Mimicry, Eco-grief and Cassettes of Desire

‘Where should the birds fly after the last sky? Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?’

— Mahmoud Darwish, ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’.

‘They say if you want something bad enough, you’ll end up making a god out of it’.

— Ocean Vuong

18 June 2026

A rosella is chirping in a lush, foliaged tree. Out of shot, an AI data centre hums at a relentlessly irritating frequency.  

‘How will data centres effect wildlife?’ reads the caption.

Later, I search for the clip — not in Google, because Google has recently become an even more environmentally destructive engine of AI, but by the gentler engine, DuckDuckGo.

I can’t see the clip of the bird. I can see the top result.

‘How AI turns bird sounds into data’.

To record a bird’s sound is to connect with urgent questions of inter-relationships between humans, birds and technology, as of death, desire and longevity. Such are the looping concerns of Department of the Vanishing (Transit Lounge, 2026) — a lyrical novel-length collage of poetry, historical and invented textual and visual archives, literary quotes, and speculative prose fiction.

This story centres on a cis white woman, Ava, who is employed to archive extinct birds while navigating government-censorship, dating and love, as well as complex grief related to her parents and the historical and ongoing extinction of bird species. Set later in the 2020s, its author — award-winning writer and director Johanna Bell ­­— playfully juxtaposes officious, government-controlled archives with the intimate world of family, ageing, dating, sex and desire in the settler-colonial context of so-called Australia.

Bell’s labour of collage variously blends and slips across archival and living relationships between humans and birds, returning often to the lyre bird; a bird ‘made famous by his polyphonic skills’. The lyre bird gains meanings in relation to Ava’s story, both as a physical creature desired by settlers for its perceived powers of mimicry and as a symbolic language of elusive capture.

‘a whisper in the bush outside/

The wind whipped in

Bringing with it one more gift/

The liquid song of lyrebird’ (p. 45).

Lyre birds, like tape players, like archives, repeat past events for the hearing of people in the present. Such mimicry carries magnetic power.

Settlers have long drawn on the power of mimicry, so Bell narrates. In the 19th Century, Europeans variously created English names for the lyrebird (the New South Wales Bird-of-Paradise) and (mis)copied ancient First Nation ones (Belleck-Belleck, Buln Buln) as colonising acts — to claim Country as ours, birds, sounds and all.

‘white men (as they mostly were)/

named their birds/

like boiled sweets in a jar’. (p. 24)

Settler practices of naming and meaning-making are placed in tantalisingly brief contrast with First Nations’ knowledges of the lyre bird. Descendant of the Bidigal clan of the D’harawal Peoples, Frances Bodkin, who has spiritual links to the Wiritjiribin, tells that the lyre bird:

‘listens and learns. They do not mimic, they remember. The reason for them being here is to remember and to make us remember too.’ (p. 129)

If remembering is a clear cultural responsibility, then mimicry is a practice of ambiguity that pervades the fragmented historic and contemporary worlds of this book. From the history of settler naming to pixelated photos of supermarket shelves empty of egg cartons, to diary entries that look like archival inventories, to acts of physical intimacy — mimicry recurs deep. In one scene, Ava’s boyfriend, Luke, plays dom using magnetic strips from cassette tapes that record the sounds of lorikeets ‘in a Moreton Bag fig’.

‘I gasp in pain/

When he pulls at the magnetic lengths/

The wheels turn/

To the sound of another time’ (p. 167)

They escape deeper into nostalgia by recording their sex, merging a soundtrack of pain and pleasure with technology.

‘he live mixes us/

distorts our moans/

with overlays/

speeding us up/

and slowing us down/

to a static fuzz’ (p. 186)

When, the scene begs, does mimicry become mockery? While Ava’s love of people and of birds generally appears earnest, on one page we’re asked to mock the dedication of archivists whose obsessiveness might bury them.

‘The brochure says a stress response can only be:

a)     flight

b)     fight

c)     freeze

d)     fawn

but they forgot the archivist/

who likes to burrow/

beneath a leaf litter of envelopes...

the archivist moves more paperwork in one week/

than most people touch in a life’ (p.198)/

The line between mimicry and mockery is, of course, thin and interpretable. Is focusing on archives during climate collapse a joke? Why not turn toward the birds still alive? Is Ava’s erotic life a human response to bird loss, or a tragicomedy? Other readers have reviewed this work as highly affective:  ‘sexy’, ‘seductive’, causing ‘weeping’, and ‘furious’. But I can only read from the present, among stories of migrating birds mangled in the engines of Israeli planes (with Australian-made parts), Palestinians and their lands and sunbirds bombarded by Israeli bombs, and First Nations people fighting at the frontline of environmental destruction. In this context, Ava’s story ­left my eco-grief cold. Is it remotely feasible that an archivist in the next few years will mainly need to worry about censorship, and not also about housing, food, water, disease, floods and fires?

For Ava, violence is mostly spectral — a looming threat of censorship against herself among the imprisonment of some contemporary activists. Meanwhile, the ongoing slow genocide against First Nations people in so-called Australia, bound up as it is with ecocide and systemic carceral violence, is mute. So, too, do the birds that Ava cares so much about remain in archives and memories and rather than as physical presences in her daily life. French philosopher Jaques Lacan wrote that:

‘The effect of mimicry is camouflage... It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background.’

The privileged boundaries of Ava’s world disassociated me from the violence that gives The Department of the Vanishing its stakes — clearing and controlling Country, introducing predators, overhunting, fossil fuel addiction, and racism to name a few —rendering this work’s high stakes frictionless. What held me was Bell’s surprising curation of history and literary bird-related quotes, and the glib and humorous moments that gift aliveness to a story pinned to fatality. Ava asks among the loss of her mother:

‘What is left in the wake of a life?

not much/

it turns out in the case of mum

-        one Kmart teacup streaked with tannin stains/....

-        an old tape player I’ve never seen.’ (p. 223)

For all its speculative camouflage, Department of the Vanishing slungshot me back into the terrors of today — audible from the privacy of home and, like birds, thoroughly transnational.

22 June 2026

­The arrival of bird flu in Western Australia; Israel blocking the delivery of aid; a pro-eco-diversity meme against Hanson’s desire for a monoculture.

I close the tabs and carry the pods that help with cognitive pain toward their charger. To tell me they’re neither in my ears nor attached to a power source, they repeat a sound:

         tweet tweet      go

By the time Ava meets Luke, around five hundred more bird species could be extinct. And how many more people will have been censored, murdered? How much living knowledge unarchived? 

The tweeting isn’t solace. It’s imitation. The shrill absence of a bird’s singular song.

References:

Mahmoud Darwish, ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’, Translated by Abdullah al-Udhari, in Victims of a Map, London: al-Saqi Books, 1984, p. 1.

Ocean Vuong quoted in The Department of the Vanishing p. 147.

Jacques Lacan, ‘The Line and Light of the Gaze’ cited in Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, Spring, 1984, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, p. 125  

Emmanuel Fabian, ‘Herzog’s helicopter makes emergency landing after hitting birds’, The Times of Israel, 25 June 2026.

Nadia Rhook (she/her) is a poet, historian and educator, and the author of the poetry
collections boots (UWA Publishing) and Second Fleet Baby (Fremantle Press). Her latest collection, Stone Veins, traces settler histories of bluestone mining and haunting, and will be released by Cordite Books in 2026. Nadia currently lives in beautiful Ballaarat where she runs creative workshops and writes about colonialism, ecology, health and love.