An extract from HEAT 24

Brett and Jodie live up at the house, I live in the shed. When I got here Brett showed me pictures from Agriculture. There are three problem species – corellas, galahs and cockatoos. There was a drawing of each one with a red cross through the middle. The drawings made the birds look big and mean, so I laughed.

Brett says, ‘what the fuck’s so funny?’

And I say, ‘they look like them cartoons – like road runner – you know?’

There’s just the three of us – me and Brett and Jodie. It’s a breakfast cereal place. Genetically modified. Brett shows me the bike and gives me the gun. He says the gun’s the real thing with only minor alterations. The bullet case has been bored out to make a big shallow chamber.

‘Here’s your ammo,’ he says, passing me the cartridges.

And I like that because it could be from television too – like I’m fighting bad guys, or Indians or terrorists. The bird cartridges are shaped like lemons, but black. Brett shows me how to shoot and I’m a bit rattled. The noise is fierce and the gun belts hard into my shoulder. And then he goes, back to the house.

It’s just me in the shed and it’ll be getting dark soon so there’s nothing to do. It’s brown inside and it smells of sump oil and sheep. I drag my swag across the floor to the back wall and lay it flat. It doesn’t feel right to sleep straight away so I sit for a while pulling the little balls of sheep shit from the canvas lining of my swag and making stacks of it and thinking about the birds.

Brett told me the birds have always been around. He said they’re part of the Australian landscape. He said in the old days people even caught them and took them home and lived with them. He said they can talk, but if they start talking to me I shouldn’t listen.

‘I’ve been there mate. I’ve done it. You’ll have them in your sights and they’ll try to fuckin’ reason with you. You think it’s your own voice in your head, but they talk sort of spastic. You gotta watch out for the spastic voice inside of you.’

My job is called protection – seasonal protection worker. I’m protecting the breakfasts from the talking birds. When I head out on patrol that first day I feel like I’m going off to war. I swing my leg over the bike as if it’s a horse and then I look around, I would have liked to say goodbye to someone. I kinda nod at the shed and ride off.

I ride around all of the fence lines watching for the galahs and corellas and sulphur-cresteds. Brett says the galahs are worst. I see myself coming home to Brett and Jodie with a big brace of the feathery bastards hanging from the handlebars of the bike. But those first few days there aren’t any galahs to shoot. I bring down a few magpies for training, to keep my eye in.

The crop is starting to push through. The first birds come. They look like rubbish blowing in the paddock, like pieces of pink and white paper. I shoot them and walk in to collect their bodies. The bird cartridges are like bullets except that they kill things without ripping them up. They kill things nicely, so as to save the breakfast cereal from contamination. The dead birds are warm, but they go stiff quickly. I take them home to the shed in old wheat sacks. Brett says cleaning up is important because dead birds act like decoys, once a flock sees a bird on the ground they’ll come down for a look.

That’s the thing about birds – they stick together. They try to find each other; they keep picking up the stragglers, making a bigger flock. With birds everyone’s the same, everyone’s on the inside…