Earlier in the month, author Stephen Orr shared an extract from his forthcoming novel, The Night Parrots, to his Substack audience. We’re pleased to be able to share this sneak peek into the pages, along with an introduction by Stephen.

The Night Parrots will release on 15 May, but is available to pre-order here.

I have a new novel coming out in a few weeks. It’s called The Night Parrots. A night parrot is a small, rare bird that can’t fly very well and hides from the world. It was thought to be extinct for years, but recently a few have been sighted. They persist. Like the protagonists of this book. A Lutheran missionary dying of heart failure, his wife and son and friends trying to get him to a railhead. The story’s about these few days, faith, love, struggle, acceptance.

***

The previous afternoon, Ludwig, Ted and a bloke called the Greek had gathered a dozen horses from around the waterhole and brought them into the yards. They’d waited until they settled before harnessing them. Watched them graze the winter grass, drink from the trough that me and Oskar kept clean. As the dust settled, and the prospect of the journey was made real. When the horses had quietened, they led them up and down the track for an hour. Oskar and I had sat watching. Oskar had said, ‘It’s gonna be a lot of work, that many horses.’

‘I can help.’

‘You’re no good with horses.’

True. I’d always avoided animals – the muster, the branding, vaccinations, driving them to the railhead. I had a reputation as an indoor kid. Maybe the men had taken pity on me, spared the pastor’s son, or maybe they’d just thought I wasn’t up to it. It’d been a big afternoon. Some of the other men had brought in a bullock, cut its throat, strung it up and butchered it. Me and Oskar again, watching from a safe distance, Oskar saying, ‘Them dogs eat anything.’

‘That one’s drinking the blood.’

Indicating a three-legged terrier. Oskar remembering: ‘Did you ever find your parrot?’

‘No.’

Someone punctured the bowel and a spewy soup drained onto the dry sand, splashing everyone’s feet and legs, bile and blood and half-digested grass, hundreds of flies descending.

‘I can show you the picture,’ I said.

‘You did. But that coulda been any bird.’

‘This bloke they pay especially to find one of each animal, and he stuffs them and sends them to museums. He found a night parrot and killed it and put it in the mail, and it’s in Holland or some place now, which proves it.’

‘What?’

‘Whether you want to believe or not, it’s real. You can go see it.’

I’d shown him one of Father’s pictures of a ringneck. But I’d read about this man and his specimens and the special gun that shot a small slug through the heart. He was a good shot. The best. That’s why they paid so much for holotypes. No mess, no blood, nothing missing. Unlike the bullock: legs removed with an axe, insides falling to the ground, more blood, the knives coming out. The heart hanging loose, the kidneys collected for pie night, the other organs thrown into a tub for the dogs. A few of the men singing, like they were enjoying it. They finished the bullock, took the meat to the smokehouse, salted it, wrapped it in cloth for the journey. Then this morning, the meat was packed into hessian sacks and put into a big ice-box that didn’t have ice. Two iron handles, and a little drain for the blood.

I said to Oskar, ‘If you listen carefully, you can still hear it moaning.’ And he said, ‘Who’s going to cook the meat?’

‘Me.’

‘You can’t cook.’

‘Pauline’s taught me.’

‘She hasn’t. She’s cooked your food while you’ve sat in there on your bum listening to your dad go on about Jesus.’

I just shook my head. ‘Someone’s gotta do it.’

Then a few of the women had milked the cows, strained the cheesy-white slop and poured it into a pail. A few days’ supply, perhaps. Enough to get us to Henbury, floating in a sea of salted butter, fig jam and condensed milk. But all of this was unknown. Hardly anyone went to Horseshoe Bend, except perhaps Jack, on the mail run.

And that’s how it was on this not-hot, not-cold October morning. How it was as me and Oskar walked around, strangely uncomfortable with each other. Maybe we knew, sensed things were about to change. To ward off this un-charm, Oskar said, ‘It’s easy. You get to the train, and what’s it take? Two days and you’re in Adelaide?’

We walked across the compound, Oskar in shorts, me in my best pants (Pauline had laid out my clothes for the journey). Fifty, sixty blacks had already gathered under the ghost gum, beside the lean-to where we stored saddles and harnesses. They were quietly singing, watching Ludwig and Silas, Jamy and Adele and Pauline coming out from the house, loading boxes onto the cart and dray and returning. They were summoning help, I guess – some of the old people who’d travel with us. Ignatz had planned it all the previous evening, sitting around our table, adding up distances and dividing by days, studying a map of the rough country, the places that might have water.

We stopped and watched this growing group. ‘You wanna join them?’ I asked Oskar, but he just continued into the church, and I followed.

