AUSTRALIAN 102 FIELD ORNITHOLOGY AUSTRALIAN FIELD ORNITHOLOGY 2008, 25, 102–108 Reviews— Glimpses of Paradise: The Quest for the Beautiful Parrakeet by Penny Olsen, National Library of , Canberra, 2007. Softcover, 22.5 × 25.5 cm, 277 pp, many colour & b/w photos, paintings. RRP $35 (available from BOCA to members for $29.25). Pulcherrimus, the most beautiful. And what a sorry tale is the Paradise ’s, from pathos and tragedy surrounding its entry to science, through early exploitation and wholesale habitat destruction, to more tragedy ending the last authentic records of it, and finally to deceit, skullduggery, criminal activity, denial, self- delusion and fruitless searches in the ensuing decades. It is also part social history, revealing the character of the ‘greats’ and scoundrels in the various periods, and the interconnected circles of acquaintances. This timely and necessary book starts with some apt quotes, among them one from the Monty Python ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch, then provides some background to the book and a tabulated list of major figures in the Parrot’s history. The first three chapters provide a history of John Gilbert’s discovery, and John Gould’s naming, of the species, and the eventual collection and description of the female. Poor Gilbert, robbed of his desired Platycercus gilberti by a combination of unfortunate circumstances. Chapter 4 is an important one critically reviewing the evidence for the Parrot’s true historical distribution, and scotching claims that it occurred on Cape York and in present-day New South Wales (after Queensland separated). Chapter 5 recounts the early live-trapping of the for European aviculture and nobility. Chapter 6 is an account of the Parrot’s eggs: the early (genuine) Barnard clutches, and Guyatt’s false clutches, which duped even the likes of Mervyn Goddard. Along the way we learn of the officious persecution of Goddard, and hence the deplorable loss to science of most of his meticulous egg collection and data. Chapter 7 describes the biology of (whose mounds provided the Parrot with its only nest-sites), and details the removal of vast quantities of their mounds, in the Parrots’ core distribution, for ‘cement’ flooring in various human constructions. Chapter 8 describes the commensal that live in the antbed parrots’ nests: two species that cohabit, respectively, with the Golden-shouldered and Hooded Parrots, and speculates that a third lived in Paradise Parrots’ nests but was probably extinct before it could be described. Chapter 9 is an account of Chisholm’s quest that resulted in Cyril Jerrard’s information on the Parrot and its nesting events, partly published by Chisholm (see Jerrard’s essay on pp. 59–65 herein). Colin Lendon (see following review) located Jerrard’s surviving brothers, and so Jerrard’s essay and other pertinent information came to light. Jerrard’s were the last verified sightings and nests. We also learn that, incredibly, the RAOU congress in 1924 visited the Barnards’ property (where the Parrot had disappeared), but not Jerrard’s property where it was still extant, and that no one other than Chisholm visited there at the time. Chapter 10 convincingly disposes of Irby’s mistaken records of the and some other rare in northern NSW, and the erroneous claims (based on misidentifications) that it nested in creek-banks and tree-hollows. This chapter also considers the unverifiable Kiernan claim of the early 1990s [see Wingspan 11(3), Sept. 1993] that spawned fruitless searches in the area concerned. Apparently a case of mistaken identity and wishful thinking, perhaps Kiernan’s and his informants’ birds were Blue Bonnets and/or juvenile Pale-headed Rosellas. VOL. 25 (2) JUNE 2008Reviews—Glimpses of Paradise 103

