Hi Vicki and anyone else interested
Vicki's posting casts some light on what is my favourite sentence in HANZAB to
date.
I guess one doesn't think of HANZAB as a source of humour but the writer must
surely have had tongue firmly in cheek when this was written in the account on
Paradise Parrot (HANZAB Vol.4 p.465):
'...and an unconfirmed record by two committed birdwatchers in grounds of Sandy
Gallop Lunatic Asylum...'
Is 'committed' used in the sense of 'dedicated' or 'placed in the care of'?.
With all due respect to the two people concerned (long dead), I like to think
that the latter interpretation helps confirm birdwatching as a peculiar madness!
Richard
Vicki PS wrote:
> Some local lore, of particular interest to me as I live only a few hundred
> metres from the site.
>
> >From Beth McRobert's book, "Challinor Centre: The End of the Line. A
> History of the Institution also known as Sandy Gallop" [Dept of Families,
> Youth and Community Care, 1997].
>
> "As a youth in the late 1920s Mr Keith Williams (well known naturalist and a
> former Charge Nurse at Challinor Centre) and a friend were catching shrimps
> in the Asylum dam near Salisbury Road. They noticed a pair of small parrots
> drinking from water left in the cattle hoofprints at the far end of the dam.
> Along the western side of the dam was a ditch built to control heavy flows
> of water into the storage area. The boys crept along behind this ditch and
> got quite close to the birds which were later identified as Paradise parrots
> (now presumed extinct) after the boys referred to their uncle's bird book.
> An old school paper from the Burnett area carried a photograph and a story
> of the birds and this confirmed the identification. The parrots flew across
> Deebing Creek so the boys could not follow them, but their subsequent
> searching of the termite mounds in the area did not reveal any nesting
> sites." [p.63]
--
+----------------------------------------+
Richard Johnson
Roma District
Tel: (07) 4622 4266 Fax: (07) 46 22 4151
E-mail:
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