Word: cockatoo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...eccentric sire that he was the child Jesus. Memories of this sort underlie Ernst's most notorious thrust of anticlerical wit, a spanking Madonna entitled The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses (1926). When his baby sister was born and his favorite bird, a pink cockatoo, died on the same day in 1906, a whole sequence of bird fantasies was set in train. Generally they were alarming: Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924) is filled with a De Chirico-like sense of loss and displacement, frozen in its tiny frame with all the bright...
...love this bonzer country This land of grog and honey Of wallaby and cockatoo Of shearing shed and dunny...
Other visions were apparently acquired from emotional events and trying circumstances in his life. His father was stern and autocratic. When young Ernst was only 14, his pet cockatoo died. The same day, almost to the hour, his favorite younger sister was born. Thereafter, Ernst's subconscious apparently kept mixing the images of a bird as hope, maybe with sex and therefore regeneration; of father as creator and destroyer; and of the whole world as both a dreadful and exciting place...