work novel
- Jindyworobaks and Aborigines 1977 single work criticism
- A Butcherbird At Dawn 1930 single work poetry
- Broken Song : T. G. H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession 2002 single work biography
- The Red Centre : Man and Beast in the Heart of Australia 1935 single work prose
- Rapt 2001 sequence poetry
- Call Her Butcher Bird 1992 single work poetry
- Gwenda Turner's Australian 123 1997 single work picture book
- A Butcherbird Story 2000 single work children's fiction
- Blinky Bill Grows Up 1934 single work children's fiction
- Birds 1952 single work poetry
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