Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

WELCOME TO MY MOUNTAIN

A QUOLL IN THE KITCHEN

SNEAKY SKINK

MINI-MICE

KOOKABURRA KINGDOM

TWO-BY-TWO

CONSORTING COUPLES

OUT OF THE FIRE...

REDNECK BOYS

RED-BELLIED SQUATTERS

ROSIES ARE RED

AQUATIC JEWELS

WILD CHILD DAY CARE

A BATHFUL OF TADPOLES

SEEKING A MATE?

POOLSIDE LOUNGERS

FREE TO GOOD HOME...

THE GUZZLER

JACKY DRAGON

MACROPOD MOTHERS’ CLUB

SNAKE PERVERSITY

PESKY POSSUMS

SHY YET SHOWY GOANNAS

PRAYING FOR PREY

THE QUOLL KIDS

LOST KOALAS

THE NIGHT MONSTER

NIGHT TIME IS OUR TIME

SKY LORDS

A QUESTION OF MURDER

BREAKING AND ENTERING

LYREBIRD LADS

SPIKY VISITOR

HORSE DILEMMAS

MASTER OF ART

RUSTY ARISTOCRATS

A QUESTING COCKATOO

THE LONELY EMU

WALLABY WEIRDO

ELEGANT, NEGLIGENT DUCKS

MYSTERY THIEF

INEDIBLE EDIBLE GRUBS

PETRIFIED BIRDS

MISSING TAILS

ADDENDUM

CONTACTS

SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE WOMAN ON THE MOUNTAIN

FRONT COVER FLAP

BACK COVER FLAP

BACK COVER MATERIAL

For my father, Frank Munro, who always listened.

WELCOME TO MY MOUNTAIN

Short or tall or really small,

Furred or feathered, smooth or scaly—

I’m the poorest creature here, without a tail at all.

Being the only human resident of a wildlife refuge, on the edge of a national park that is far from any town, I see lots of creatures behaving ‘wildly’. They can be so natural because they ignore me, as they should.

After all, I’m obviously of an inferior and inadequate species: no tail, only two legs, pathetic hearing, poor vision that’s shockingly so at night, no built-in insulation of fur or feathers, and an apparent inability to survive on the local abundance of grass, leaves and roots—or other creatures.

To that general picture of modern white Australians, my neighbours might add other deficiencies peculiar to me: knees that can’t be relied on to bend, as knees must, to climb up and down slopes; inappropriate Celtic skin that burns to cancerous spots under our sunshine; and a lack of any singing talent.

I love where I live, high on my forested mountain, surrounded by even higher, wilder mountains, but I admit to being the least well-adapted to my surroundings, because still dependent to some extent on the outside world.

But not for entertainment! My fellow wild residents, and their relatives from the national park next door, are always up to new tricks. These may well frustrate my own activities and infuriate me with the apparent perversity of their choice and timing, but they never fail to interest, surprise and cause me to seek further information.

Such tales usually amuse other people—and me, once I’ve calmed down. I mean how would you like it if your neighbours ate your roses, solicited for sex in your front yard, or commandeered your shed?

Many people say they like animals, but they really only mean domesticated animals, or the cute and cuddly semi-tame native ones kept in tourist parks. Being genuinely wild creatures, none of my neighbours is cuddly; they wouldn’t allow such liberties even if I wanted to. But many are very cute, like the joeys—the baby wallabies and kangaroos and wallaroos.

Beauty is another matter. While I acknowledge snakes can be beautiful, there is always a big ‘BUT’ clouding my attempts at objective judgement. They do provide a few scary tales, because I’m alone, and not the calmest where creatures like snakes or spiders or leeches are concerned. Other people may even laugh at these tales, but it’s a nervous, skittery kind of laughter, usually accompanied by a shiver and a ‘Rather you than me!’

If ‘cute’ and ‘beautiful’ and even ‘scary’ sometimes apply, ‘amazing’ often does.

I am astonished at the diversity of ways in which these creatures have adapted to their environment, evolved over thousands of years, and are still evolving. They have truly earned their places here; they belong.

When I studied biology in high school and learnt about the internal processes of the human body, I was struck with wonder at the intricate design of it all. My wonder was no less when we looked into the pinned-back frog or rat we had dissected—that is, a less squeamish classmate had—and it was enhanced by the fact that their insides looked just like the diagrams in our textbooks!

