The Feel of a Word: crow
This is the bird which, in more recent years, we have been encouraged to call a raven. The Australian raven is the name of a species of bird (with two subspecies) that inhabits the southern and north-eastern parts of Australia. We have a crow, a genuine crow, in northern Australia that we share with PNG.
The crow is an iconic bird of the Australian landscape which I feel I cannot refer to as a raven. For me the raven conjures up glossy blackness, a foreboding presence and a tendency to make bleak noises interpreted as predicting future disaster. ‘Quoth the raven, Nevermore.’ That kind of thing.
The crow is also associated with melancholy, but in a rather different way. First there is the look and sound. The crow is a rather arresting black as if all light has been punched out of the space it occupies. ‘The crows are black and shiny as jackboots.’ It hunches its shoulders in an aggressive way. It has a harsh voice that inspires dread and foreboding, a call that has been described as a dry barking with a wailing finish. ‘Three symbolically large and easeful crows went flapping. They made receding sounds of disbelief, rough as horse-hair, until they became motes in the sky.’ The crow is marauding, predatory, hateful, sinister, villainous, malevolent. It is described as ‘a black shiver against the sun’.
The crow has been linked with isolation, loneliness and privation. The description of a place as one where the crows fly backwards conveys its remoteness and desolation. The crows fly backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes. Alternatively, the sand. They are often described as perching in numbers on a fence, a telegraph wire, a dead tree, ‘like a band of mourners’.
The crow is to be observed flying across land that other animals would shun. ‘Two crows passed high overhead, flying in their strange shoulder-hunched way, chasing their shadows across the hot earth, calling kar! kar! kar!’
The crow is despised because it feeds on carrion and is feared because it will peck the eyes out of a small animal like a new-born lamb or an animal that is helpless, such as a sheep stuck in the mud of a drying dam. Even people fear what might happen to them if they die in the outback and become food for the dingoes, foxes and crows. This trio of scavengers turns up frequently in Australian writing. The crow is called the King of the Drought because it can feast on the large numbers of dying animals. The bush poem, the Dying Stockman, has a verse:
Wrap me up in my stockwhip and blanket
And bury me deep down below,
Where the dingoes and crows won’t molest me,
In the shade where the coolibahs grow.
In colonial times if you had to boil up a crow for dinner then you were almost at starvation point. The people on the very lowest rung of the colonial hierarchy were the crow-eaters, and South Australia was singled out as being the part of Australia where there was the greatest privation. Thus the South Australians came to be called Crow-eaters, a name that they now wear with pride although at the time when it was first applied it was not exactly an insult but certainly a terse description of their poverty. The Americans went further down this track and came up with the expression made to eat crow meaning ‘humiliated’. As poor as a crow is a expression indicating deep poverty.
Crows are known to be cunning and can work together to achieve their purposes. Sydney Baker records the phrase to have a crow’s eye meaning ‘to be cunning, alert’.
Stone the crows is an expression of surprise or exasperation that dates back to the early 1900s. There are variations like stiffen the crows, starve the crows, spare the crows, but stone the crows outnumbers all of those. And indeed it is a constant theme in Australian literature that people no sooner see a crow than they reach down to pick up a stone to throw at it, sometimes because they see it as a threat to their animals or to themselves, sometimes because they can’t stand the sound of it.
Another expression is to draw the crow meaning ‘to get the worst part of something that is shared around’. It is the equivalent of drawing the short straw. A way of deciding who should get the job of doing something unpleasant was to put pictures of birds in a hat. Whoever drew the crow got the job. Of course what unsuspecting participants did not know was that all the pictures in the hat were of crows. Eventually they would learn but until they did, they always drew the crow.
Of course now that we are no longer looking at the crow with a jaundiced eye we describe it as one of the most intelligent animals in the world. And we are encouraged to refer to it as the Australian raven. I am not at that point yet.