Beached Az: Whale and Seagull meet Poseidon

Beached Az is an Australian series of short animations about a New Zealand whale who gets stuck on a small tropical island and becomes friends with a local seagull.

It has simple designs, and simple dialogue: sample:

Whale: “Oh No! I’m beached! I’m beached as!”

Seagull: “What are you doing, bro?”

Whale: “Dude, I’m beached as!”

Beached Az, series 1, episode 1.

It’s very funny, most of its humour coming from word play, repetition, and those accents. Whale and Seagull speak in the Australian approximation of a New Zealand accent–the a sounds like an e, i sounds like a u, the o sounds like oi, es sound like is, and so on. Seagull offers Whale a chup (a chip); Whale says ‘no I only eat plenkton (plankton).’ Their talk, too, is peppered with Kiwi slang–they often refer to each other as ‘bro;’ and say ‘sweet as,’ instead of awesome. Australians love making fun of how Kiwis speak, and this show offers a concentrated dose of friendly trans-Tasman mockery.

And it’s a sweet little series–of harmless and pointless conversations, with the occasional moment of depth and seriousness. Which brings us to Poseidon.

I just kind of Nep-tuned you out…

In the opening to the third series, Whale and Seagull have the opportunity to be really serious, when they meet Poseidon, the god of the sea. Poseidon’s despondent because of the pollution and rubbish in the sea. Whale and Seagull try to change the subject and cheer up the gloomy god, but Poseidon’s not having it.

Beached Az: Cygull and Whaleborg

He takes them on a journey into the future, to show them what the oceans will become–dirty, built up, and full of robots. Indeed Seagull and Whale become cyborgs (Cygull and Whaleborg), but if Poseidon is making a point, it’s lost to the duo, who delightedly play with their robot powers, until the god loses his temper and shouts:

Poseidon: Yes I suppose your particuar situation has possibly improved, but we can’t allow ourselves to be befuddled by technology while nature is DYING!

Poseidon takes them back to the present, and tries again:

Whale/Seagull: Aww, Poseidon!

Poseidon: I was showing you the future to show you how bad it gets.

Whale: If you’re God of the Oceans, why don’t you just change it then. You’re powerful as.

Poseidon: It doesn’t work like that. I can’t affect humans’ free will. They must realise they’re not separate from nature, you’re part of nature–

Seagull: Aw, sorry, I wasn’t listening there. I just kind of Nep-tuned you out.

The environmental dilemma in a nutshell–a desperate nature god, ignored by mates who just want to chat and muck about. But of course the point is made–if humans don’t do something about our relationship with the world, we too are in big trouble.

Consulting the Urban Dictionary on the term ‘beached az,’ I find that the phrase has entered the vernacular–to be ‘beached as,’ is not at all like anything ‘sweet as.’ It’s to be in deep trouble–to be beached, like the whales that sometimes wash up on New Zealand shores–to be out of one’s depth, and up a creek without a paddle. Choose your simile or metaphor: the point makes itself.

Beached Az, meantime, is doing its bit to help the world–through sly humour and using Poseidon as a hapless straight-man, a foil to the chat of Seagull and Whale. Perhaps if humans are paying attention (and not Nep-tuning things out), some of the message will get through.

–Elizabeth Hale

A Cockatoo Called Caesar

When I was a child I was bitten very hard on the finger by a pet-shop cockatoo called Cocky.  Perhaps if he’d been called Caesar our encounter would have been more civilised.  We change pace this week with a lovely piece from Anne Rogerson (Charles Tesoriero Senior Lecturer in Latin at Sydney University) about the curious habit of calling cockatoos Caesar, and their import in iconic Australian children’s books.  

I can’t remember whom I encountered first as a child – the engaging young Norah of Billabong or Julius Caesar. I think that it was probably Norah. I was certainly reading Mary Grant Bruce’s stories about life on a Victorian cattle station, and then abroad in England and Ireland during WWI, while still in primary school, long before I had anything but the haziest knowledge of Roman history.

