too, the
small freeholder alights on good ground, extracts all he can
from it, and then flies away, to `fresh fields and pastures
new.' . . . However, whether the name is just or not, it is a
recognised one here; and I have heard a man say in answer to a
question about his usual `occupation, `I'm a cockatoo.'"

1873. A. Trollope, `Australia and New Zealand,'
vol. ii. p. 135:

"The word cockatoo in the farinaceous colony has become so
common as almost to cease to carry with it the intended
sarcasm. . . . It signifies that the man does not really
till his land, but only scratches it as the bird does."

1882. A. J. Boyd, `Old Colonials,' p. 32:

"It may possibly have been a term of reproach applied to the
industrious farmer, who settled or perched on the resumed
portions of a squatter's run, so much to the latter's rage and
disgust that he contemptuously likened the farmer to the
white-coated, yellow-crested screamer that settles or perches
on the trees at the edge of his namesake's clearing."

1889. `Cornhill Magazine,' Jan., p. 33:

"`With a cockatoo' [Title]. Cockatoo is the name given
to the small, bush farmer in New Zealand."

1890. Rolf Boldrewood, `Miner's Right,' c. xliii. p. 377:

"The governor is a bigoted agriculturist; he has contracted
the cockatoo complaint, I'm afraid."

1893, `The Argus,' June 17, p. 13, col. 4:

"Hire yourself out to a dairyman, take a contract with a
rail-splitter, sign articles with a cockatoo selector;
but don't touch land without knowing something about it."

<hw>Cockatoo</hw>, <i>v. intr</i>. (1) To be a farmer.

1890. Rolf Boldrewood, `Squatter's Dream,' c. xx. p. 245:

"Fancy three hundred acres in Oxfordshire, with a score or two
of bullocks,and twice as many black-faced Down sheep. Regular
cockatooing."

(2) A special sense--to sit on a fence as the bird sits.

1890. Rolf Boldrewood, `A Colonial Reformer,' c. xviii. p. 224:

"The correct thing, on first arriving at a drafting-yard, is to
`cockatoo,' or sit on the rails high above the tossing
horn-billows."

<hw>Cockatooer</hw>, <i>n</i>. a variant of <i>Cockatoo</i>
(q.v.), quite fallen into disuse, if quotation be not a nonce
use.

1852. Mrs. Meredith, `My Home in Tasmania,' vol. ii. p. 137:

"A few wretched-looking huts and hovels, the dwellings of
`cockatooers,' who are not, as it might seem, a species of
bird, but human beings; who rent portions of this forest
. . . on exorbitant terms .