Sunday Song: Feeling Emu

You lot take me to some weird places.

So I post a picture of a green beach rock, and next thing I know, Heliconia’s comparing it to an emu egg and RQ’s asking if emu eggs are green. So I got curious. And I looked. And day-yamn. They surely are.

Emu egg purchased at the farmers' market in Mountain View, California. Image and caption courtesy Shuhari via Wikimedia Commons.
Emu egg purchased at the farmers’ market in Mountain View, California. Image and caption courtesy Shuhari via Wikimedia Commons.

Remarkable. The resemblance, as Heliconia said, is striking. Now I want an emu egg. Lots of emu ranches in Washington state, so perhaps, one day…

Of course, I resolved to post a picture of an emu egg for you, and then I couldn’t think of what I wanted for the Sunday Song, until I remembered emu eggs and wondered, are there emu songs? Lo and behold.

This first one’s quite funny. Lyrics are here if you find the Aussie accent difficult.

Aussie’s Old Man Emu

And then I found this bizarre and quite hilarious impromptu emu song:

Emu Attack

And there were, of course, emus in the Dreamtime.

Emu Dreaming

And, just in case things didn’t get weird enough for you already…

Ganga Giri – Thigarra Yugal (Emu Song) (Raising it Up)

I have no idea what that was about. Ganga describes himself as “a rhythmic didjeridu virtuoso.” I shan’t argue. And I’ll admit it’s strangely compelling. Much like the deep green of an emu’s egg. Sort of.

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Sunday Song: Feeling Emu
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8 thoughts on “Sunday Song: Feeling Emu

  1. 2

    Cheers for these, Dana Hunter. :-)

    The Emu constellation noted in the first clip includes the Coalsack dark nebula in the Southern Cross :

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_astronomy#Emu_in_the_sky

    Incidentally, Indigenous Australian peoples have some skylore of notable archaeoastronomical significance too as this article :

    http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/aborigines-recorded-major-star-explosion.htm

    notes.

    Personally, I quite often see emus in the national park down the road – and was chased by one on my bike as a kid once too! Can’t recall ever seeing emu nests or eggs but seen their colourfully patterned chicks on occasions. Impressive birds although not quite the megafauna we once had!

  2. rq
    3

    Wow, emu songs! Ha. Yeah, the didgeridoo is one strange instrument. We had a how-to video back home in Canada since my dad had a bit of a didgeridoo craze at one point (brought I think 3 or 4 back from a trip to see family). Some pretty interesting stuff – it’s not hard to play as such, but it has a few tricks that are more difficult to master, notably – circular breathing. Needless to say, I am not a didgeridoo virtuoso and never shall be (only for lack of practicing, as Miss Elizabeth Bennett is wont to say), but here’s one of my favourite Australian musicians in action – Xavier Rudd. Saw him live way back in Toronto, small venue, had my flabber completely gasted. He’s also got quieter songs, more of the folksy ones – a long-time favourite has been Green Spandex.
    I had another great Australian tribute to the most popular guitar song of all time, Stairway to Heaven. Be warned, it’s not something you listen to with something in your mouth (at least, it wasn’t, first time I heard it)…

  3. 6

    What have I done?!?! And we’ll never know what kind of rock it was, either!

    Dana, if you ever get ahold of an emu egg, I can gladly provide you with instructions for how to remove the insides and varnish the shell. It’s a fairly long process.

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