But we didn’t even consider our native animals then, let alone their unique and clever features: how a kangaroo can delay the growth of a foetus; how a koala can survive on a diet of gum leaves that would be toxic to other animals; how a wombat’s pouch opens backwards so the baby doesn’t get buried in dirt when the mother digs; how an echidna has one extra-long claw for scratching amongst its spines ... the list of things to wonder at is endless.

In any association with living creatures, there will also be sad or painful tales. Many readers of my first book, The Woman on the Mountain, say they found the animal stories some of the most moving. Over the 30 years since I found this place, and came to belong to it, many incidents were experienced and creatures met that didn’t find their way into that book. And of course our wild life together has continued since.

So that new readers will be able to follow me and my animal encounters over those decades, here’s a potted history. I first moved here in 1978 with my husband and our two children, Sam, five, and Lucy, three. That early bush life—living in a tent while we built a little mud-brick cabin, fencing, setting up watering systems, planting fruit trees and vegetable gardens—was idyllic, but the marriage splintered into very nasty shards after too few years. Then came too many years in Sydney as a sole parent, working and renting and always broke, returning to our Mountain home whenever we could.

In 1994, when the kids were off living their own lives, I resumed my full-time bush lifestyle, with my new partner, having installed solar power so we could work from here. The cabin grew a little bigger; its surrounding yard was fenced off from the forest, and from its inhabitants—theoretically.

Since I ended that relationship in early 2003, I have lived here alone—except of course for the animals. These solitary six years have allowed me to observe and share more of their lives than ever before, but surviving here wasn’t, isn’t, always easy for me, as The Woman on the Mountain tells!

As a child I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be an artist or an author or a ballerina when I grew up. Whilst I might still risk an occasional pirouette across the paddock or a grand jeté over a puddle when the wallabies aren’t watching, the ballerina dream ended early. But I do like to draw my neighbours as well as write about them, so to indulge two of my dreams, I offer my readers, old and new, this illustrated collection of ‘Mountain tails’. Mostly short, a few tall, mostly new, a few classics—to make you smile, chuckle or sniffle, say ‘Oo-oh!’, ‘Aha!’ or, better still, ‘A-a-ah!’

Come take a walk in my gumboots and meet my neighbours.

Sharyn Munro

The Mountain, 2009

www.sharynmunro.com

A QUOLL IN THE KITCHEN

A Spotted-tailed Quoll has bred in my big shed for most of the last ten years. She mates and gives birth in the cooler months, which means that by mid-spring the shed is almost unusable, so pungent is the stench of her carnivore’s combined nursery, larder and toilet.

By summer she and the kids are a very strong presence. I enter only under dire necessity, holding my nose and calling out my credentials and apologies as I go. I should be less sensitive, having plenty of past experience of what a teenage boy’s long-worn socks and sneakers, finally removed, can do to a room.

Since she’s a threatened species, classed as ‘Vulnerable’, I don’t mind, even if I do whinge sometimes, as I feel privileged to be able to offer her shelter.

Usually she’s seen outside the shed only at night, quite often on my verandah, but very occasionally I see her at dawn or twilight, hurrying across the paddock, looking purposeful. She makes me think of the time-pressed White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

However, while they do have daily routines, my wild neighbours like to keep me on my toes with occasional flashes of unpredictable behaviour.

One fine autumn day, I was sitting at my desk. On my right the door to the verandah was held wide open with one of the heavy black flat irons which, pre-solar power, I had to heat on the fuel stove for ironing. Low sunlight was streaming across the floorboards, throwing into relief the curving sweeps of the original rough saw cuts, bare-feet-polished smooth over the years. Secondhand, like my windows and doors, which, when we acquired them 30 years ago, were already old and weathered—although back then I wasn’t!

I should explain that my mud-brick cabin is tiny. Its one main room houses my study, living, dining and kitchen areas, so continuous that it’s hard to say where one starts and the other ends. Perfect for one person, and occasionally two, and causing little housework. So my one external door doesn’t open into a specific room and I can see into all the main ‘rooms’. Two small sleeping areas and a pantry, tacked onto the back of the original cabin at a later date, and an extended verandah at the front, and that’s it. My home. Don’t ask about a bathroom—it sets me off—and this tale’s not about my goosebumps of a windy winter morning as I brave the outside shower.

