Ann Jones
speaker
552 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Ann Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They're not
But this is why our magpies are called magpies, because superficially they're black and white birds sort of like the ones from the old country.
Anything that was small or brown and hopped into the bushes, that was called a wren.
They're not wrens.
Genetically, the birds are mostly very different from the birds of the northern hemisphere, often not even in the same family.
Of course, as far as common names go for Australian birds, not all of them were named after birds from the north.
Some of them had names that arose spontaneously after colonization.
Like catbirds.
For obvious reasons.
Ian Fraser is a co-author of Australian Bird Names, Origins and Meanings, and he's also a Mad Keen birder.
And what Ian is referring to there when he says about the 1920s is a really important meeting of a subsection of the then Royal Australasian Ornithologist Union.
They printed a list that basically said, Here are the official names of Australian birds.
Lots of common names that we use today were solidified in that report, for better or worse.
And then there was another report in 1978.
called recommended English names for Australian birds.
But of course the birds had names well before those reports, well before 1788, and some of those names are actually blended into the common names that we still use.
Ian Fraser.
It was that same list from the 1920s that helped cement cookaburra into our national lingo, though other words like gala, carawang, gang gang, there's not much info around on where these words exactly were appropriated from.
By the way, other common names for the cooker are the great brown kingfisher.
The laughing jackass, plus
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