By Michael Gray Griffith
Out here, to my eyes, everything looks like it’s either struggling to survive or on the verge of death. No trees seem to grow very high, we rarely see any animals and the creek beds are all as dry as the lakes who retain not fish, but the footsteps of the animals and birds that traversed their dried mud, each driven, at least to my eyes, by a fading memory of water.
The sky too appears to be a distant and indifferent ceiling, cracked only by the sun, who in the summer will use this land as her anvil.
I would not survive out here for long, not with my eyes, but when I interviewed four indigenous elders who were sitting around a camp fire cooking kangaroo tails, they tried to show me the same land through their eyes, for to them this was not a wasteland but their mother, and in her pantry, food was everywhere and even these little finches, who were perched in the emaciated trees, were the ones that would lead them to water.
But then, as we were heading to the next town down a highway guarded by crows who were perched on the summits of the road-killed roos; guards who would only and briefly fly away as the road trains, four trailers each, barrelled by, we started to see flocks of wild budgerigars tearing through the stunted trees as though, as one, they had all just broken out of somewhere and were now, communally on the run. And it was clear by their joy that they had no intention of ever being caught.
And as I watched them, I wondered, since everything out here probably wanted to eat them, if any of them dreamt of a life where they were kept safe and warm in a small cage, where their seed was always supplied, and their plastic water bowl never ran dry, and jammed between their bars would be a cuttlefish for them to sharpen their beak upon. A cage with two perches, from which every time they spoke or sang in their little budgie voice, a face of a smiling human would turn and talk to them in their human language. And all this safety would come at the cost of one, minor concession; they had to surrender this ability to fly.
Then again, if they were born in these cages, would they even know how to survive out here, or what their parents had sacrificed by being caught? For until I was out here and had witnessed these little green flashes of movement for myself; these tiny punks racing through this remote sky, I never knew budgies were capable of flying like this. And by this, I mean as though they were finally home. A few times, despite the sound of my bus’s engine, I could hear their tiny voices vanishing and celebrating into the distance, as though together, they were aware that through the bars of hundreds of millions of cages, other budgies, from their perches, could see them fly, for they were, each of them, the source and destination of their sisters and brother’s dreams.
We Found The Source and Destination of Your Budgie's Dreams