Fantail Branch

Your small companion on the track

The one who follows

You’ve barely stepped onto the bush track when it appears: a tiny bird, all tail and attitude, flitting from branch to branch just ahead of you. It flicks its fan open, closed, open again. It swoops past your shoulder, so close you feel the air move, then lands on a twig and looks back as if to say, well, come on then.

It keeps you company the whole way: a few metres ahead, a few metres behind, never quite still, never quite gone. When you stop to catch your breath, it stops too. When you walk on, there it is again, chattering softly to itself.

By the end of the walk you feel oddly as though you’ve been accompanied by a friend, and when you reach the car park and it finally flits back into the trees, you’re a little sorry to see it go.

The artwork

Here the fantail sits for once in perfect stillness, perched on two crossed, weathered branches in the lower half of the coaster. Its body is small and rounded, its head turned to the right, a pale stripe above the eye. And of course there’s the tail, rising high behind it, long and elegant, its feathers drawn in fine parallel strokes.

What makes this piece special is its frame. A circle of fern fronds encloses the bird like a wreath, their leaflets crisp and regular, curving all the way around. It feels like a small world of its own, a place where the busiest bird in the bush has finally paused long enough to have its portrait taken.

In slate and in wood. On slate, the fern wreath and the bird glow pale against near-black stone, crisp and almost luminous, framed by the natural chipped edge. On wood, the same design appears in rich dark brown on a warm, light ground with rounded corners, which gives it the look of a fine pen-and-ink illustration.