Illywhacker

If western Europe is a room full of old learned men with bushy eyebrows and white beards down to their knees pottering over vast ledgers of achievement, Peter Carey would have us believe that Australia is a cocky prepubescent with a Polaroid camera, a fertile imagination and a tendency to fib. Or at least that is how the narrator - one Herbert Badgery; aviator, car salesman, disappearing act, obsessive builder and creator of dragons (yes, dragons!) - tells it. My drawing, like the example to the left, features a Parrot - a black Cockatoo to be precise.