Brolga

Sometimes it’s just name a that fires your imagination. Brolga is short, pithy and to the point. It’s an echo of the sound made by a tall, stately creature, dressed in grey but wearing a natty red bandana to signal its hedonistic streak. The ‘r’ is possessed of a rolling guttural vibrato

A Brolga can dance with cavorting, high leaping freedom and from deep within its chest, looped up like French horn, resides a resonant whooping voice that echoes across the landscape. A Brolga is a crane, a resident of Australasia and hitherto unseen by me.

In my fieldguide of Australian birds, many stand out as fabulous for a myriad of reasons, but it is the name of this bird that so captures my attention. It hints at the essence of the bird and then I read that it’s an anglicised corruption from the Aboriginal language Gamilaraay, for the creature they called, burralga. Now the bird jumps from the page, calling its name full-throated and deliciously onomatopoeic.

I finally met my ‘burralga’ amid the wondrous wetlands of Werribee. It did not disappoint!