Four Australian wood ducks looked on in envy on Thursday, from the banks of a North Watson storm water pond, at the official unveiling of a flattering sculpture of another bird species, the Galah. First Bruce Armstrong's controversial Powerful Owl at the corner of Belconnen way and Benjamin Way, now this pair of Galahs beside Antill Street at North Watson. Will the ducks' turn for immortalisation never come?
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The sculpture Kissing Galahs is at the new Village Building "master planned community" of over 300 houses and apartments at 'The Fair' at North Watson. The two giant birds (each about the size of a substantial seal or, uncannily, of Village Building supremo Bob Winnel) are posed together on a giant log and seem about to "kiss", if that's what birds do.
Minister for the Arts Joy Burch said at the unveiling (she cut the bright red silk ribbon holding the material covering the love birds) that the people of The Fair would be bound to "embrace" the sculpture. She's surely right but some of us, living at The Fair (it's on the site of the old, Canberra Fair) would find that eternal will they?/won't they? pose quite suspenseful, like those paintings of breaking waves (that can never break) that are so popular with motel chains but that keep some of us awake with the suspense. Rodin's famous sculpture The Kiss would be quite irritating if it depicted the two naked lovers wondering (like these two Galahs) whether to kiss or not instead of being as they are, already embarked on a no-turning-back hotly smooching exchange of salivas.
Artists Bev Hogg and Elizabeth Patterson (you may know their Soccer Players at MacGregor) explained after Thursday's unveiling that their ideas about the sculpture included the thought of young families at The Fair "nesting" just like those pairs of Galahs that, setting a moral example to us all, remain monogamously true to one another for life. Then of course there's the fact that The Fair nestles just below bushy Mount Majura and makes much of the place's natural backdrop and abundant native bird life.
Indeed, as well as the four ducks looking on enviously, the copse of remnant native trees just behind the sculpture trilled and rusted with tiny wren-like things even while minister Burch was speaking.
She said that locals would "embrace" the puckering-up Psittacines not only figuratively but literally too and that little children were going to enjoy clambering about on the tactile and sturdy (concrete and on stainless steel frames) cockatoos.
