Kookaburra

One of the first english songs I learned in my life was in 5th grade, in my English class by Herr Reichert. Bless him, he was a good teacher who liked me and I liked him. He died one or two years ago, I saw his orbituary (Todesanzeige) in the newspaper. The song is a simple children's canon about an Australian bird.

"Kookaburra sits on an old gum tree,
Merry merry king of the bush is he,
Laugh, kookaburra laugh,
Kookaburra, gay your life must be."

Maybe my classmates who read this will remember. Kookaburra, as the song goes, has a distictive cry that resembles laughter. Play the video clip for a short recording I made last night. "Bush" is a word that Australians use to refer to any land that is not urbanized -- whether it's forest, shubbery, grassland or desert, it's all "bush". The prevailing (vorherrschende) tree here is the eucalyptus tree, which for some reason I don't know the Australians call "gum tree". It has nothing to do with the tree they make rubber from. Gum trees are beautiful, with leaves that resemble those of willows (Weiden) and smooth trunks and branches that shred their bark in strips every year. There is always a pile of shredded bark underneath a gum tree, and often these shreds, while falling, get caught in the tree itself, where they keep hanging until they rot and fall off.

And, hehe, I still remember that the last line of the song would give us children a chuckle (Kichern) because "gay", as everyone knows, means homosexual. Herr Reichert would then explain to us that the original meaning of this word was "cheerful" (fröhlich). I don't know whether Herr Reichert has ever been to Australia, but I know that he loved birds and was very active in the protection of pigeons (Tauben) in Augsburg.