DARKNESS CALLS

Ostensibly a film about director Robert Nugent’s hunt for a long-thought-lost species of bird, Night Parrot Stories is, more significantly, a meditation on historical and scientific constructions, the clash of white and Aboriginal cultures, and humanity’s place in – and continued destruction of – nature. Lauren Carroll Harris dives into this intricately woven documentary and dissects its manifold messages.

What makes a documentary today? What do we expect documentaries to do? Night Parrot Stories (2016) is a film about director Robert Nugent’s search for ‘that bird lost in the darkness’. Despite its call being heard across the desert after dark, the night parrot is a mysterious Australian bird that had evaded human contact for around eighty years until a 1979 sighting; in the late 1800s, it was hunted by European collectors, who prized its vivid green colouring, and it has been tormented by changes to its habitats since colonial invasion. Alone with a video camera, Nugent goes to places where the night parrot is believed to reside to find out whether the species is extinct or just elusive. He speaks with those who have heard its call, gathers remnants of its traces, and encounters a mix of different views regarding the bird’s fate from Western scientists and Aboriginal elders. The stories he assembles build to a larger narrative that relates the bird’s fabled disappearance