The Kookaburra II

David Sedaris’ article in the current issue of the New Yorker actually takes in the childhood memory of singing with his sister a version of the Kookaburra song, and being punished by his irritable father for doing so. I suppose it would be fair to say that most Australians above a certain age (at least mine) must have sung that song in its original version, namely a delightful four-part round that was written in 1932 by Marion Sinclair, a schoolmistress at Toorak College, of which my grandmother was an alumna, and one of my sisters-in-law still is.

Miss Sinclair entered her composition in a fund-raising competition run by the Girl Guides’ Association of Victoria, and won. The song was first performed in 1934 in the presence of Lieutenant-General the Rt. Hon. Lord Baden-Powell, G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O., K.C.B., and Lady Baden-Powell, G.B.E., at a jamboree in Frankston (above) It was meticulously reported shortly thereafter in the Argus (January 4, 1935, p. 7), and thence spread across the globe—though not necessarily as a four-part round. However, I remember quite distinctly singing it in this form as a rather fetching treble temporarily seconded to some ad hoc choir, perhaps that of Millear House, on speech day at Grimwade House, with the late Miss Kathleen James at the pianoforte.

Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, / Merry, merry king of the bush is he; / Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra! / Gay your life must be.

Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, / Eating all the gum drops he can see; / Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra! / Leave some there for me.

Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, / Counting all the monkeys he can see; / Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra! / That’s not a monkey. That’s me

Kookaburra sits on a rusty nail, / Gets a boo-boo in his tail; / Cry, Kookaburra! Cry, kookaburra! / Oh how life can be.

The concluding stanza, I suppose, reflects a degree of gloom arising from that ghastly experience of the Great Depression, from which nobody at all in Australia was spared.

Note the earliest (and correct) form of words: The kookaburra sits on, and not in, the old gum tree, a subtle distinction, certainly, but one that gives that muscular bird a slight hint of dominance, as befits the king of the bush designation that follows in the next line. Incidentally, in this context I have no idea what a boo-boo is. I doubt if it has anything to do with the parish of Boo Boo in the county of Courallie, which is in the Shire of Boolooroo, roughly half way between Narrabri and Moree in northern New South Wales, a few miles east of the Newell Highway (149° 56ʹ E, 29° 54ʹ S, to be precise). Nor, I think is it anything to do with the boobook, as the subtle brown owl we called the mopoke is more properly known. In any case boo-boo, n., is not yet listed in the O.E.D., or the otherwise impeccable Australian National Dictionary, so I shall certain make a point of speaking to the editors about this.

The Kookaburra

There is a slightly odd piece in the current issue of the New Yorker in which David Sedaris describes an intimate encounter not so long ago with a tame kookaburra over lunch in Daylesford, Victoria. Reading this I was immediately transported to the weatherboard house at Metung, where, in the very early morning, perched high in the branches of the enormous ghost gum that overhangs the boat-shed, a pair of extremely competitive kookaburras occasionally woke us up with a loud impromptu performance. I’ve always thought “laughter” a poor analogy for the distinctive cry of that muscular bird the kookaburra—except for those scarily over-emphatic, tooth-baring, rapid-fire, ack-ack-style baboon-screeches occasionally uttered by seasoned cocktail party-goers slightly too shrill in their grimly determined sociability. In fact it wasn’t only the kookaburras that unleashed a noisy dawn chorus. Between their limited engagements I recall waking up in the morning to the far more mellifluous song of the pied currawongs, the butcherbirds, the Australian magpies, the bellbirds, the aptly named whipbirds, the honeyeaters, the scratchy-sounding wattlebirds, the noisy miners, the fairy martins, maybe even the subtle mopokes (known more properly, I gather, as the southern boobook, or Ninox novaseelandiae), and very occasionally a rather perplexed and disoriented-looking king-parrot, or else a sulphur-crested cockatoo. Meanwhile, gazing out across the back lake, where we fed kitchen scraps to the seagulls, I always found it hard to take my eyes off the pelicans, those majestic, stately, yet grunting survivors of some antediluvian epoch, or else to keep track of the lissome cormorants after they dived energetically for fish. From time to time, against the evening sky, high above the line of scrubby dunes that separate Bass Strait from the lakes, you could spot a lone sea eagle wheeling hungrily. I have no idea what they sound like.