Chapter 11 is the story of smuggling of fauna, and laundering of the proceeds, by Hallstrom; illegal trapping of Golden-shouldered Parrots on Cape York by his underling Mattinson (involving corruption among officialdom); the passing-off of hybrid Mulga × Golden-shouldered Parrots as Paradise Parrots (which have duped some aviculturists in recent times); and the fraudulent claim of Paradise Parrots allegedly bred in captivity. Chapter 12 details rumours, sightings and expeditions since the 1960s. Many of the claims were second- or third-hand reports from non-birders whose identifications were unreliable, hence likely confusion with look-alikes such as the Golden-shouldered Parrot, and Blue Bonnet. Furthermore, confusion also arose from the same folk-names for several species, e.g. many were known as ‘grass parrots’ or ‘ground parrots’, and the was also called the Beautiful or Red-shouldered Parrot; some lay informants also confused (by name) the Red-winged Parrot with the ‘Red-shouldered’ (Paradise) Parrot. Then there is the much-touted photograph of the male Paradise Parrot, given to the late Alan Lendon in the 1960s, by an undisclosed source from an undisclosed location (i.e. the origin of the photograph is unverifiable). Surely, 40 years on, these vital details could have been provided to Dr Olsen for appraisal in her book, if Lendon senior had divulged them to anyone. The photograph (reproduced here as Plate 14, p. 107) is undeniably of an adult male Paradise Parrot, but it is so out of focus (deliberately?) that it is impossible to tell whether it is alive, or a stuffed specimen tied to a tree. (Perhaps computer enhancement of the original image could provide an answer.) Olsen deduces that the location was Kulki Station, Queensland (near Hebel), a region where Mattinson was rumoured to have been active. (There is also, confusingly, a Kulki Station near Graman, NSW, which perhaps spawned some of the claims of the Parrot occurring in NSW.) Finally, there is the claim of nests near Ingham in northern Queensland. This hoax shares its origin with the bogus ‘new’ Fig-Parrot for NSW [see Wingspan 17(2), June 2007], and should be regarded in the same light. (And these outcomes must also cast doubt on the Black-breasted Button-quail allegedly occurring and breeding well south of its accepted range in NSW, cf. Emu 96, 202–209.) Tellingly, none of the reputable, expert ornithologists who investigated all these Paradise Parrot claims, and searched for the , ever obtained sightings or hard evidence: Goddard, Courtney, Hunt, the Lendons, Officer, Cameron, Nielsen (the last two of whom lived in the Parrot’s country), Pizzey, Sharland, Bennett (in the first RAOU Atlas days), Seton (not ‘Seaton’), Ley, Sonnenburg (not ‘Sonnerberg’), Venables, Carter, Holmes, Izzard, Gosper et al. The final chapter reviews the litany of environmentally destructive events in the Parrot’s core range, and reaches the inevitable conclusion that the Parrot is extinct. Olsen quotes Sharland as saying that trappers have ‘just about rooted the Golden-shouldered [Parrot]’, and one could say the same for 150 years of inappropriate (for the Australian environment) land- and water-management practices in the Paradise Parrot’s habitat. Successive Queensland governments in the Jerrard era and ensuing few decades are culpable. Some of the main conclusions, convincingly argued by Olsen, include the following. • Gilbert’s ability notwithstanding, he clearly mistook the hitherto unknown Golden-shouldered Parrots on Cape York for his Paradise Parrots of the , and all subsequent claims of the Paradise Parrot on Cape York are based on an initial false premise, mistaken identity, and (in some AUSTRALIAN 104Reviews—Glimpses of Paradise FIELD ORNITHOLOGY

cases) deceit. Furthermore, these claims, e.g. the Ingham nests, betray an ignorance of ecology and biogeography. • In historical times the Parrot only ever occurred in south-eastern Queensland, centred on the Darling Downs, and it only nested in mounds (specifically, the domed ones of Nasutitermes magnus); claims that it occurred in present-day NSW (since the separation of Qld), or nested in banks, trees and stumps, are false or mistaken. • Claims of sightings or nests since the 1940s are bogus or mistaken, or at best unsupported by sufficient evidence. (And if people have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, let them prove it! With the modern technology available, there