The phone rang and I quickly turned from contemplating the floorboards to answer it, as it was almost time for the radio interview arranged with Charles Wooley about my book, The Woman on the Mountain. He’s in Tasmania, but his radio show goes out to 50 regional stations across Australia.

Clearly a discerning and intelligent man—since he loved the book!—he proved to be warm, funny and empathetic as well. He especially loved the stories about the quoll, perhaps because she’s related to the Tasmanian Devil. When I put the phone down I was still chuckling at his offer to play the quoll in the unlikely event of a TV show of the book.

I made myself a coffee (the non-instant, volcanic way: strong, flat white, one sugar, in case you’re curious), taking it back to the desk, where I re-booted my Mac and soon lost myself in the current short-story-in-progress.

Not two hours later, I was still staring at the screen, pondering on the best word to replace a repetition I’d just spotted, when the corner of my right eye detected a movement. I turned my head, and there she was, as boldly reddish-brown and spotty as you please, walking into my kitchen in the middle of the day!

I uttered a small squeal—not the clichéd mouse-sighting kind, just a shocked involuntary ‘What the...!’ She looked at me, about-turned, and unhurriedly waddled back to the doorway, her long spotted tail held straight out behind. I got up from the desk and followed her, grabbing my camera as I went.

She hadn’t gone far. From the doorway I watched as she jumped into my ‘burnables’ bin, only half a metre away at most, on the verandah. It’s an open plastic cube, a cut-down 10-litre vinegar container, and she’s about the size of a large cat. It wasn’t exactly a tight fit but neither did it look comfortable, bent double as she was, tail hanging over the edge. It occurred to me that she wouldn’t have put herself in such a vulnerable position if she had considered me any sort of threat.

She fossicked noisily around in the paper and cardboard, then leapt back out on to the verandah with a piece of scrunched-up printer paper. I’d been having trouble with this story for a few days.

I could have told her that version was no good, but it must have smelt of the buttered slice of pumpkin and walnut loaf that had sat on my desk papers at yesterday’s morning tea. Butter’s almost animal, for a desperate quoll in a vegetarian garbage bin; she should be thankful that I’m not a vegan—yet. Holding the crumpled sheet in her paw, she gave it a thorough licking before abandoning it.

Then she walked at a leisurely pace to the steps, continuing to ignore me, and slipped through the side railings. I followed. On the stone path right next to the steps is a large green cement dish, about 45 millimetres in diameter, its pedestal long broken, so it’s a grounded bird bath, still vaguely intended for birds to drink from. It now held brackish rainwater, over soggy leaves fallen from the ornamental grapevine above, which it also trapped in reflection.

As she drank from it, I stood on the adjacent steps and clicked several pictures of her. She didn’t blink or deign to look around until she’d drunk her fill. One brief blank stare over her shoulder at me—‘Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time?’—and she ambled off to her halfway house, a tin-covered pile of timber, plopping down beside it for a sun soak before entering.

No thought of flight. Or fight, thank goodness, since another common name for this sort of quoll is the Tiger Quoll. Not because she looks like one—she’s spotted, not striped—but because she’s a fierce and aggressive carnivore with an extremely strong jaw, able to bring down, and more importantly, hold down, a hefty possum or even an animal much larger than herself, like a wallaby.

The Spotted-tailed Quoll is the biggest carnivorous marsupial left on mainland Australia. The Tassie Devil is the biggest overall, but they’re in real trouble, with those new and contagious facial tumours that have almost halved their population since 1995. Let’s hope a way to stop it is found before the Devil joins the Tasmanian Tiger, the Thylacine, to become mere legend.

My quoll’s cousin, the Eastern Quoll, who’s smaller and doesn’t have spots on her tail, appears to be gone from the mainland now, surviving only in Tasmania. I wish I’d had a shed to offer as refuge when I saw one here, as I’m sure I did, in the ’70s.

As happens so often with my wild neighbours, once again my quoll’s behaviour had let me know quite plainly that I don’t count. I’m not prey—although I’m always glad she’s much smaller than I am; I’m not predator—she knows I’m a wussy vegetarian pacifist; and I’m certainly not a potential male partner or a competing female.

