Four sketches and a written description of a white cockatoo survive in a mid 13th-century manuscript from Sicily, now held in the Vatican Library, according to a new study. This finding, reported in the journal Parergon, suggests that trade in the waters in and around Australia’s north was flourishing as far back as medieval times, linked into sea and overland routes to Indonesia, China, Egypt and beyond into Europe. One of the four images of an...