should be no excuse.) This scholarly work concludes with an extensive bibliography of sources used for each chapter. I noticed few errors: a (very) few typos or misspellings of people and place-names; ‘dependant’ as an adjective; and ‘peaked’ for ‘piqued’ (which should have been corrected by a National Library editor). Also, the ‘magpies’ subject to bounty were currawongs (aka ‘scrub magpies’); the ‘Brush-turkey’ of the Downs was probably the grassland Bustard (aka Bush Turkey), not the forest Brush-turkey (Alectura); and the Spotted-sided Finch was the Diamond Firetail, not the Zebra Finch. These co-inhabitants of Paradise Parrot country—Bustard and Firetail—are also, of course, now threatened birds of the grassy woodlands. And the parrots on the Nive River near Augathella (Queensland) were probably not Turquoise Parrots, but something else (if not indeed genuine Paradise), as the site is scarcely extralimital to the Paradise’s true range but well beyond the Turquoise’s range. (During the first RAOU Atlas period, I saw possible Paradise Parrot habitat of eucalypt woodland with termite mounds to the north, between Aramac and Clermont, Qld.) I leave any errors of fact or interpretation to the following reviewer, more qualified to comment. The number of museum specimens is staggering, representing excessive collecting: more than 130! One is also left pondering the motives of the people behind the false claims: in some cases perhaps pecuniary, or to obtain eggs of other rare species, but in others apparently just for the notoriety, or self- aggrandisement among peers or ecotourism clients, or because they’re deluded or are pathological liars. Then there are those who cling to vain hopes of the Parrot’s continued existence. Unfortunately, the Parrot, like its habitat, has been buried under so much bovine scat. To continue Monty Python’s ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch: ‘…Beautiful plumage.’ ‘…He’s stone dead! ...That parrot is definitely deceased… He’s bleedin’ demised… All statements to the effect that this parrot is still a going concern are from now on inoperative.’ The Paradise Parrot’s fate was a forewarning of the widespread declines of grassy woodland birds that we’re seeing today. If there is a slight chance that it still exists, the places to look would be in or near its confirmed historical range in Queensland, in extensive woodland with an intact ground layer of seeding native grasses, abundant Nasutitermes mounds, and permanent water (if indeed any such country still exists, necessarily remote from where birders usually look). Finally, DNA testing of the Parrot’s feathers, and comparison with and among Golden- shouldered, Hooded and other Psephotus species, would settle nagging questions VOL. 25 (2) JUNE 2008Reviews—Glimpses of Paradise 105 about the species status of the three antbed parrots and the validity of a separate genus for them, ; I would have liked to see this addressed. For those of us born since the 1930s, the only tangible links with the Paradise Parrot are the museum specimens, this book, and (for me) Jerrard’s essay and a childhood encounter with Chisholm shortly before his death. The tragedy of the Parrot, eloquently told in this attractive, well-produced and surprisingly inexpensive book, must not be allowed to be repeated on our other woodland birds. Stephen Debus University of New England

Editor’s note: We depart from usual practice and place two reviews of the same book here, because the following reviewer was intimately involved in the Alan Lendon phase of the saga and is well qualified to judge a history of the post-Jerrard era. And, although the Paradise Parrot may be the only bird species to become extinct on mainland Australia (so far!), many endemics on Australian territory are extinct: King Island Emu, Kangaroo Island Emu, White Gallinule (Lord Howe Island), Norfolk Island Ground-Dove, Norfolk Island Kaka, Lord Howe Gerygone, Robust White-eye (Lord Howe Island), White-chested White-eye (Norfolk Island), and Tasman Starling (Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands).