I’ve told her I think male quolls are too boofy-looking for my tastes, with their blunter faces and big raw pink noses that make me envisage them snuffling about in bloody carcasses. But I don’t think she has much choice when it comes to mating, which is the only time I have ever heard quolls make vocal sounds.

Once a year, when she has a male visitor in the shed, there’s a prolonged and fierce carry-on, with growls and hisses that don’t sound very loving. I’ve read that the females often get badly bitten during the process, which can last up to eight hours. I bet she’s pleased he doesn’t stay around or ask to move in: male quolls are clearly only bearable as one-night stands.

I’d said to Charles W. that my quoll had been pushing the boundaries of her/my territory, taking over my verandah as well as the shed. She ensures I know it by leaving her curled and fur-filled droppings there for me to avoid each morning. Now it looks like she has designs on the interior of the cabin as well.

Checking out my larder? She’d be disappointed in its totally fleshless contents, but if she worked out how to open the little 24-volt refrigerator, the size used in caravans, and easily within her height’s reach, she’d find cheese, and I know she eats that.

Anything smelly is her preference, but I always at least stock a wedge of Parmesan or Romano, a large tub of fetta and a block of the driest matured cheddar I can find amongst the non-fancy cheap range, so I’m sure they’d do. She’d like it when my Tasmanian friend and webmaster, Fred, sends me a double treat: a postbox of books, the space around them packed with wonderful Tassie cheeses like washed rind and aged blue, all loudly announcing their ripeness by the time they arrive. The post office probably wonders why anyone would send me dirty socks.

I no longer put the wrappers of such treats in the garbage, but lay them face up on the verandah for her. I hope that will keep her happy, or entice her back, as this summer she seems to have been off on holiday. Quolls are strong and clever; deservedly top of the food chain here, apart from introduced species like dogs and humans. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she could master a fridge door.

I obviously need to think about how to mark my territory better.

And thank you, yes, I’ve had that suggestion and I don’t fancy it. Primitive though adequate my sanitary arrangements may be, with a ‘long drop’ pit toilet, but I draw the line at that.

SNEAKY SKINK

The quoll’s not the only intruder over the outdoor/indoor border by any means. One very sleek and speedy lizard is a frequent visitor to my verandah. At about 180 millimetres long, much bigger than the common Garden Skink, he’s probably a Southern Water Skink, but could be an Eastern one. Regardless of his exact title, I know he’s an Inquisitive Skink.

Often when I’m at the computer I catch sight of him snooping round the corner of the open door, then scurrying in and off across the floor, usually disappearing behind my wood box next to the fuel stove. This is neither square nor timber as the word ‘box’ implies but I don’t know what else to call it. It’s actually the copper liner of an old wood-fired clothes-washing boiler, which is probably why people used to call them ‘coppers’ in their entirety.

When I was growing up that was all my mother had. Coppers can be freestanding cast-iron units, as I had up here in the early days, but my mother’s copper liner sat in a built-in brick and cement corner structure, with a chimney above and a fireplace beneath. Mum had to fill it by bucket.

I can still feel the furry softness of the waterlogged wooden dowel stick with which we’d lift steaming sheets or towels or clothes from the boiling water and drop them into the cold rinsing water in the adjacent cement laundry tub. They were always surprisingly heavy, and there was a delicate balance to the angle at which you held the stick. Too low and you’d drop the clothes back in, splashing yourself with boiling water; too high and that water would run back down the stick and scald your hand.

A household wash today would contain lots of synthetic fabrics that wouldn’t survive such serious boiling. They’d probably pine for fabric softener or pre-wash stain remover or whatever other perceived essentials line the shelves of those incredibly full supermarket aisles for cleaning and washing. Our laundry items were washed in suds made by shaving bars of Sunlight yellow laundry soap, and placing these in a little wire mesh cage with a handle.

That’s how we washed dishes too, and not in a sink, but in a big tin dish on the kitchen table, with a tin tray beside it for stacking and draining. The water for this procedure was either boiled in a kettle on the fuel stove, or in a creamy-yellow thick china electric jug with a Bakelite lid: very modern, we thought.

After the rinsing, whites like school shirts might be treated to the Bluo nob in its little cloth bag, or the crumbly, silky white Reckitt’s Starch mixed with water to the right gluey density. But what on earth was Bluo made from? For we were also given the dampened Bluo to rub on bee, wasp or ant stings, which we did, violently, and it worked, but whether from the colour, the pressure or just the distraction I don’t know.

