Matthew Flinders' Cat by Bryce Courtenay Read Free Book Online Page A

as true Australians, loud, aggressive, lacking in subtlety, highly competitive and devoted to cricket, even turning up at the SCG for Sheffield Shield games.
    However, Billy’s love of birds was by no means all-encompassing. There was one avian species he considered his mortal enemy. This was the presence, in ever-increasing numbers, of Indian mynah birds, Acridotheres tristis , which had replaced the sparrows, pigeons and gulls as the city’s most potent pavement polluters.
    He regarded the mynah bird as a foreign invader which had infiltrated the country and multiplied while nobody was looking. The black and tan, beady-eyed, sharp-pointed, yellow-beaked birds strutted about on spindly curry-coloured legs wherever there was a chance of a free feed, and drove him to distraction. They would gather, in what he preferred to think of as street gangs, on the steps of the State Library where lunchtime workers sitting in the sun would throw them crusts from their sandwiches. Billy’s pleas to all and sundry not to feed ‘the bloody pestilence’ went unheeded.
    Most of Sydney’s urban population could scarcely tell a kookaburra from a sparrow. These airborne shit factories were simply more of the same to them.
    While Billy was aware that the European sparrows were also interlopers, they’d come out with the First Fleet and had earned their migrant status. Pigeons, as an early source of food to both convict and free settler, had also earned their tenure. Not so the mynahs. They were, pound for pound, the greatest defecators on the planet, producing more shit than a gannet four times their size. The grey-tinged-withwhite splat they left everywhere clung like superglue to the caps of the Corinthian and Doric columns of several notable buildings. It could be seen on the moulded ledges and decorative stonework of the State Library, the Art Gallery, the Queen Victoria Building, the old Commonwealth Bank building and the GPO in Martin Place, to name but a few.
    Moreover, unlike the sparrows and the pigeons, the Indian mynahs had systematically eliminated all of the smaller species of native bird life which were attracted to the grevillea nectar and the wildflower seeds found in the Botanic Gardens. As an amateur naturalist, this was of major concern to Billy. The smaller birds, the Bluetit, Rose Robin, Red-capped Robin, White-winged Triller, Rufous Whistler and Willie Wagtail, as well as several other smaller species common to the Gardens, had disappeared, the mynah birds having destroyed their eggs or taken their fledglings while still in the nest.
    To Billy this was an act of war, a foreign invader systematically murdering the indigenous population as the first white settlers had done. This time somebody had to fight back. He accepted single-handedly the task of exterminating the tyranny from the steps and pavement outside the State Library, the part of the city he cherished the most.
    When Billy had finished his coffee, he rinsed out the container and set to work. He removed the packet of rat poison and a pair of transparent latex gloves from the cardboard dispenser and carefully pulled them on. Then he commenced to mould a single poison pellet into a tiny ball of well-kneaded dough and dropped it into the container. He continued until he had fifty or so tiny rounded morsels, the required number for the day’s Operation Mynah Bird. He replaced the plastic top of the coffee container and put it in his briefcase along with the rat poison, peeled off the gloves and deposited them in a nearby rubbish bin. It was time for a pleasant morning stroll through the Botanic Gardens he so dearly loved and then on to his assignation with the Flag Hotel inWoolloomooloo.
    The Flag was already busy by the time he arrived around nine-thirty. The patrons at this time of the day were mostly shift workers from the Garden Island dry dock, retired waterside workers who lived in housing-commission homes in the immediate neighbourhood, or the homeless