Glimpses of Paradise (2) The Paradise Parrot has an evocative name, and sadly it is also dubbed extinct, more likely gone forever than any of continental Australia’s other bird species. It also has a mysterious history, mediated by a cast of unusual human characters, to which this large, flashy tome does wordy testament and epitaph to Australia’s one-time exquisite parrot. I know, and like, the author, Dr Penny Olsen, from student days when we studied zoology, whence she went on to be a leading researcher and publisher on Australian raptors. (I also joined CSIRO, researching the arid-zone environment). I’ll therefore be referring to Penny from acquaintance. This book, as she says in her preface, is ‘part-ramble through history, part-detective story’; included must be everything the author has ever unearthed about the Parrot. The strength of the book, for birdo and non-birdo alike, is the illustrations: stunning portraits (no authenticated colour photographs of the bird exist) from talented bird artists, such as Tony Pridham, who excels at painting the male, whereas E. Gostelow and P. Marsack do justice to the female. Penny includes an exhaustive 20 photographs of almost all the extant museum skins, which some readers may find overdone from their very dead, stuffed and artificial shapes. The text is certainly a ‘ramble’— in parts tediously repetitive. If one ignores the misattribution of data (for example, the so-called Lendon mounted skin, B.24658, is a different bird, NMV B.21496), then a more succinct narrative is found in the plate captions. The Parrot was early on recognised as perhaps the most superlative (pulcherrimus)—not beautiful, as Penny mistranslates, but the most beautiful. Bird enthusiasts quickly fell in love with the Parrot, became possessive, jealous, desirous to collect it (and its eggs), and eventually just to rediscover it alive. Penny catalogues a large cast of diverse characters bitten by the revenge of the Paradise Parrot. The long and not chronologically sequential text boils down to three main periods of Paradise ‘fading and once regaining’ (apologies to John Milton). The first might be called Discoverers and Collectors, and focusses on the early AUSTRALIAN 106Reviews—Glimpses of Paradise FIELD ORNITHOLOGY explorers and their natural-history patrons in 19th-century England. Gould’s collector, John Gilbert, features prominently, and he is one of Penny’s favourites, understandable as he came to a tragic end while invading Aboriginal territory on Cape York. The author has her firm favourites in this version of the Paradise story; also those she dislikes, such as the 20th-century main champion of the Paradise Parrot, journalist Alec Chisholm. The first three chapters, set in the decades of the 19th century when the Parrot was most easily encountered, deal mostly with the histories of exploring Europeans. The second period could be called Trouble in Paradise. From Chapter 4 we are focussed on the heartland of the Paradise Parrot’s distribution—the Darling Downs of south-eastern Queensland—in the critical decades of late 19th and early 20th centuries. This pastoral district was indeed a paradise for early settlers pushing their flocks and herds west from Brisbane. There are records of the dense seeding grasses coming up to a horse’s belly: these native grasses sustained the Parrot, clouds of finches, doves and pigeons, and, all too quickly, hungry livestock. Later, of course, came the devastating competition from the rabbit, predations of cats and foxes, and invasions of weeds like the thick Prickly Pear Opuntia. These are the frightful sets of ecological disasters that beset the Paradise Parrot, which was not geared to move to more favourable areas in times of stress. Pastoralists and bird-lovers spoke of the Great (or Federation) Drought, which was yet another tipping-point sending the Parrot to the verge of . Although these sad and sober reports are well covered in the book, the lessons for today’s conservation management of rare species are not so well made. Two-thirds of this book fits into the third period, starting after the First World War and running through to present-day FRVs: Fools, Romantics and Villains. Here is the controversial stuff of Penny’s tale, and, I find, some mistaken parts. One of Penny’s main players in the saga, Alan Lendon, was my father. He was widely regarded as Australia’s parrot man until Joe Forshaw came along in the 1970s: Alan started as an aviculturist, studying most of our parrot species in 60 aviaries which I kept supplied with fresh water and greenstuff. One gets to know parrot behaviour that way—not even that great English writer on parrots, Lord Tavistock, noted that the male displays to its mate by raising the crest-feathers of its black cap. With a repetition typical of this book, Alan is constantly referred to as an aviculturist: in fact in the latter, post-WWII years of his life, he was more an amateur ornithologist, as his presidency of both the South Australian Ornithological Association and Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union attests. He was also the recipient of a 35-mm slide, sent to him in great secrecy in the late 1960s, from which he made