Gang-gang. Imagining magpies as big as jumbo jets

Suburban Australians love magpies but we would live in terrible fear of them if they really were the size of the behemoth in Dean Bowen's fanciful painting Giant Magpie on Skyscraper. Magpies are mostly carnivorous and if they were this big we, humans, would be just worms and maggots to them.

Bowen's monster is in a new exhibition of his works, New Morning, soon to commence at the Beaver Galleries. The gallery tells us that he has "a naive style".

"His depictions of animals, insects, buildings and objects reflect his quirky and infectious sense of humour ... he plays with aspects of scale reflecting on both the monumental as well as the miniature, often juxtaposing the two."

Look closely at Giant Magpie on Skyscraper and you will see two other big birds, belonging to Qantas and to Virgin, high up in the firmament and juxtaposed with a naive and juvenile moon.

Dean Bowen's New Moon, featuring paintings, print and sculpture, opens at the Beaver Galleries on May 26 and continues until June 12.

But, reluctantly, we put aside the naive and the fanciful and come back to earth, to be precise the earth of Woden Valley's Curtin, with a bump.

Loyal readers will know of this column's popular (but sometimes disgusting) occasional series of readers' unusual photographs of local wildlife, photographs that capture what a jungle it is out there for animals; a world of sex and violence.

As our latest in this series we bring you the concussed king parrot.

You can an tell from this poor creature's glazed eye and bewildered body language that if you asked it the mandatory easy questions medicos always ask biffed footballers to test for concussion (like "What day is it?" "What is the prime minister's name?" "Is Scott Morrison the government's worst Christian hypocrite?") it would score poorly.

Reader Richard Bush had just listened, last Sunday, to an ABC Radio
National Sunday Extra: Ockham's Razor item. https://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pglR6WWBJ6

"The speaker has undertaken research into the [native] noisy miner and found its habits are as destructive as those of the introduced Indian mynah which has been subject of an effective culling program in Canberra.

"I was a bit sceptical until, the next day, a king parrot knocked itself out by flying into my window. Immediately, within seconds, an aggressive mob of noisy miners
descended on the helpless parrot and started to attack it. I rescued the
not-quite-dead parrot from the mob and placed it in a cardboard box in
my garage for protection. It was really out to it but came good within
the hour. Nothing broken. [Eventually] it flew
confidently away. The noisy miner has colonised my neighbourhood in
Curtin. It's open parkland with mature trees. This is the habitat they
like and it is these areas in many urban parks where they have
frightened away all small birds and are even aggressive towards bigger
birds."

The Ockham's Razor item canvassed the case for culling noisy miners. This columnist has no opinion on this. But the fact that noisy miners are combative and do awful things (like kicking a parrot when it's down) is not of itself a reason to cull them. They have evolved to be so belligerent to enable them to survive in Nature's ruthless jungle. Not as Darwinian as federal politics (five prime ministers in five years), Nature is still forbidding and callous,

But if enough Canberrans hate noisy miners perhaps they, the human Canberrans, could get together as a Complaints Choir and sing a song against the species.

We've not written about Complaints Choirs for quite some time (some readers, being Canberrans, have complained about this failure of ours) but at the time of writing there is such a richness of complaining going on here that there is a potential superabundance of choristers.

Like-minded whingers, for example opponents of light rail and/or residents' associations complaining about risks of anything 21st century coming to their neighbourhoods would make their cases so much more attractive if only they would sing them to us. They could perform in shopping centres, at Raiders' games, wherever there are people to be entertained.

Another Complaints Choir could be formed (one senses from the volume of letters to the editor it would be roughly the size of the mammoth Mormon Tabernacle Choir) from those who despise the pretty lakeside container village and all things (graffiti, say, and unmown grass) that they complain makes the city unsightly.

Complaints Choirs crop up all over the world now but they seem to owe something of their invention to the ever-impressive Finns. The Helsinki Complaints Choir was one of the very first (it sang about failings of its city's governance). Then Finnish artists set about composing works for the Finnish choir to sing.

Canberra's NIMBY whingers show such imagination, such flair in their inventions of complaints about things that one feel sure versifying will come easily to them when writing lyrics for their respective choirs. Catchy melodies abound to set the words to. Classic advertising jingles like I Like Aeroplane Jelly/Aeroplane Jelly For Me (suggesting the opening lines "I hate the 21st century/The 1950s suited me", or perhaps "I love being a NIMBY/No urban infill near me!") might work well.