A Little Bush-Maid by Mary Grant Bruce (author’s photograph)

At first glance, it may not seem that this popular and determinedly Australian series of young adult novels has much to do with the Classics. Its heroes and heroines are hard-working, horse-riding, cheerful and clean-cut young people, who – though well-educated – aren’t given to dwelling on academic matters and are rarely seen to read a book. But it was while re-reading the series recently that I realized that a little snippet of Roman history had been hiding in plain sight in the early chapters of the first Billabong novel all along.

 

A Little Bush Maid (1910) introduces Norah, her father, her brother Jim and his school friends, and the “menagerie” of Norah and Jim’s pets. These are many and various, including a wide variety of native and introduced species, an aviary full of unnamed birds, a parrot called Fudge and – last but most certainly not least – “old Caesar, a very fine white cockatoo”. Only Caesar gets a naming story. He was shot while very young and rescued by Norah, who brought him home and handed him to her brother, whom he promptly bit:

 

“Jim was no hero – at the age of eleven, he dropped the cockatoo like a hot coal. “Great Caesar!” he exclaimed, sucking his thumb, and Caesar he was christened in that moment.”

Mary Grant Bruce, A Little Bush Maid (1910), Chapter 2

 

As one might expect from such an introduction, Caesar’s story is characterized by aggression, particularly towards other animals and visitors to the homestead. He exists in a state of deepest enmity with the housekeeper’s cat, and their relationship is one of battles, strategic plotting and occasionally (for the warlike but chained Caesar rarely wins these fights) a “wild state of triumph” on the part of the victorious bird.

 

Thinking about the bellicose cockatoo of A Little Bush Maid set me wondering about the subliminal effects of his Roman name on the impressionable young reader that I was in the 1980s when I began to read the Billabong books. I didn’t know any boys for whom “Great Caesar!” was a customary exclamation, and I hadn’t yet come across the Superman comics, where “Great Caesar’s ghost!” is a catch-phrase of Perry White, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet. Nor had I read any Mark Twain, where the once-popular oath is also recorded, or encountered the comic strip by A. E. Hayward titled “Great Caesar’s Ghost” and published in the New York Herald in the mid-1910s. For me, Jim’s “Great Caesar!” was simply something to take at face value, and the cockatoo’s name likewise.

Julius Caesar (not a cockatoo)

Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo

Major Mitchell Cockatoo

It was much more recently that I learned that Caesar is a popular name for cockatoos, along with Napoleon, Alexander, Angel Baby and Houdini (Mattie Sue Athan, Guide to Companion Parrot Behaviour, 2^nd edition (2010), p. 194). Cockatoo Caesars appear in the Wall Street Journal (“Polly Want a Xanax? Neurotic Parrots Can Drive Their Owners Crazy”), and the Journal of the International Association of Animal Behaviour Consultants (a good news story about a nervous and neglected cockatoo called Charlie who was rehabilitated and renamed Caesar to mark his happier new self). They also inhabit a corner of their own on the internet. There are those whose percussion performances on saucepan lids, coffee tins and salt and pepper shakers are immortalized on YouTube, one who does a head banging dance to the strains of Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’, and another who mimics her owner’s typing on the computer keyboard (female cockatoos are called Caesar too). Others are not so outgoing – one poor Caesar appears as the terrorized victim of persistent bullying by a companion cockatoo called Carmen. But whatever their accomplishments or state of mind, it is a curious fact that from Australia to the United States of America, from 1910 to 2018, if you meet a pet cockatoo the chances are reasonably good that it will be called Caesar.

 

Is this anything more than a curiosity? Maybe not, but it is still perhaps worth thinking about the Classical names casually dropped into our lives, and our children’s literature, as the names of our pets. They are intended to reflect on the character of the animals so called, and it is no surprise that confident and cocky birds like cockatoos are graced so often with the name of Caesar. But they also tell us something about popular perceptions of the ancient figures they (if very distantly at times) recall. And in turn they have a small part in shaping our own impressions of the historical characters whom we later learn so much more about. Somewhere still in the back of my mind, whenever I read Caesar’s commentaries today, Norah’s pet bobs up and down on his perch, “a giant among cockatoos, [who] had a full sense of his own importance.”

—Anne Rogerson

Anne Rogerson