“After this lot, I only make them for the grandkids.” Glenys Tarrant (67) is letting the final 368 sunbird lamps go at a special price. The Kuranda glass restorer is done selling.
The Wet arrives in Far North Queensland somewhere around the middle of November, and by January it has taken the light out of everything. Five months of low cloud and rain on a tin roof, and the greens outside go flat and grey behind the glass.
The sunbirds carry on regardless. Glenys Tarrant has a pair that nests under the eave of her front verandah at Kuranda — a long hanging spindle of a nest, right over the step, close enough that she has learned to duck. Through the worst of the Wet the male is still out there at the heliconias, yellow underneath and a hard iridescent blue at the throat, holding himself still in the air in front of a flower.
Eight years ago she decided she wanted that indoors. She’s been making them ever since. This is the last year you’ll be able to buy one.
Thirty Years in Glass
Tarrant did not start in the tropics. She came up in leadlight and stained glass in central Victoria — the goldfields churches, mostly. Ballarat, Castlemaine, Maldon, and a long list of parishes in between, all of them fitted out in the 1860s by people with more money than sense and a great deal of coloured glass.
She is not modest about the work.
When a window that’s a hundred and fifty years old comes apart in your hands and you put it back so the congregation walks in on Sunday and notices nothing except that the blue is blue again — that is a real thing to be able to do.
She did it for thirty years, and then at fifty-seven she did what a great many Australians do eventually. She went north.
Nobody pushed me out. I was fifty-seven and up a ladder in a church in Ballarat in August, and I thought: I have done this. I would like to be warm now.
The final run is painted and packed. What is on the shelf is all there is.
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Why It Isn’t Glass
Tarrant would rather say this part first than have somebody else say it for her: the lamp is not glass. It is resin, cast in a mould she cut herself, and the colour is painted on by hand.
The reason is the part worth listening to.
A church window never moves. It sits in a stone opening, the wall holds it, and if nobody touches it, lead and solder stay exactly where they were put for a century and a half. That is the bargain glass makes with you. Keep it still and it will outlast you.
A lamp is the opposite of still. It gets picked up, dusted, carried into the other room when the furniture shifts, knocked by a sleeve. And before any of that it goes into a box in Cairns and comes out of one in Perth, four thousand kilometres away, having been handled by people who have no idea what is inside.
I know precisely what happens to leadlight that travels, because that was my job. The windows that turned up at my bench broken were almost never the ones sitting in a wall. They were the ones somebody had taken out of a wall. The solder works loose, the came flexes, a panel starts to rattle, and after that it is only a question of when.
I was not going to spend thirty years learning that and then post people something built to come apart.
So she built it the way it actually wants to be built. The flowers at the base are shaped the way she would have shaped them in glass. The dark lines between the colour panels sit exactly where the came would have gone. The light comes through from the inside the way it comes through a window — as a diffusion, not a beam.
She paints with transparent pigment rather than opaque colour, which means every piece pools a little differently where the colour runs deepest. Hold two side by side and you will see it.
That is not a fault I am apologising for. It is the only reason I still paint them myself.
Whose Bird Is It
People ask her whether it is a sunbird.
It is my sunbird. I have had a pair over the front step for eight years and I have watched him hold still in the air in front of a heliconia more times than I could count. I was never trying to make a photograph of him. I was trying to make what it feels like when he does that.
Which is the honest answer, and also the reason the colours are what they are. No bird alive is jade and magenta and gold all at once. The piece is a leadlight maker’s idea of a small bird holding itself still in the air, and the colours are chosen for what they do to the light rather than for what any field guide says.
What It Does
Switched off, in daylight, it reads as a sculpture: dark bronze base and branch, jade green over the crown, magenta at the throat, soft yellow through the breast, and wings that run blue and green into magenta before going gold at the feather edges. People walk past it, and then they come back.
Switched on after dark, it stops being an object. The colour deepens, the flowers at the base begin to glow from the inside, and the wall behind fills with scattered warm light that shifts as you move. The corner it is standing in becomes the part of the room you want to sit in.
That is the same trick a cathedral window plays. I have just made one small enough for a bedside table.
At 25 cm tall it fits a bedside table, a windowsill or the table beside a reading chair without crowding anything. It runs on three AA batteries, which was deliberate: no cord means no power point, and no power point means it can go out on the verandah table after dinner and come back in afterwards.
