The Bowerbird and Me

All the blue shiny things

The blue satin Bowerbird has been my travelling companion for some time now. I encountered him when I was at that stage of my PhD research where I was constantly looking for inspiration. I had a methodology to design and I wanted it to be something fresh. I wanted my research to not be lonely.

I first encountered him shopping for perfume online, from a beloved store called Nomad and The Bowerbird in Wells-Next-The-Sea (in a pleasing circular coincidence, the same place I bought a new frock for my viva several years later). Looking him up, because I’d never heard of a Bowerbird before, I also found his academic presence in the work of Australian artist-researcher Pam Greet. He’s native to her country, hopping around in the south east of that huge land mass, collecting blue shiny things with which to decorate his bower. Not to nest, but to show off and attract a new mate. Of course, his shiny things are the detritus of human life - plastic straws and bottle tops (though, according to legend, also the occasional sapphire).

Pam used the metaphor of the Bowerbird to justify an ethnography, in an article entitled ‘Writer as Perv: bowerbird, bricolage, observation’ which is geekily entertaining (and freely available). I was immediately enthralled by the idea of developing bowerbird practice as part of my analysis. Eventually, my findings were presented in shades of blue.

What captured my imagination was the repurposing of the Bowerbird’s blue shiny things. By the time the female Bowerbird comes along to choose her mate, there’s a whole avenue of bowers. Once she’s chosen, she kicks over all the losing bowers and the blue shiny things stay on the forest floor until the next mating season, when they are put to use again. It was later that I learned how young females went for the most impressive bower, and older females preferred the best dancer! A metaphor for life right there.

I thought about how, in education, we are told what is shiny, even if we don’t believe it. The only evidence that ‘counts’ is a narrow range of stuff that organisations believe Ofsted (or whoever) want to see. All the rest gets left on the forest floor. It seemed to me that we were throwing away all traces of the best of our practice and in doing so we were allowing the essence of it to be redacted.

When I came to pull themes out of the 140k words generously gifted by research participants, I put the Bowerbird to work, to hunt for the blue shiny things. In my practice, I began to talk about the importance of telling our own stories as educators. And for that, we needed to be able to see where we’d been.

I was encouraged in this by another Aussie shero, the broadcaster Julia Baird. In her exceptional book, ‘Phosphorescence’*, she remembers going to the Museum of London and exploring the Suffragette Archive. What chimed with her was not the famous artefacts such as Emily Wilding Davison’s scarf, nor the famous victories of the movement, but the endless boxes of minutes from boring meetings in towns and villages up and down the country. There lies our history, in the losses as well as the gains. In the tiny steps forwards and back which led history to change its course.

Nobody will tell our story for us, if we don’t tell it for ourselves. And in our busy lives, we forget where we’ve been. So I introduced the Bowerbird to the national project Joss and I were working on at the time - #APConnect - and he found a new legion of fans who began not only to collect the stories but to amplify them in blogs, podcasts, articles, videos, social media and the rest.

I was challenged in an early PhD progression meeting about how the Bowerbird could be animate, when he was basically just a metaphor. I fielded it well enough to progress, but it’s still something I think about today because he’s very real to me. Ideas have energy, so I guess metaphors have energy too. ‘No smoke without fire’ might be words on a page but those words can damage lives. The Bowerbird, more affirmatively, has taken on a life of his own because he doesn’t rely on me to get his shiny blue message out there. He exists in other people’s minds, ideas and practice. And he breeds! As I write this today, I have several little blue Bowerbirds in view in addition to my felt ‘original’, gifts from lovely friends.

But he’s even more than that to me. He represents posthuman thinking, which brings birds, animals, seas, trees and the whole of nature into philosophical equality with humans. He reminds me of my posthuman affirmative ethics, guiding my work from the joy inside rather than the socio-geo-political-economic structures which dominate our lives. And, during lockdown, when I was very alone, he sat on my shoulder day after day as I wrote up my research. He’s written into every word.

*Wild swimmers will love this book. I’m doing my first ever sea-swim soon, coincidentally with the Birkenhead ‘Blue Tits’ 😂