Indigenous Cormorant (Cormorant and Pelican, Part Two)

Six: I again reverse the focus so as to reflect on the cormorant’s role as an icon of indigeneity providing an unexpected parallel to the role of its cousin the pelican, outlining the latter by way of the Australian children’s book Storm Boy and then turning back to the cormorant to show how it too has at times acquired status both as a marker of indigeneity and as a local victim of human environmental destruction, notably in images of cormorants affected by oil spills, drawing in particular on a Gulf War poem by Tony Harrison and on an image in the writing of Jean Baudrillard. I conclude by returning to the longstanding association of cormorants and China through an analysis of an advert for HSBC (‘The World’s Local Bank’), assessing the co-option by capital of the cormorant’s new-found and hard-earned sense of global belonging.