Here's the story of Pirate the cockatoo, the hissing white ghost who became boss of my heart | Alexis Wright

I ended up incorporating him into my novel Carpentaria, where he now looms larger than life

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This is a story of Pirate, Australia's proper number one rex regum et volucres, king of birds. As a fledging, so I was told, he was rescued in a relocation of sulphur-crested cockatoos from the vicinity of Tullamarine airport, so that he would not end up being a bird-strike victim caught up in a jet turbine of one of those long-haul international Boeing jetliners taking off at about 180mph to Hong Kong, London, Paris or wherever else these people carriers fly to on the planet.

This wild young cockatoo was taken to central Australia, where the skies would eventually be large enough for his freewheeling temperament to roam. Within days of arriving in Alice Springs he came to live with my family as a basically wild, and seemingly untameable, rebellious adolescent. He hated everyone and hissed like a mad white ghost whenever anyone went near his cage. Every day I talked to him, paid him many compliments for his extraordinary beauty, and gave him the name of Pirate. Somehow I managed to clean his cage with all the newspapers he ripped up without having my hand bitten off while he was going completely bananas, and then I brought him fresh gumtree foliage to beautify his home, which he destroyed along with the newspaper, and gave him saucers of cut-up fruit, vegetables, seed and water. In other words, he was the boss and I was his slave.