Jim first senses that some change must happen when he sees the Dunlin. Although thinks that the Dunlin has “broken a barrier that was laid down a million years ago” and so broken away from itself and its identity, this bird shows him that as there are birds he has never seen before, so are there are experiences that are unknown to him. This vision of Jim’s develops further when he takes to a trip in the plane. This “monstrous cage” that he knew was being used as an instrument of war, confirms what he imagined looking down from this height would be but also shows that he has been limited by his time in Australia: he has no other experience to compare it to. When he finds that the “Map in his head” can be compared to birds gives him a “new vision after all.” As the plane literally tilts, Jim feels the his mind tilting “down into the pit with the rest.” He realizes that he must migrate, like the birds, in order to have new experiences and to understand for himself how he as an individual can fit into the world. He has learned to change. Despite Jim’s departure, there is newly growing wheat, showing that out of death, there is new life. Also, the birds stay as they always had been, showing him that “the birds could wait” and therefore that time goes on.
The war shows Jim a world “unlike anything he had ever known or imagined.” He is not the same man that had lived on the Crowther estate: he first tasted of new experiences in Brisbane and learns after he has had them that “nothing had changed,” showing that he has learnt that change is not something to be afraid of, but rather to be accepted. However, these could not compare to what he is about to learn in the trenches. Jim learns that each soldier has a nickname which sets them apart form the rest just as the birds’ names differentiate each species, but that it is all of these individuals that make up the whole: “They were “men” in some larger generals “plan.” They were also “Spud, Snow, Skeeter, Blue and Tommo.” His mate, Clancy, gives him new confidence and helps him overcome his inhibitions, thereby enabling him to do things that “he would never have done on his own.” Clancy has a “List” that allows him to keep the old life alive in the new one. Later in the story, Jim finds himself needing to observe and identify the birds once again in his “Book,” simply because it keeps his past life alive in the present, and therefore removes the “line between the past and what was to come.”
The world that Jim was sheltered from at the start of his life is made very clear to him when he enters the front line. He learns that “he had been blind” to the true brutality that man inflicts upon himself. Because Jim has been sheltered, he believes the violent and poisonous nature of his father as well as his brother’s tragic death are simply faults and that they do not in any way represent the otherwise tranquil world. Not only does Jim learn that the word is filled with violence but he finds himself doing things that make him more destructive than his father could ever be despite the fact that he has resisted all his life from being infected with father’s disease. Hearing the enemy chuckle and talk amongst themselves shows Jim that the men in the enemy trenches are no different from himself and Clancy, and that they too are individuals with nicknames, not just a whole entity bent on destroying. After these revelations, Jim reminisces of a time when he found a bird that had a sardine tin tied to its legs. At the time, he could not imagine how any human being could be so cruel, yet he realizes that “there was how it was, even in the sunlight of Australia – even there” and that there was a dark side of human nature that he himself has stepped into.
Jim discovers many contrasts and opposites in his new life. The heaven of the home he knew with its birds and air and serenity is contrasted by the hell of trenches with its rats and choking mud and unremitting chaos, and “the only way he can deal with this is by turning his world upside down.” What he eventually realises is that these opposites balance each other out, and that his experiences of life in Australia needed to be balanced by his experiences of death in Europe. Jim’s ability to see this balance is very important in developing his vision of life.
In addition to this balance, Jim learns that despite the “feeling that time had stopped” (a sense that comes to him through the fixed life in the trenches), time is continuing everywhere: in places such as Australia, and even here in the front. When he sees a local man digging up the earth on the battlefield, at first he thinks that he is digging a grave, but when he sees that he is ploughing in preparation for crops, he knows that this is a sign that time is continuing and that new life is rising out of the earth that is covered with the dead. The mammoth remains that the soldiers discover represent the fact that time is continuous and that the past and present are linked: “The mammoth was thousands of years old, thousands of years dead. It went back to the beginning and was here.” The fact that the dead surround the mammoth shows Jim that the war is occurring, to a certain extent, outside of time, and that when the war eventually finishes, time will continue where it has occurred despite the devastation the violence has caused. On seeing this man ploughing his fields, Jim suddenly feels the need to start writing in his bird book, as he needs to return to the time that exists outside of the war, in which the man and the birds are living: “They had fallen, he and his contemporaries, into a dark pocket of time from which there was no escape.” He realizes that the war is on another level of life, a lower level and that the birds and the local man exist above this level: “There were so many worlds. They were all continuously with one another and went on simultaneously: that farmer’s world, intent on his business with his hoe; his own world, committed to bringing these men up in battle; their worlds, each one, about which he could only guess.”
Through these experiences of war, Jim is able to bring that blurred view of the blades of grass into focus through the perspective he gains from experience. Jim learns about the physical world, in which there are terrible evils from which he was sheltered during his time growing up in Australia and the fact that “he had been living in a state of dangerous innocence.” He also becomes aware that there are so many different levels of meaning and existence and that although the individuals who make up these levels are lost in overall continuum of time and change, without this individuality, there would be no process at all.