Flight of the old breed

Diehard … Berty with one of his racing pigeons in the loft at
his Lilyfield home.

Diehard … Berty with one of his racing pigeons in the loft at his Lilyfield home.
Photo: Steven Siewert

March 8, 2008

Pigeon racing is being pushed to the outskirts, both of the city and of society, writes Erik Jensen.

Pigeon racing is thought of as an eccentricity, something old men do or young men did. It is a metaphor, say its practitioners, for the way society treats its past.

With racers pushed to the outer suburbs, to Badgerys Creek and beyond, the clubs around Glebe and Leichhardt suffer declining membership and struggle to pay council rates. Collars are less blue, neighbours complain about lice, and the cost of seed and petrol has stopped it being a working-class pastime.

"What keeps me doing it?" asks Jock Gray, the public officer at the Leichhardt Flying Club. "It's the thrill, it's the adrenalin when the birds are racing. It's like a drug."

He laughs a throaty laugh, one that builds almost to a hack. At 69, his Scottish gruff is softened by a love of his birds. "It's better than smoking," he adds. "It's better than drinking and it's better than women."

Seventy years ago Leichhardt was the cream of Sydney's pigeon clubs and the oldest, with 80 members and thousands of birds. Today it has a membership of five - one of them Gray's wife - and only two of them fly.

"It was [the premier club] but Leichhardt now, we've got to go and basket at another club at Maroubra," Gray says. "We're dwindling in members - everybody's dying, you know."

Gray is one of the men the Herald photographer Steven Siewert has shot as part of his five-year series documenting the sport. "I don't see it as a sport so much," Siewert says. "It has the mystery of flight that they have tried to work out for years - how they find their way home - but it's also a look at how society progresses and how they deal with the more eccentric parts of life. You can't just see it on one level, otherwise you'd just shoot it for a weekend."

Siewert shoots on film, driving out to the release of the birds - the liberation, as it is termed - and getting about 10 seconds to capture the rush of pigeons as they scatter from the truck. It is not until he returns home and develops the film that he knows what he has.

It is the same for the racers, many of whom share an intimate relationship with their birds and see racing as bittersweet - there is the thrill of competition but also an unknowing, the knowledge their birds may be taken by falcons or caught in storms over the 1000-kilometre legs.

"Some pigeons you get very attached to," Gray says. "I had a pigeon called the Pied - I've got her in the backyard, [buried] in my garden in the backyard. I mean, she was a very famous pigeon. Another man, Freddy Borg, he's got a bird called Carmen - he got it stuffed. That's how close we are with pigeon racing.

"It's just not like, you have a greyhound and when it doesn't win a race, you shoot it. And when the horse is finished, after winning two races, shoot it and send it to the factory. We don't do that. It's a very personal thing, pigeons."

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