Making a vista in Victoria Park

Apparently, according to the bird book, corellas aren't supposed to be this close to the coast, so even when they bleat in the trees on either side of us or take off from the grass in agitated groups, their wey faces startled, eyes smudged with the eager stupor of the follower (of course, theirs was the last complaint after the fireworks died at the end of Chinese New Year) it is possible to imagine the park without them. After all, many years ago, I remember black swans on the artificial lake (a whole side of the continent displaced) before the bottom of it was shallowed and a bridge pushed across the middle to make a vista to the Great Hall from a couple of blind-fronted buildings on City Road.

The occasional falling note

I couldn't help thinking now, walking through the park this early in the night, of the series of YouTube videos of their new house in Brazil, where each of the rooms opens out in beautiful, destitute silence, newly cleared of rubbish but with grey fringed holes in the walls yet to be filled, the sound of dogs barking in a distance which is still so much closer than here, three sets of working bathrooms, plenteous space and a delicate forest of fruit trees beyond what seems to contain a loft; people walking, chatting, by the front of the not unusually caged front yard whose single chair must have been placed by the former owner as it has the look of someone lingering -- thinking of this house as I listened to the bleating of the hundreds of settling corellas in the Moreton Bay figs and gums in Victoria Park and trying to be sure, as it was impossible to single them out, that the series of upward inflecting cries, once sounding together, still managed to hide as soon as it revealed, the occasional falling note.