Messing Around With Menura

Elizabeth Morgan

There’s a new man in my life. I call him Jewels Holland because his jazzy repertoire makes me think of the English boogie-woogie pianist Jools Holland. If I was more of a classical bent my boyfriend (whose real name is Menura novaehollandiae, or superb lyrebird) might evoke the French composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen, who uses lyrebird song in his compositions.* Jewels first revealed himself in a neighbour’s garden in late spring, performing a full mating medley and dance. (In a wonderful coincidence, our neighbour is a pianist of some note – a Messiaen devotee – whom we hear practising as we pass by.) Perhaps Jewels is jealous, because he’s moved into our place. Maybe he was displaced by the firebreaks we and some neighbours created between our homes and his bushland residence at the height of the summer’s bushfires? While we are enormously grateful Jewels has vacated the greenhouse and spared us the vegetables, and we do wish he’d stop digging up the mulch around the fruit trees, we have no right to complain. Our garden is a cornucopia of grubs and other delicacies and he’s entitled to his fill. And, thus sated, he offers his thanks in a glorious song.

*Taylor, Hollis (2014). Whose bird is it?: Messiaen’s transcriptions of Australian songbirds. Twentieth-Century Music 11, Special Issue no. 01: 63-100.