In the Museum’s

enfolding hush

the Superb Lyrebird

stretches splayed toes

on wooden platform

to rake leaflitter

tawny tailfeathers
Posterity preserved

glassy eyes peering past

Burke’s inscribed revolver

through double doors

to forest deep    listening

as an axe strikes blackwood

her wild mate offering
A perfect imitation

turns her head to hear

hooves of half-starved

cattle    High Street vagrants

sticking necks over

neat garden fences

eating everything in reach
A profusion of pink

roses & scarlet

passion flowers captured

inside a glass globe

a bouquet of prize-winning

petals modelled in wax

with precise fidelity
By Mrs De Jacques

           pristine charm never lost

disposed of by Art Union

ticket 2-0-0-8

held by Richard Warren

now jostling for space

on a crowded mantel
Next to a clutch of eggs

cotton wool nestled

property of a large pelican

           shot at Staghorn Flat

stuffed by an amateur

skin mounted for display

at the Yackandandah Athenaeum




Note: A Superb Lyrebird is currently displayed at the Burke Museum in Beechworth, part of

a larger taxidermy collection. The inscribed revolver was presented to Robert O’Hara Burke,

Superintendent of Police, by his fellow officers when he left Beechworth in 1858. Mrs De

Jacques won a prize at the Beechworth Horticultural Show in March 1879 for her bouquet of

wax flowers exhibited inside a glass globe. The phrases ‘precise fidelity’ and ‘pristine charm

never lost’ are found text from J. and H. Minton’s 1844 The Hand-Book for Modelling Wax

Flowers. A number of images are sourced from 1879 editions of Victorian regional

newspaper, The Ovens and Murray Advertiser, including the locally shot and stuffed pelican

as well as complaints about cattle wandering the streets.