Flocks of Colour

Download or read book Flocks of Colour written by Penny Olsen and published by National Library Australia. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What name could be a more apt description of Australia than ‘The Land of Parrots’, a name inspired by late sixteenth-century maps showing a southern region labelled ‘Psittacorum regio’? This beautiful book takes a close look at parrots in Australia, from the first published illustration of an Australian parrot—a Rainbow Lorikeet collected live on Cook’s 1770 voyage—to William T. Cooper’s twentieth-century watercolour of the elusive Night Parrot. With introductory essays by ornithologist Penny Olsen, Flocks of Colour covers two and a quarter centuries of discovery and illustration of Australia’s avifauna. It features a rich portfolio of images of all the Australian parrots, by various artists including John Gould, Edward Lear, Neville W. Cayley and William T. Cooper, selected from the collections of the National Library of Australia, The foreword is by Joseph Forshaw, a world expert on the parrot family.