A Lesson From Little Fatty

The shopping centre is a conservatory filled with exotic trees and plants softening the straight line form of malls and criss-crossing escalators. I love it. The aroma of fresh bread and warm muffins wafts around coffee tables, across decorative waterfalls and up into the high glass roof. Winter clothes display sale prices, while the easy listening music of the public address system competes with the beat of a rock star, whose image, as a cardboard cut-out, stands dominant and defiant in the music shop display. Just how much do we take for granted how finely tuned this environment is to our needs?

It’s raining outside, but I’m dry and comfortable, by a waterfall, with a muffin and a cappuccino. The bustle of the shoppers around me makes the atmosphere right; it’s vibrant, it’s safe, it’s how I want it to be.

And it’s the same for that little sparrow eyeing up my muffin. He’s a little fatty, and why wouldn’t he be; he’s got it all. He doesn’t have to worry about the rain, or cold winter nights, or the blistering heat of hot summer days, and he has no concern for where his next meal will come from; not in this affluent environment.

Look at him hoping from table to table, stretching his wings as he goes for a recreational flutter. I guess after a long day, when all has gone quiet, he’ll take a cooling dip in a waterfall before roosting in the thermostatically controlled bliss of the conservatory evening. His only stress will be the dilemma of, should it be muffins or should it be donuts? He’s developed a taste for both.

But where are the Honey-eaters? Why isn’t the good old Kookaburra eyeing up a gourmet sausage the way that sparrow eyes up my muffin?

Fatty Sparrow fits in nicely. He’s an immigrant of course, or at least not native; yet he’s adapted perfectly to this designed environment, protected from the harsh and uncompromising reality on the outside. He gets a glimpse of it each time the automatic doors open: the bad temper of a sudden hail storm, the torture of a dry spell, the viciousness of a wind squall. I get the impression he’s happy with his lot.

I wonder why the Honey-eater doesn’t come and dip his long beak into coffee table left-overs? And I’m sure the Crimson Rosellas would do well on a diet of croissant crumbs. It’d be nice to have one or two around to add a bit of colour and culture to the environment. It’d make it look more natural, more individually Australian.

But it seems they’ll just cling to their old ways, scratching about in the dusty scrub where the trees once were. They don’t realise they’ll be better off if they learn to adapt, and indeed will disappear if they don’t? Then it’ll be just Fatty Sparrow and all the other emigrants.