I began reading Joshua Lobb’s The Flight of Birds (2019), a novel in 12 stories, while on a writing retreat at Bundanon, New South Wales. I was sitting on a bed in one of the monastic rooms that overlooks the Shoalhaven River, window open to the breeze and birds. Here I slipped into the sensitive and intricately woven storyworld and was transported across time to meet birds in bushland and on beaches, on busy roads and bridges, in household cages or chicken yards, in gardens and on front verandahs. I encountered birds close up and far away; they were nesting, flocking, perching on trees or posts, or doing other clever things besides flying, like cracking a walnut by use of passing traffic. Lobb narrates encounters with live birds, extinct birds and fabled birds, all made present to the reader visually and aurally: lyrebirds; sparrows; magpies; cockatoos; chickens; kookaburras; crows; falcons; sea-eagles; budgerigars; golden whistlers; whip birds; bowerbirds; and many, many more.

The Flight of Birds is called a novel in 12 stories for a reason. As Lobb stories our tangled relationships with birds, (our connection to them, disconnection from them), he tries to do so in a way that will provoke our attention. Not unlike the early morning kookaburra calls that wake many of us each day. No story in The Flight of Birds is allowed to settle into a comfortable narrative. Lobb’s storyworld embraces multiple experiences and traverses multiple time periods. Some of the stories are in first person, others in third. Each story has a bird as its central concern and a distraught relationship. Fairy tales, parables, newspaper reports, court transcripts, quotes from academic essays and recountings from television documentaries are embedded within the 12 stories, so that the impact of birds on human lives and human lives on birds is revealed as ever-present, catastrophic and intensely moving.