9 hours Ago By Antone Martinho-Truswell
Late last year, a cherished but sometimes controversial University of Sydney institution did the unthinkable, betraying longstanding tradition and the expectations and values of its members. I write of the Sydney Alumni Festival, which displayed a promotional banner for the annual gathering on City Road, just outside the university’s Michael Spence Building – more commonly known as F23. The words and colours were inoffensive enough, but flanking the banner, in defiance of all good Sydneysider taste, were two adorable cartoon bin chickens.
Sydney’s most derided bird had somehow become its standard-bearer. An ibis, derisorily known as a “bin chicken”, in inner city Redfern. Credit: Janie Barrett The Australian white ibis ( Threskiornis molucca ) is a misunderstood creature.
Perhaps most perniciously, a widespread myth seems to hold that it is an introduced pest, rather than the Australian native that it is. The most romantic version of the myth even turns around a kind of classical hubris narrative, twisted round on the animal: that our ridiculed bin chicken – dirty and forlorn – is actually the sacred ibis of Egyptian lore, come as an invader to our shores to live the life of a ragamuffin amid our detritus. But, while our ibises (or ibides, if you prefer the Latin third declension, which I do) are closely related to the sacred ibis, most taxonomists consider them separate species.
Our local bird is no feral fowl of pharaoh’s favour, but an Aussie true blue. But it is not a native Sydneysider, and here is where I think the ibis marketing team got stuck on the back foot. It’s tough to get established in this city if you don’t have a recognisable school on your CV, and the ibises didn’t come up through King’s, Grammar or Shore.
The birds’ anatomy gives the game away – their long wading legs, featherless head and curved beak are all adapted for feeding and breeding in marshy wetlands. The ibis is Australian, but it’s a regional migrant, originally from lagoons and estuaries well north of Sydney, particularly the Macquarie Marshes in north-western NSW, its former breeding grounds. Not a bin to be bothered: An ibis colony in NSW’s Macquarie Marshes.
Credit: Nick Moir It is only since the 1970s that ibises have been making cities their homes , and this explains a good deal of the antipathy towards them. Until recently, most Sydneysiders would have remembered a childhood or young adulthood when wheelie bins could loiter, unafraid, on neighbourhood streets. Generations turn over and values change, though.
For the past 10 years or so, Millennials, who ruin everything, have set their (ahem, our ) sights on ruining the Australian tradition of mocking the ibis. Back in 2018, the ABC even called the ibis the “spirit animal of Millennials”, a daggy, underdog animal for my daggy, underdog generation. To make matters worse, Millennials are gently parenting their offspring now to be kind and inclusive to everyone, including the bin chickens.
Indoctrinating children! I mean, where does it end? It ends with the long march through the institutions, as it always does. A quiet, bureaucratic revolution of changing minds and hearts that soon enough turns even the most staid and old-fashioned cultural bastion into a stronghold of radical interspecies justice warriors. It is one thing for the ibis to have found its way into the hearts of a misfit generation, itself feasting on the societal garbage left behind by the Boomers and Xers, but real success is when even the C-suite get on board and, say, put an ibis on their alumni festival banner.
The real change here is that Sydney’s population is now mostly people for whom the ibis has always been here. Younger Sydneysiders and newcomers to our city do not see the ibises as dishevelled interlopers but, rather, as big, charismatic native fauna that give the place its local character. This has allowed the ibis to transform from a nuisance to a mascot, a role the ibis and its close relatives have some experience filling, from ancient Egypt to the The Harvard Lampoon ’s emblem.
The banner of the University of Sydney Alumni Festival. Credit: Antone Martinho-Truswell It’s a good evolutionary move for the ibis, too. Despite the flourishing population of some 10,000 ibises in Sydney, the species is not doing so well in its original habitats.
Droughts and human encroachment that change waterways have made life hard on the ibis in its native wetlands. In 1998, 11,000 nested in the Macquarie Marshes. Since 2000, though the ibises still frequent the marshes, breeding numbers have plummeted.
Like so many humans, the ibis is here in Sydney seeking opportunity and a brighter future. As their native ranges were despoiled, migrating ibises started to make foraging stops in city landfills. Research suggests this is part of how they adjusted their behaviour to congregate in cities instead of wetlands .
Our cities can often spell doom for species as they expand, but for some they can be a saviour. The shift to urban living has been profound, and city-dwelling humans who spent their youths unused to ibises in their bins really have witnessed a paradigm shift for these birds. An ibis as a uni mascot may be baffling to some Sydneysiders, yet as natural as breathing to others.
If we can come to see the wildlife in our midst as our neighbours and mascots, perhaps we can do a little better at making room in our hearts – and our city planning – for them to live alongside us. Antone Martinho-Truswell is a zoologist and evolutionary biologist. He is a research affiliate of the University of Sydney, and dean of Graduate House at St Paul’s College.
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