Anyway, if they were the good old days, they’re not missed by me, as I simply load and program my sophisticated electric computerised automatic washing machine, thanks to my solar power system.

Today people like to use these old copper liners for wood storage because if there are any termites in the firewood, they can’t eat through copper and start on your floorboards.

Occasionally I worry about my sneaky skink being trapped inside the cabin when I close the door at night, but I suspect he’s also a clever skink and knows when to make his exit. I just don’t see him do it.

Neither do I see him eat the flies that get caught inside, and I assume he must. We get big flies here rather than sticky little bush flies. I’m no fly expert, so I assume they’re blowflies, but they don’t bother me. They seem only interested in animal products, so ignore my vegetarian platters at meal times. And I have noticed that the only time these flies hang about the toilet building is after I have non-vegetarian visitors, which include most of my family and friends.

I don’t like screens, and in warm weather I keep the door and the windows open for the flies to go in and out, which they do, but there is one large fixed window that is the bane of my summers. Because I can’t open it, flies buzz and buzz hopelessly at the glass, until they fall down in a daze, which is when I imagine my skink comes darting out to claim them as lunch. Replacing that window with two opening casements is high on one of my lists: the never-done-that-before-possibly-too-hard one.

In the Sydney years, we could only come back here on some weekends and holidays. Seeing as we were only part-time, a Cunningham’s Skink took up permanent residence in the cabin. He wasn’t sleek at all, but fat and spiky and bumpy like a small dinosaur. As I wrote in my diary one weekend then:

Our resident lizard rustles out from under the kero fridge to investigate, and remains fixed, pretending not to notice me, till he gets up the courage to waddle (he plainly thinks he’s darting) across the room to safety under the sideboard. As the winter sets in, we won’t see him at all—I wonder where he goes to hibernate? We used to find whole families of these fat hibernating lizards curled up together under a sheet of tin or amongst stored beer bottles—they remained in rigid crescents when we picked them up to relocate them. Ours doesn’t seem to have a family—he has been alone in our cabin for years. I hope he knows there is a world outside it.

He eventually must have been scared by bush rats into hiding on top of the mirror above my big sideboard.

When I became a full-time resident again, my partner and I decided to paint the mud walls, with environmentally friendly paint of course, to reflect more light. To do so we had to move the sideboard.

We heard a loud clunk as something fell and landed on the floorboards: there lay one perfectly preserved, desiccated Cunningham’s Skink, undamaged by the fall, and looking like a plaster replica of himself. I was more upset than I’d have expected to be; the poor little blighter must have starved up there because he wasn’t game to come down.

So my concerns about my snooping skink are not unfounded, but because I am living here now he’d never be locked in for long—and besides, I refuse to let the bush rats move in again! But that’s another story.

MINI-MICE

In that part-time era, our Mountain weekends often started late on Friday night. The drive from Sydney took four and a half hours, no easy task on top of my working week, especially with the impatient kids in the back seat testing my frazzled nerves to the limit.

For our en route dinner we’d often grab a vegetarian pizza from an admirably independent late-night café in the last town. Unfortunately it’s no longer there; one of the big boys, Pizza Hut, muscled in right across the road. That eventually got its just deserts and closed down, but too late for the little guy it had ousted.

That café’s pizzas are memorable still for their generously mounded toppings, unusual for their chunks of fresh tomato and slices of banana amongst the more common tinned pineapple pieces, mushrooms, capsicum, olives, onion, herbs, and as much cheese as the load could bear. Quite a few ‘loads’ ended up in our laps as we struggled with those weighty and floppy wedges, in the dark and in the car, on the remaining hour and a half drive.

And why do tomatoes hold their heat so much longer than other foods?

We’d arrive around midnight, the kids sometimes managing to sleep until we hit the bumps of the rough Mountain roads. I’d be desperately needing to close my eyes, after facing too many headlights on the main roads, and then intense vigilance for suicidal wallabies on the lesser ones.

Stumbling down the hill from the car by torchlight, we’d light a candle or two so we could see to make the beds from the folded and stacked blankets and sheets, try to remember to blow the candles out—and fall dead asleep. The late-night trip was always worth it, because then we could wake up at our Mountain and have two whole days there.

