Bird images suggest early trade route between Australia, Europe

SYDNEY — Images of an Australian cockatoo parrot in a 13th century Italian manuscript suggest an extensive trade route reaching from the waters around Australia’s north to Europe, centuries earlier than previously thought.

“The fact that a cockatoo reached Sicily during the 13th century shows that merchants applying their trade to the north of Australia were part of a flourishing network that reached west to the Middle East and beyond,” said Heather Dalton, who published findings about the discovery on Tuesday.

The University of Melbourne School of Historical and Philosophical Studies’ honorary research fellow detailed four images of a white cockatoo that appeared in a Vatican library book called the Art of Hunting with Birds by Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.

Believed to have been written in the 1240s, the bird is stated in the text as being a gift from the fourth Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt to Frederick II, who referred to him as the Sultan of Babylon.

Recently, when scholars from the Finnish Institute in Rome were studying the manuscript they realized the significance of what they had found.

In collaboration with Dalton, the researchers determined the bird to be either a female Triton or one of three subspecies of Yellow-crested or Lesser Sulphur-crested Cockatoo.

This means that the bird originated from Australia’s northern tip, Papua New Guinea or Indonesia.

The earliest European depiction of a cockatoo was previously believed to have been 250 years later in a painting by 15th Century Italian artist Andrea Mantegna.

How the bird got to Sicily in the 13th century however, has been pieced together by Dalton in a journey she says would have been primarily over land and likely to have taken several years.

“They would probably have been traded in Java and then up into China and across what we call the Silk Road to Cairo,” she said.

But cockatoos may have been traded into China from Northern Australia far earlier still.

“We know that from the 3rd century AD, there were colored and white parrots from the islands off Indonesia in China,” Dalton said.

“They were in Han Dynasty gardens and we’ve actually got a couple of 7 th century written records of white parrots which were caught, quote — in the furthest part of Indonesia.”

“It’s not really surprising that cockatoos were being traded, I think we tend to look at Australia through the eyes of Europeans, specifically British historians that paint Australia as the dead continent waiting for Europeans to turn up.”

“That was far from true,” she added.