Flocks of Colour

What name could be a more apt description of Australia than 'The Land of Parrots', a name inspired by late sixteenth-century maps showing a southern region labelled 'Psittacorum regio'? This beautiful book takes a close look at parrots in Australia, from the first published illustration of an Australian parrot — a Rainbow Lorikeet collected live on Cook's 1770 voyage — to William T Cooper’s twentieth-century watercolour of the elusive Night Parrot.

With introductory essays by ornithologist Penny Olsen, Flocks of Colour covers two and a quarter centuries of discovery and illustration of Australia's avifauna. It features a rich portfolio of images of all the Australian parrots, by various artists including John Gould, Edward Lear, Neville W Cayley and William T Cooper, selected from the collections of the National Library of Australia. The foreword is by Joseph Forshaw, a world expert on the parrot family.