Regent Honeyeater Project co-ordinator Andie Guerin was invited to see Jane Howe and Robert Bird’s new art installation, a detailed sculpture of a regent honeyeater.
Photo by
Billie Davern
The newest addition to Robert Bird and Jane Howe’s backyard is more than an intricate artwork. It’s a sculpture that symbolises a dying species “rising from the ashes”.
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On Saturday, October 17, a sculpture of a regent honeyeater created by Melbourne-based artist Jessie Yvette Journoud-Ryan was installed at Mr Bird and Ms Howe’s Lurg property.
The piece’s initial purpose was to accompany a sculpture of a banksia flower in the pair’s backyard; however, over time, it became much more meaningful.
When Mr Bird read a flyer detailing Taronga Zoo’s regent honeyeater breeding program, which explained how the captive male bird was having difficulty attracting wild females because its song was no longer recognisable, he knew exactly what the sculpture would portray.
“It grabbed me when I read it, thinking that the male was sitting in a tree trying to attract a female, but he lost the right tone and sound, and he doesn’t know,” Mr Bird said.
“I read that quite a while back and thought, ‘gee, that’s really sad’.”
A feature of the artwork that portrays this story is the depiction of the Lyra constellation on the sculpted bird’s body, which can only be seen in the dark.
The constellation tells the Greek mythology story of Orpheus, whose magical lyre had charming powers.
Eventually, after failing to rescue his wife, Eurydice, Orpheus was consumed by grief and lost his ability to play the instrument.
“I thought it had to have some sort of projection of ‘rising from the ashes’, or the story of the bird losing its song,” Mr Bird said.
The birds have since began to get their song back, with the breeding program playing captive males the sounds of wild birds to teach them the right tones, but they still face extinction.
The sculpture was created by Melbourne artist Jessie Yvette Journoud-Ryan.
Photo by
Billie Davern
Today, Australia’s regent honeyeater population sits between about 250 and 300 birds, down from more than 1000 in the 1990s.
Regent Honeyeater Project co-ordinator Andie Guerin said the species would once regularly frequent the Benalla, Lurg and Glenrowan area.
“Their numbers (in 1990) were thought to be 1500 in Australia, but their range has really depleted,” he said.
“They haven’t been seen in Victoria for the last two years, which is really unexpected.”
The Regent Honeyeater Project, which has been operating locally for about 30 years, works with landholders to retain vegetation that’s suitable for regent honeyeaters, as well as other temperate woodland birds, and to revegetate areas.
While the project is growing, the population of native birdlife has continued to decline throughout the past three decades.
“I received an email from a lady who lives over at Upper Lurg, and she recalls, as a child, she would walk down their laneways and she could see and hear the regent honeyeaters, and other birds, raiding the orchards and stealing the fruit,” Mr Guerin said.
“Forty or 50 years later, she said, ‘and now I walk down the same lanes and I listen to the silence’.
“It’s really sad in a way — poignant but sad. It’s an overall degradation in the number of all the species, and there are very few bird species where their numbers are maintained or increasing.”
Ms Howe said she could attest to the story about declining birdlife.
“We’ve been here for 10 years, come Christmas. The birds that were here when we came, to the birds that are here now — there’re some that I haven’t seen for years,” she said.
Mr Guerin said the regent honeyeater was important to the overall ecosystem, making the project more important now than ever before.
“The regent honeyeater is the icon of the temperate woodland bird community,” he said.
“It was the least known, or the rarest, when our project started.
“For it to continue to decline is an indication that all the other bird species are declining. The canary in the coal mine, to some degree.”
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