Big Sky Country: New England, New South Wales.(First Person)(Short Story)

THE SKY takes up most of the space here. Walking along the road between the houses, I am dizzy with the sensation of looking up: funnelled like a time-traveller into an exhilarating blue vastness. It is a swaggering thing, our sky: not pretty backdrop, not meek scenery, but overbearing, wild, almost scary. Skyscape is the main game; wildlife rituals and dramas more obviously enacted than on the secretive, low-rolling, subtly-shaded landscape.

It is as if the denizens of Sky have permission to defy the colour and noise taboos of the modest, almost morbidly modest, Australian bush. Writers of the bush have often been accused of a dun-coloured realism; perhaps few of them lifted their eyes from the land and into the gaudy wildness above them. Here are birds in improbable, fairytale colours: screeching galahs in preppy pink and grey; rosellas in an ice-cream cornucopia of raspberry, lime, lemon, and a wild, chemical blue; riots of black cockatoos, with strident yellow or red tail-feathers; fairy wrens with blue breasts; firetails carrying their sparking brand behind them; blush-cheeked king parrots, their backs a powdered-soft yet luminescent green. The eye is staggered by the range of it, the boldness of it, the proclamation of Nature's passionate excess.

There are other birds, more suitably attired, yet even these are surprising: the harridan-eyed magpie or currawong, in their sober black and white, meat-eater's sharp beaks open to carol some of the most beautiful of all bird songs to be heard anywhere; pretty, toy-like crested pigeons in dusty blues, pinks and greys, taking off in a clockwork whir and whistle of wings; swallows darting in soft late autumn air, giving you a deja vu of spring; the solemn flock of ibis, strutting in the paddock like an Egyptian mural come to life; the kookaburra, with its brisk kingfisher's manner, sitting on the telephone wire in summer, with the brown snake it's just killed dangling off the wire next to it, like a discarded, wrinkled tie.

Sometimes, a group of clouds hangs in the sky against other clouds, like a scrim on a stage, and then you might see a pair of wedge-tailed eagles, who make their home in the painted mountain just to the west of us, soaring in between the layers of clouds, like gods appearing in a Greek play. In the bright blue of an ...