We sat at the back. On Sundays, the place was full. Father had wanted to build a new church, a big, better, cooler place, but of course there was no money, and the Board said, ‘It’s in the pipeline’ (or something similar). The pipeline we’d been waiting for since Father arrived to a collection of huts and stone buildings, good intentions and a box of Bibles. Waiting. Oskar said, ‘And what’d happen if …?’

‘What?’

‘I mean if … you lot wouldn’t stay, would you?’

I hadn’t thought about it but couldn’t imagine what there’d be to stay for. Mother was no missionary. I couldn’t skin a bullock, build a smokehouse, preach, change anyone’s life (let alone my own). ‘I guess not.’

‘They’d send someone else?’ Oskar said.

‘They might. They mightn’t be able to find anyone.’

‘Right.’ Wringing his hands like he did when he was confused. ‘That’d be funny, wouldn’t it, because they come here and tell us all about Jesus, then when we’re listening …’

***

The singing was getting louder. ‘I better see if they need help.’

We turned and left, reluctantly. If any place was special, it was here. Special in the hand-hewn floorboards, the wattle and daub walls; in the burn marks the candles left on the walls, and the watercolour stations Isaiah had painted (more about him later). Special in the marble font that confirmed we were alive, and the old table for coffins. Special how everyone had their spot before the big cross, and special how we knew, every time we came in, we were being watched. And I was special, apparently. According to Opa, who must have heard it from Father. Maybe Father had said something to him like, ‘You can hold on to the other children, you can send them to school and church, but I think I’ll take Benno with me. I think, perhaps, he’s special.’

Like I said, never explained. But maybe I was the lucky one, sent into the never-never to make new discoveries. We emerged and saw maybe a hundred people sitting around singing, the women moving rhythmically in the little bit of wind, the kids, even, still and serious and full of purpose. A sight I’ll never forget. Sometimes I imagine my own funeral, and the six or seven people who might come. I wonder what I did wrong, less generously, not as wisely as my father. I still remember all of those people, sixty-six years ago, singing us towards salvation and good health, and I realise this is how people are meant to function. None of this better house or school. What’s any of that matter? How does it explain why God breathed life into us? But I saw it that day. I saw that my father had become part of something bigger (though not the thing he’d expected).

‘Benno!’

Pauline tried to lift a case onto the cart. Oskar and I ran over, climbed up, lifted it, packed it beside the box of books Father had requested. He’d chosen them, as Ignatz had done his sums the previous evening. He’d called out the titles, and Mother, on the porch, had packed them in the Oolong No. 29 box. ‘Oh, and The Odyssey, put that in too.’ He’d been trying to get me to read it for years. Now, with no distractions, he was determined. As he’d been with history, zoology, Greek, Latin – extra studies after class, because although I was a mission boy, soon I’d be sent south to Adelaide, to Immanuel College, for a proper Lutheran education. He didn’t want me lagging behind the other kids. He wanted me to be the marvel, the miracle, the scholar he’d never officially become.

Oskar and I returned to the house. We gathered supplies, dragged them back to the cart and dray and managed to load them. Bread that Adele had been baking all night; various meats; small and big water bags; the tents and lean-to, pegs rattling like small change. As the singing got louder, and Ignatz, shittier, asking me where I’d been all morning, just when I was needed (you’ll have to do better than that, Benno). I didn’t reply. He wasn’t in charge. Father was (or probably, Mother). And anyway, I hadn’t applied to be a missionary’s kid.

I eventually returned to my room and finished packing the clothes Pauline had set out. I checked for a towel, soap, noticed the castor oil Mother put in my hair every Sunday morning (to make it go curly). Like the prime minister was coming to Hermannsburg. I put the oil in my drawer, but Mother came in, saw me, reclaimed it and said, ‘I can’t think what else to take.’

‘I’ve got everything,’ I said, sitting on my bed, listening to the songs.

‘Just don’t get in between him and Ignatz,’ she said.

‘Is he better this morning?’

‘And keep his mind off … keep talking to him. That’s your job. Read to him. Goethe, that’ll do it, I’ve packed Faust.’

Father loved Goethe. He took us to Auerbach’s Cellar in Leipzig, bought us a meal and said it was in celebration of our national poet, who came here (here! can you believe it?) to get his ideas.

‘Is he better?’

‘If he gets bad, tell him. He won’t listen to me.’ Sitting, taking my knee and squeezing it (she hadn’t done this in years).

‘But he’s better?’

Shaking her head. ‘It’s a necessary trip, isn’t it, Benno?’

‘Yes.’

‘We must do what we can.’ Checking out the window for Father before giving up, going into her room and packing the last of his things.