- Height: 25 cm (9.85 in)
- Material: cast resin, hand-painted with transparent pigment; bronze-finish base
- Power: 3 × AA batteries — no cord, no power point needed
What Sets Tarrant’s Lamp Apart
- Painted one at a time. Not printed, not transfer-applied, not sprayed. Transparent pigment laid panel by panel with a fine brush.
- Transparent pigment, not opaque paint. The light travels through the colour instead of stopping at the surface, which is why a lit panel reads as depth rather than flat colour.
- No two the same. The pigment gathers a little deeper along the edge of each panel, and never in quite the same way twice.
- Resin, and she says so first. It isn’t glass, and that is a decision rather than a shortcut — thirty years of restoration taught her what happens to leadlight that travels.
- Lines where the came would go. The dark divisions between the panels sit exactly where lead came sits in a real window. That is the whole reason it reads as leadlight.
- A base with weight in it. It sits down on a sill instead of tipping when a sleeve catches it.
- Nothing to plug in. Three AA batteries, no cord, no power point — so it goes out to the verandah table and back again.
- Packed for the distance. Air cushions on every side, in a carton sized well over the piece. Cairns to Perth is four thousand kilometres and she packs for it.
- One honest note before you order. This is a decorative light, not a reading lamp. It will not light a page. It fills a corner with colour, and that is all it sets out to do.
368 pieces in the final run — when they’re gone, Tarrant stops selling.
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What Owners Say
★★★★★
My husband has a chair by the front window and a lamp he has had since the nineties that puts out light like a service station. I put this on the table beside it in September. He has not switched the old one on since. He will not say he likes it, but he will not switch it on.
— Margaret H., Toowoomba QLD
★★★★★
Bought it for my mother, who already owns an alarming number of bird ornaments. I assumed this would be number forty. It is on her bedside table and the others are still on the shelf, so apparently not. The weight surprised me — it feels like something, not like the hollow plastic I was braced for at this price.
— Dennis W., Geelong VIC
★★★★★
We have it out on the verandah table most evenings now. No cord to run out through the door, which was the whole reason I bought it. It goes back on the kitchen sill when we come in and it looks like it belongs there too.
— Jo-Ann T., Coffs Harbour NSW
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If You’re Buying It For Somebody Else
A fair number of them go out as presents, and Tarrant has worked out why.
It is not a thing anybody puts on a list. That is the point of it. You cannot ask for one, so somebody has to have thought of you.
Four practical things, if it is going under a tree:
- It survives the post. Oversized carton, air cushions on every side. It can go interstate in December, which is the worst fortnight of the year to send anything.
- No batteries hunt on the day. It takes three AA. Put a packet in with it and it works the moment the paper comes off — no cord to find a power point for, no app, no setup.
- It is not another ornament to dust. It does something. Switched on it changes the corner it stands in, which is more than most gifts in this price range manage.
- It keeps working in January. Nothing about it is Christmas. It goes on the sill or the bedside table and stays there after everything else has gone back in the box.
Worth knowing: the final run is being painted now, and the back half of December is when Australia Post stops making promises. If it is meant to be under a tree, earlier is better than clever.
At A Glance
- 30 years restoring leadlight and stained glass in the Victorian goldfields.
- 8 years casting and painting this lamp, since the Wet she decided she wanted that colour indoors.
- 8 seasons of the same pair of sunbirds nesting over her front step.
- 2 moulds left, and she is not cutting another at sixty-seven.
- 368 pieces in the final run. After that, grandchildren and the Kuranda markets only.
- 25 cm tall, on three AA batteries, with no cord anywhere.
Why This Is the Last One
She is sixty-seven. Her hands are fine, her eyes are fine, and she would like to keep both that way.
So this is the final run she is selling: 368 pieces, cast from the two moulds she has left and painted before the Wet sets in.
She is not stopping altogether. She will still make them for grandchildren, and she will still take a table at the Kuranda markets in December, because she has done that since she came north and she would miss it. But not in production, not in runs, and not online.
When these 368 are gone, that is the end of the part where you can buy one.
Through the Wet
Every November the cloud comes down over the range and stays, and every November she switches this on in the afternoon. Eight years now.
The sunbirds never leave. It is the light that goes. In the meantime, there is some in the room.
If It Isn’t What You Expected
Send it back within 30 days and you get your money back. No explanation required, and nothing to argue about on the phone.
The Final Run
368 pieces, cast from two moulds, painted by a woman who spent thirty years learning what light does when it passes through colour. After that she keeps making them — just not for sale.
Was A$115 · Free shipping Australia-wide · 30-day money-back guarantee