Windows Aside, This Drongo Is No Galah

The Age

Saturday December 6, 2008

Robert Drewe's

Like a scene from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Robert Drewe's contemplations are rudely interrupted by something that is not what it seems.

SOME drongo almost smashed my study window the other morning. I was writing away when there was an explosive thump a couple of metres from my head and the glass nearly burst from the window frame. Outside, lying on its back, was a bird with glossy black feathers iridescent with purple and blue highlights. One blood-red eye was open and staring sightlessly up at me.

It was the first real drongo to impinge on my consciousness: a spangled drongo, according to my Field Guide to the Birds of Australia, and immediately, I thought of my father, for whom a car journey never passed, nor a session of maths homework assistance, that didn't contain the vehemently expressed word drongo!

We grew up knowing its meaning: idiot, simpleton, harmless fool. But if a drongo were to have physical form, it sounded more like a creature out of Lewis Carroll - lumpish, slow and turtle-shaped - than the black and purple bird lying before me. We didn't have them in Western Australia, not the bird ones anyway. But now I know what they look like, I see that I'm surrounded by drongos here in the Northern Rivers. Indeed, as I write this, two more drongos are dashing about in the shrubbery after bugs, soaring aerobatically up into the palms and sucking nectar from the grevillea bushes.

While boisterous, noisy and occasionally mystified by window glass, the behaviour of Dicrurus bracteatus is not foolish enough to merit its name becoming a national byword for stupidity. Actually, they look quite adroit and clever. So how did this happen? Field Guide gives no explanation, and Wikipedia, while repeating that drongo is Australian slang for idiot, lamely suggests as a reason "the bird's uninhibited and sometimes comical behaviour as it swoops in search of insects".

I turned to the Australian National Dictionary Centre of the Australian National University, which quickly shot down that theory: "The origin of this term has been wrongly traced to the bird called the drongo ... Some of the drongos of Queensland are migratory, and in winter either travel north to New Guinea or south to Victoria. One ingenious theory has it any bird which travels to Victoria in winter must perforce be stupid, but there is no convincing evidence that the drongo acquired the reputation of the galah." (A bit rich, that dig, coming from Canberra, national centre of intemperate winters.)

The ANDC goes on to assert that the origin of drongo as no-hoper belongs with a famously unsuccessful racehorse, Drongo, in the 1920s. He often came close to winning major races, coming second in a VRC Derby and StLeger, third in the AJC StLeger and fifth in the Sydney Cup, but in 37 starts never won a race. Tradition had it that soon after Drongo's retirement, racegoers began applying his name to other unlucky horses, and then by extension to humans who were slow, clumsy or hopeless cases.

This explanation is only partly convincing. The horse was not unusually hopeless; plenty of horses never win a race. And there was a 15-year gap between the end of Drongo's racing career and the first proven use of drongo in the transferred pejorative sense. This was in the early 1940s when RAAF personnel began applying the term to dumb or slow-learning World War II recruits. But the airforce connection at least cleared up for me my ex-pilot father's daily use of the term.

I reckon the slur drongo caught on because to the Anglo-Saxon ear it sounds amusingly stupid.

And so to the drongo lying belly-up outside my study window. In the way of hurt birds, it looked strangely vulnerable. Dead or alive? What to do? I was considering my mother's highly successful remedy for window-concussed birds: a droplet of Johnnie Walker administered to the beak with an eye-dropper, when the drongo opened its other ruby eye, shook its head to clear it, glared at me for a moment, smoothed its forked tail feathers, and strolled nonchalantly away.

Then it took to the air. It didn't look silly or stupid or worth the nation's insults; it looked pretty much in control of events. More than, say, a galah in a similar situation. Galahs have it even worse.

NEXT WEEK KATE HOLDEN

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