Australia National Racing Pigeon Board Incorporated

THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE ARTICLE

He has positioned his armchair in the living room so that, at a glance, he can capture with his keen cricket commentator’s eyes the scene beyond the rear windows. In the left of frame, the entry to a backyard pigeon loft and, right of frame, a segment of blue Victorian sky waiting for a bird to slash across it; for another wondrous bird to come back home.

Like all pigeon fanciers, Bill Lawry admires his 80 or so racing birds for their miraculous navigational ability, for the internal compass that enables them to fly 800km across unknown terrain to find the entry to their loft beside the tin shed of his home off a dusty road in the Nillumbik Shire, north-east of Melbourne. We humans aren’t built like that. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we just can’t find our way back home again. Sometimes we go away and we go away for good.

Bill’s been thinking lately about fortitude, his birds’ unswerving determination to stay on course, their loyalty and devotion to home and their will to return to it. His birds will fight and flap through ferocious, energy-sapping head-winds. They will duck and weave through forests and cities, all the while being hunted by ­falcons with talons that can grip their small pigeon heads as surely as Rod Marsh’s gloves could grip a Lillee outswinger. And it makes Bill wonder what it means to find home again, that place where you were always meant to be, that place where you belong. He was dropped as Test captain during the 1970-71 Ashes series. The selectors – Bradman among them – infamously failed to notify him of the axing before he heard the news on the radio. “Unbelievable!” roared his loyal successor, Ian Chappell. But Bill left as he came, quietly. “I’ve no anger at all about being dropped,” he said. Because he always had this, the pigeon loft, the place he always felt he belonged, ever since he was eight years old, when he begged his father and brother to be allowed to clean it out. That was fun for young Bill Lawry, scraping out handfuls of old feathers and bird shit. His personal paradise.

“It was different for me because the pigeons were always my greatest passion, far more than cricket,” he says. If you really press him for a highlight of his sporting career he won’t speak of hard-fought victories, he’ll speak of being the only Australian Test captain invited to walk through the Queen’s royal pigeon lofts.

He’d knock a stunning century in an Ashes Test and the first thing he’d do in the dressing shed would be to call home to ask Joy about the welfare of a month-old pigeon. He knows the bloodlines of his birds going back generations. He’ll stand out in this yard in rain and hail, waiting for his pigeons to return. Joy has watched him through the back glass windows, standing for hours beneath an umbrella, eyes fixed on that ever-changing Victorian sky. Why? “Because they try. If I had as much courage as them I’d have equalled Bradman’s record,” he says. They’re the first thing I think about when I wake,” he continues. “Apart from Joy, of course. I get up and I come down here. When I walked out my back door as a kid we had finches and ferrets, two dogs and a pigeon loft and that was my life.

Bill is driving to Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula tomorrow with a few young pigeons in his trailer, to set them free for their first training flight. “At a month old you put them out of the loft and they fly and flutter about, and within the next month if they fly around and come back, they’re homed,” he says. “I’ll let them go in Rosebud, which is an hour and a half flight back home.” Sometimes young birds don’t make it back, but most times they do. “They’ll come back,” he says. “Once they’re homed, they’re home forever.