the print that accompanies this review (Plate 14). Alan only ever wrote: ‘it would appear to be convincing evidence that the species is not extinct’ (emphasis mine), and he knew of at least two other main players in this game who had access to male Paradise skins. Penny quotes one character as claiming that Alan knew that this slide was taken at Kulki, north of Walgett, NSW. Sheer invention, like many of the other claims Penny collates for this FRV period. The start of this period was when the widely-pronounced extinct Paradise Parrot was rediscovered, thanks to the unremitting faith of Alec Chisholm, who receives a poor press in the book. He refused to accept all the received wisdom that the Parrot had become extinct by the end of the Great Drought which broke in 1902. His publicity campaign in country newspapers brought forth a series of remarkable photographs from a grazier, Cyril Jerrard, showing an undoubted pair of Paradise Parrots at their nesting hole in a termite mound. VOL. 25 (2) JUNE 2008Reviews—Glimpses of Paradise 107

Print of slide shown to Alan Lendon in the 1960s, purporting to show an adult male Paradise Parrot in the field. Reproduced here to show its poor quality, and hence low value as evidence of the Paradise Parrot’s existence. The patches of ventral white (underdown?) showing through the feathers suggest a museum specimen. Plate 14 Photo: Courtesy Colin Lendon

Chisholm publicised Jerrard’s remarkable rediscovery in the Emu, and tried to mobilise what we would now call conservation support within the RAOU. In 1926 he had a motion passed urging State Governments to encourage the breeding of rare species in approved private aviaries with a view to subsequent liberation in suitable sanctuaries. How prescient of him, when one now realises that this is close to the strategy being used for the survival of the endangered Orange-bellied Parrot. Alan Lendon commented in 1973 in relation to the Paradise: ‘In retrospect it seems a great pity that this [RAOU] resolution was not acted upon, for the closely related Hooded and Golden-shouldered Parrots have proved to be free breeders in captivity’. AUSTRALIAN 108Reviews—Glimpses of Paradise FIELD ORNITHOLOGY

I find it quite unfair that this book gives scant acknowledgement to the efforts of Chisholm, apparently on the unworthy grounds that people found him quarrelsome and, nowadays, sexist. I met him once with my father: yes, he was a grumpy old man, perhaps because Alan Lendon did not rise to his bait that Gilbert’s northernmost reports were from the last refuge of the parrot Chisholm alone had popularised with the name of Paradise. To finish by saying Chisholm presided over the extinction of the Paradise Parrot is most certainly a case not well made. The Chisholm/Jerrard rediscovery opened the floodgates to other FRVs, especially as birdos became more mobile in the affluent decades following WWII. Penny’s research would suggest that the Jerrard birds, which disappeared by 1927, were possibly the last inbred remnants of the Darling Downs population (their clutches were infertile). Many more people became bitten by the bug, not just bona fide bird-watchers, but destructive egg-collectors and the old enemy, illegal bird-trappers. A notorious example of the latter, Joe Mattinson, had early 4-wheel- drive access to Cape York where he plundered the rare Golden-shouldered Parrot, and also claimed to have taken Paradise Parrots in the region of poor Gilbert’s last reports. Such villainous characters appear to have one consistent trait in common: congenital untruthfulness. There are so many shonks coming and going in this section of the book that one longs for a graph or timeline summarising their credibility, along the lines of two illuminating graphs that Penny gives on bogus egg-sizes and the months/years of Paradise Parrot observations so carefully recorded by Cyril Jerrard. It’s a pity to have to say that even for a Paradise aficionado this book contains a lot of wearisome padding, and simply cries out for a rigorous editor to eliminate repetitions; to consolidate the repetitious bibliographies for each chapter; to insist on a gazetteer with map co-ordinates for many obscure place names; and to add the missing E to the index (for which ecology, eggs, the Emu, spring to mind). A proper historian’s eye detects the lessons of history for us today. What are the graded tipping-points (or last straws) that sent the Paradise Parrot to extinction? And are we wilfully repeating them today for other vulnerable species? The ‘part- detective story’ should finger all the villains contributing to this our greatest avian loss, and that includes the wildlife bureaucracy who never set up a network of sanctuary-reserves or even deterred the bird smugglers. In the end, it’s the Parrot’s tragedy that we still yearn to disavow. This book lists so many missed chances, so many false hopes and lost opportunities that one senses a profound sadness at its heart. That we lost so early our most beautiful of all the parrots is our own Shakespearean tragedy, wherein we, like Othello, must admit we threw away a pearl Richer than all his tribe. A light never to shine again on the Downs. Colin Lendon Canberra