Pay attention, the birds are bringing messages of love all around us

Merlinda Bobis has long believed that as long as you can open your mind and heart to an idea, the universe will attend to you in many mysterious ways. Her new book, a collection of short stories, is filled with such spiritual moments, the kind you tend to notice as a writer who spends a lot of time inside your own head.

Bobis is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories, plays and poems - she received the 2016 Christina Stead Prize in the NSW Premier's Awards for her novel Locust Girl, A Lovesong. She grew up in Albay, in the Philippines, at the foot of an active volcano, a fact that features often in her writing and performance. She moved to Australia to study at the University of Wollongong, before eventually fetching up in Canberra.

Here, she's an honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University; her office has a tree at the window, where birds often land.

Her parents, back in the Philippines, had always observed that the native orioles flew about in pairs. As her father lay dying, her mother relayed to him that a pair of the birds had landed on a tree outside, and were singing to him. Later, after the end, she visited his grave and a pair of orioles were singing nearby. Bobis, hearing this relayed over the phone from her apartment in the Canberra suburb of Braddon, was struck by the kindness of birds.

"It comforted my father, or that's what I thought," she says.

"It comforted my mother, the fact that the birds came to comfort my father, and it comforted me to think that my parents were comforted in a very difficult time.

"But then as the thought came, two crimson rosellas flew up. I was just outside on the balcony, I was sitting there, and I thought, really, the kindness of birds!

"We have a belief in the Philippines that you have to listen, these uncanny moments, they tell you something - you have to respond."

With this, she had the title of a collection of stories, 14 in all, many with recurring characters and themes. They are threaded through with both fact and fiction. She writes about old friends and new loves, both real and imagined, set in the very near present - bushfires and Covid pop up here and there - and in the distant past. She describes love - both romantic and familial - the intensity of female friendship and the resilience of female bonds.

A version of herself, called Nenita, appears in several stories, both in Canberra and in the Philippines.

And she writes of her own recent cancer diagnosis, here in Canberra, and during the first Covid lockdown.

The stories all have as a motif, either central or peripheral, the presence - and kindness - of birds. Cockatoos, orioles, rosellas, doves, a bittern, an owl. The birdlike fluttering of a troubled heart, even.

"I really believe when you think of something, when you open a space, in your head, in your heart, in your body, they come to you," she says.

"Birds just started appearing suddenly. And my sister said, 'Oh, it's just you notice them'. But I told her, how would you explain this uncanny thing, because I have so many? They're not even in the book, so many uncanny moments.

"Like, when I was writing 'Singing Back', about the king parrot, I was writing the sentence about the parrot, and I heard one. I was in my study, and I knew...In the topmost of the cedar was the king parrot singing. And it was like it was actually telling me, 'Merlinda, we are better than what you fabricate in your sentences. We are real'.

"It is so humbling. It keeps on reminding me, you're producing something, you're creating, but the primary source that you're being reminded of, it comes from here."

Some of her stories are inspired by a single phrase, or a story told to her by someone else. In the opening work, for example, a Filipina woman is asked by her neighbour, a woman she barely knows, to help her attend to a dead loved one in the morgue.

It's based on a similar experience relayed to her by a friend: the woman, called Pilar in this story, has no idea at first that she is being asked to help prepare the body of a woman for burial. This involves a most tender act, of colouring the woman's grey strands of hair with a mascara wand.

"She said, 'I had never handled the dead even with my own family'. So that was her line - 'strand by strand, we coloured her hair'," Bobis says.

Bobis cries easily and often during our interview; as in her stories, emotions are never far from the surface. She is often overwhelmed by the beauty and kindness in the world, much of which has made its way into her book.

The longest story in the book is the final one, "Ode To Joy", a story based largely on a period of her own life when she lived in Wollongong and suffered a prolonged period of loneliness. It was, eventually, the kindness and attention of friends, and - being far from home - relative strangers, that would pull her through.

There is a pivotal scene in which the fictional version of herself recalls swimming in a rockpool and, being a novice in the water, she finds herself flailing in the water. A young boy, no older than nine, appeared beside her.

"He was swimming by, so I called out, 'I lost my strokes', and he just swam over, put out his hand and said, 'Hold my hand and we'll swim together'."

The scene as she recounts it is almost identical to the book - it really happened and she's never forgotten it.

"This book is also my homage to the boy who saved me, and that's exactly what he said - 'hold my hand and we'll swim together'," she says.

"That's the line that we have to give to anyone who's out there and drowning, whatever it is."

That was many years ago - the boy would be in his 30s now, and she has thought about trying to find him. Friends have assured her that social media would help, but she wonders whether there is any need to reach out after so many years.

"The 'Ode to Joy' story came from when I was getting better - the pool helped me, the water helped me," she says. "But you know, as a storyteller, you have to put together the bits and pieces into a narrative."

By the end of our interview, Bobis has used almost an entire packet of tissues.

But outside the window, a brilliant crimson rosella alights on a branch, directly in our sightline. It preens a little, before flitting off - a reminder of the world of beauty just outside the window.