This day had the distinction of being the six month mark of my year long visit to Australia. It’s gone fast and the next six months promise to go even faster.
This morning as I was making coffee, I glanced out the window and froze. There, about ten feet from me was a kookaburra sitting on a branch. It was a nice way to mark the halfway point of this particular journey because it paralleled something similar that had happened in Sydney on my first morning there.
I had woken up and gone down to the dining room. After making a pass through the food offerings, I took my plate outside into a small covered area to be able to better immerse myself in the sights and sounds of this new place. After a moment a kookaburra came over and landed on a beam about ten or so feet away, just above me. A lady at a nearby table witnessed this also and she said it was considered a sign of good luck by the locals for a kookaburra to land near you. Now I don’t put any stock in good luck or luck of any kind, for that matter, but it was a nice little detail that made the moment feel special, if not significant. After all, despite raging fires, drought, and a world-altering pandemic, I had managed to get here just before the worst happened and national borders were shut. I had been very fortunate.
And I felt fortunate then to see such a unique and iconic bird outside of the confines of a zoo. The kookaburra has a call that sounds similar to a manic laugh, and I can remember hearing it in an old Loony Tunes cartoon featuring the ‘dodo’, who was completely insane. It’s the kind of sound that immediately makes one feel as though they are in the heart of the Amazon or in some dense, tropical jungle. I have been able to hear many kookaburra songs since my arrival, but I have never gotten as close to one as I did that first morning.
Not until today, that is. To have the same thing happen to me exactly at the halfway point in my journey felt poetic and meaningful. But it also wedged a song into my head that’s been stuck there ever since.
This kookaburra was sitting in a Torelliana tree and not a gum, but the chorus to the old favorite “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree” popped into my head immediately. Not actually knowing all the words, I pulled it up online so I could listen to it. The words are really very simple:
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Merry merry king of the bush is he
Laugh kookaburra, laugh kookaburra
Gay your life must be
The song was written in 1932 and is an Aussie favorite. I somehow knew the tune and the first line of the chorus, but I couldn’t recall when I had heard it, where I had heard it, or how I even knew the first few words of the song. It’s possible that I was exposed to it in music class many years ago, but it’s a total mystery to me. So a month or so ago I had this very tune bouncing around in my head when one day, completely at random, it finally collided with another Aussie song that had been rattling around in there and BAM! I had a sudden epiphany; an absolute Eureka! moment.
In 1981 the band Men at Work released a single called “Down Under” and it made a splash in the US a year after its AU release. Everyone who grew up in the 80’s or has any awareness of American pop culture can recognize this song within the first five notes. But what many people don’t know, and what I certainly didn’t know until one day while self-isolating in a house in Australia, is that the “Kookaburra” song is actually embedded into that 1980’s standard. The flute part is where you’ll hear it prominently, and once you’ve heard it, you can’t un-hear it.
That a super catchy kids song could provide immediate appeal for adults is probably a given, but unfortunately this similarity also lead to several court battles over copyright infringement some years back. The funny thing, though, is that the owners of the copyrighted song didn’t even recognize the telltale notes of their own tune until over two decades later when it was pointed out on a quiz show and came to public attention in 2007. Since then Colin Hay has reworked the flute part slightly so as to avoid copyright fees, but the company who holds the copyright to the Kookaburra song has garnered much ill will from the Australian public as a result of their part in essentially striking down the song that helped catapult Australia into the consciousness of the world and virtually become the country’s alternate national anthem.
So there you have it.
In other news, the hallway that has consumed much of my time and effort for the past six months is nearly finished. The painting is finally done and yesterday the men with the sander came in and stripped the floor to bare wood so that it can be refinished. One thing I can say is that when I leave here I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I physically left my mark and helped beautify this wonderful old house that will have been my home for the better part of a year.
Oh, and I also completed version 1.0 of a fabric mask for the eventual flight out of Oz. (But it’s also entirely possible that I’ve been recruited by Cobra to help in it’s continuing fight against GI Joe.)
So anyways, a visit from a kookaburra was a nice way to start this truly significant day; the halfway point. The hump day for the entire trip and a Wednesday, no less!! To wake up this morning was to realize that my journey was officially half over, but that little bird reminded me that I still have a lot to see and experience and enjoy, and that made my remaining time all the more precious. After all, my song will be ending soon and regeneration is an inevitability (I’m on my fifth right now, so far as I can figure). I intend to thoroughly enjoy the rest of my run as the Doctor this season while I wait to see if the next season in New Zealand will get picked up by the network or not.
The crick in my back says I’ll likely be writing radio scripts today, teaching classes tonight, and not doing much else. As of posting this, May 7th began nine minutes ago, but by the time my North American friends read this, May 6th will have only just begun. For you it’s a whole new day. So enjoy it, make it count for something, and don’t let it go to waste!
