Thursday 16 April 2009

A Critical Bird

Back on November 21st I received the following note on Flickr

"I would like permission to use this photo in a non-for profit aboriginal language poster I am working on. Do you have this image in high resolution? The poster will be in Alyawarr, a language of central Australia, and it will be about birds that signal things in the environment. We will acknowledge all photographers and are happy to send you a copy of the poster.
Look forward to hearing from you Myf Turpin"

Of course I was happy to oblige and sent of the higher resolution picture. To be honest I'd forgotten all about it so when the postman knocked and gave me a "tube" from Australia I had no Idea what would be in it.

I was impressed by this great poster of Australian Birds, each with a little "story" about it. The poster is about 60cm by 84cm and is very eye-catching. The posters are produced by the Cultural Signs Project, Charles Darwin University. The posters in four native languages can be seen at the university Charles Darwin University WEB site.

It's a bit difficult to read the text this size, this is what it says "The Owlet-nightjar makes a whooshing sound. I criticises people as they go past at night. It sees them out of the tree hollow and mocks or criticises that person".
This is another view of the bird on the poster. The first one we saw was in fact in a hole in a tree, and only popped its head out for a short time and I missed the photo, it could have been my inability to takes its picture that it was criticising.

2 comments:

Birdingben said...

Hi Tony

Your fame spreads far & wide! Really nice when something like that happens out of the blue (not that there was much of that yesterday!).

Cheers

Ben R

Pat said...

What fun. The boys will be impressed.