Moonbird
In the 1970’s a young Tasmanian Aborigine, Errol West, wrote the poem: The Moon Birds of Big Dog Island.
Like dust blown across the plain are the people of the Moon Bird.
And yet there is no one to teach me the songs
That bring the Moon Bird, the fish
Or any other thing that makes me what I am.
Birding involves the sustainable harvesting of juvenile short-tailed shearwaters, called muttonbirds, or moonbirds, from their burrows and preparing them for eating. Aboriginal harvesting of the birds, that migrate to the Arctic each year, goes back thousands of years, and became an important food and cultural practice for island communities in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The birding season runs for six weeks from around late February on the Furneaux Islands in Bass Strait between mainland Australia and lutruwita / Tasmania. Our story is based on Big Dog Island just south of the small town of Lady Baron on Flinders Island.
During the birding season, the small community brings everything they need out to the remote and windy island by boat setting up camp in ramshackle shacks for a number of weeks. Birding culture is ingenious, warm, colourful, peripheral, eccentric, often rough, sometimes funny and occasionally brilliant. Its about connection to community and country and the birds.