The Happy Warrior

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 803, 10 December 1954, Page 22

The Happy Warrior

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SUNDOWNER

NOVEMBER 9

Birkdale, that the third * starling I saw recently in the riest-making party was a late chick from last season. "I remember watching three honey-eaters once when I camped for a few weeks under their nest in Tasmania. It seemed that the male and female were taking turns on the nest, while the third member watched on a near-by tree. Flocks A S.D. suggests, in a note from

Or parrots made periodic noisy

raids on them, but the honey-eaters were vigilant and, it seemed to me, systematic. The three would dart from different directions, and the slower parrots were no match for them. I can’t remember now why I decided that the third bird was a grown-up youngster, but my opinion was afterwards endorsed by a naturalist. If I was right about the honey-eaters, it is possible that the same explanation covers the third starling." I would think it a very likely explanation if the late chicken happened to be a solitary survivor of a clutch, or perhaps the only one hatched. But the family history of birds is an obscure page to me. I don’t know on what principle they pair off to begin with, and if one member of a pair dies I don’t know whether the other remains solitary for the rest of that season, pairs again, or never pairs at all. I have reasons for supposing that some pairs, if not all or most, are from the same clutch, but I can’t suppose that what applies to one species applies to all. Birds that spend most of the year in flocks seem to go through a prolonged period of sorting themselves into pairs; but I have never been patient enough to learn how they do it, The courting stage appears to follow the pairing-off ‘stage, or would it be more accurate to say that the pairing is courting and the later stage mating or marTiage? I once read a detailed account of the courting of the yellow-hammer from which I gathered that the males, which have been in flocks through the winter, isolate themselves early in spring and seize a piece of territory. Here they do a little feeble singing, but their serious activity is freeing their area from rival males; and until that has been accomplished they take little notice of the females or the females of them. It may be a week or two before females visit them with intent, and a month or two before they have fixed their attentions on a particular female and persuaded her to stay. But the author did not say who that female was -whether she was a complete stranger, a member of the small flock with which the male has spent the winter, or a member of the male’s own clutch. Such facts must be known; but I don’t think they are widely known; and I have certainly not myself come on them frequently in books. It therefore seems strange* that a young starling, even if it was a solitary chicken, should be helping its parents to make a nest instead of finding a mate and building a nest of its own. Perhaps its hormones were sluggish or develop-

ment had taken a morbid course, There must, after all, be birds with kinks as there are twisted human beings. * s&s _

NOVEMBER 10

be ut NE of my pleasant memories of Queensland is the discovery, among my daughter-in-law’s treasures, of a big thick, and inordinately heavy volume of the essays of Walter Murdoch. It was not, I suppose, Murdoch’s complete essays, which will not be available while he lives, But there were essays between the worn and drab covers that I had never seen in New Zealand, and I also discovered, I think for the first time,

that prophets who are honoured in

their own country have a significance there that is not quite the same anywhere else. My introduction to Walter Murdoch came many years ago through Professor Sinclaire, now, to our great’ loss in New Zealand, relapsed@into silence; but I did not catch the full flavour of Murdoch’s Pages till I read them in Australia, Now that I am back in New Zealand I find myself wondering why this should have een, A part of the answer perhaps is that Murdoch is the happy Australian warrior, and that this is not quite the same thing as the happy English, or American, or European warrior, even when they all march to the same music or themselves make the music. Because Murdoch has written much for newspapers he has written much that will be forgotten. But he has written very little that is not first-class for its purpose and of its kind, and less still that was not worth saying when he said it. It was always good for those who read it, and I am not quite sure that Murdoch, when he wrote it, would have been "better employed writing something else, Only Murdoch himself knows the answer to that question, but I suspect that he knows very well why he chose to express his thoughts as they came to him, and that he would do it again if he were living his life a second time. A man who can both read and mix, go on learning and not cease loving’ his country and his contemporaries, become a scholar without being a snob, trust his emotions without clothing his mind, work and worship and question and deny and laugh, can be silent only at a great cost to his fellow men. Australia is on the way to a_ civilisation as rich as Europe’s or Asia’s and more genial and kind. Murdoch is a bright light on the weve # % %

NOVEMBER 11

WAS advised today by a bookseller friend to hide all "the bad" books I have on my shelves, or "lie very low" about them. It was disinterested advice, but a little tantalising. Fifty or forty or even thirty years ago I might have known what a bad book is. Now I don’t. I know what a dull book is, a stupid book, a book without a fresh thought

from beginning to end. If I start

taking those from my shelves the holes will be wider than the filled spaces. I know. what a lying book is. a book written by a man who never told the truth in his-life, since he never heard or said or understood anything that was true; and I have some of

those, too. I know what a- malicious book is, a book written by an author whose ink was mixed with mud. I saw one the other day written about T. E. Lawrence. I know what a fanatical book is, a book written by a blind man who had a blind man for a father, who addresses himself to blind readers, and can never be happy as long as there are readers left with eyes. Wars produce them by the thousand, religions by we tens of thousands, and every page of every book is sooner or later spattered with blood and tears. The incurably blind are, however, a small percentage of mankind. I know what salacious books are, but offhand I can’t name one that would interest the police. Perhaps the salt on my shelves has lost its savour. I know what bloodless books are, gutless books, books without compassion or charity, books, whoever wrote them, that serve, feed, and_ glorify man’s inhumanity to man. I have so, many~of those, though I no longer read them, that the police would have to bring a lorry to carry them away. They are nine out of ten of all books writ- ten, but the police would find nothing wrong with them, and in the end, if they took them away, they would have to return them to me. I know, and possess, and read, and enjoy many books that the police may one day be instructed to impound-Chaucer and Shakespeare and Burns and the Old Testament and Byron and Whitman and Voltaire and Rabelais and MRousseau; all our great novelists except Scott; nearly all our famous autobiographies. When the police come for those I will insist that the Lord came before them-that the moment I put the Delinquency Report on my shelves everything -flew out of the window but a few fairy tales, one or two missionary books, my cobwebbed Euclid and Algebra, Eric or Little by Little, and Dame Buckle and Her Pet Johnny. (To be continued)