When I first arrived in Adelaide in the early eighties, the Hyde Park Hotel was still a working mans drinking spot and the way to the lavatories was via an outside courtyard and passed a magnificent Sulphur Crested Cockatoo in a cage. It was impossible not to stop and look at him, to say hello. He would reply 'Hello cocky' and then give a prolonged and hacking smoker's cough, the sort of cough that takes forty or fifty years of hand rolled tobacco. When shortly after I met this amusing bird and the pub was gentrified, the cocky was the first thing to go. These birds live a very long life and I hope he is coughing away in a good home.
Lisa Young
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