In those years my mud-brick cabin was just one overly full room. We used a wardrobe and bookshelves as dividers, the kids slept in double-decker bunks, and my double bed was a hardwood platform built high over big sets of deep, long drawers that had originally been used for bulk storage in an old-fashioned health food shop.

It meant there was little room to manoeuvre, and lots of dark spaces in the canyons created by the furniture. The greyish mud walls weren’t painted then, so they absorbed rather than reflected light.

One Friday night, I took a candle round the side of my bed to the old pine blanket box, which held papers and photos, not blankets, and which doubled as a stacking base for our bedding and a step up to the top of the drawers and thence to my mattress. I set the candle on the windowsill, too high to properly illuminate the box level, but I knew what I needed by feel.

Right! Sleeping bags for the kids—slightly silky, slippery feel, that’s them. Yank, flip.

Sudden wild activity as what seemed like dozens of tiny creatures leapt for cover. ‘Torch!’ I yelled, not game to move for fear of squashing something, yet also terrified of those ‘somethings’ taking refuge up my jeans.

My eyes had adjusted enough to the candlelight to see that they were baby marsupial somethings, probably antechinus, very mobile, scurrying under any available cover, like the rest of the blankets, but also panicking and taking to the floor as well.

It was chaos. ‘Ee-eek!’ was totally inadequate.

The kids caught several as we kept re-disturbing and unearthing them from the diminishing blanket pile. I hoped the mother found the rest and ferried them out. Our mini-mice went into an old sack, which was placed, open, under a pile of tin and timber close by the cabin. The blankets went out to the verandah to be checked and washed on the morrow; birthing and nesting is a messy business.

I was shuddering at anything I touched, tiptoeing anywhere I walked. I knew daylight would make it better, but sleep did not come easily that night. I left the candle burning—a deterrent to them running over my head, I fancied.

We didn’t find any more the next day, and the sack outside was empty, so I could kid myself that their mother found them and they all survived. (Yes, I know, a quoll or an owl or a snake might have eaten them.)

‘Weekending’ was the pits, especially when I mightn’t be able to afford the petrol for the trip for a month or even two: the critters think you’ve gone for good and move in, which is fair enough, and you’ve got to claim your territory anew each time you come. And that’s not easy in the dark!

In fact, after another more rank and rankling experience, when Mum mini-mouse, having nibbled through plywood, had her litter in my undies and socks drawer, I began leaving Sydney at 4a.m. on Saturday mornings. I definitely cope better in daylight with mini-mice invasions.

I shouldn’t call them mice, as they’re not, they’re Brown Antechinus, small marsupials, and quite sweet looking. But they hiss and scurry and scrabble and leave tiny black pellets everywhere, and gnaw at plastic lids and rubber seals and soap—which they often steal—so I don’t know if they’re any better to have as flatmates.

Once I had returned to live here full time again, I evicted them (in a live trap), and changed the locks (blocked up any crevice). Since they can flatten their little bodies to fit through amazingly narrow spaces, it’s a constant battle to maintain vigilance against such squatters, even though I thought I’d found and filled every crack where they could enter.

Yet each year, come the colder weather, out of the night shadows a tiny creature will suddenly dart onto the sink or the bench, stare at me with its round dark eyes, then disappear. I get out the live trap again: a folding aluminium tunnel with a spring-loaded platform inside, which, when stepped on, snaps the door shut.

It’s not that I don’t like them. In fact, the Brown Antechinus is one of the cutest of our small mammals, despite being related to the Tasmanian Devil. Similarly carnivorous, they have lots of sharp little teeth, but they have pretty rounded ears like pink flowers, a pointy pink nose and rather ‘poppy’ black eyes. They’re great climbers.

Being meat eaters, they don’t touch my fruit or vegetables—unlike the bush rats. My antechinus do like cheese, which is what I put in the live trap. Younger antechinus are too tiny, too light to trip the trap, so I have to wait until they grow bigger, feed them up with free cheese slivers until the night of their big surprise.

Since they have a go at the actual door of the trap when in there, they don’t mind the taste of metal either. What began as a tiny nibbled corner has been increased by each overnight prisoner down the years until, star-shaped, it is now almost big enough for an escape hole, although the spiky edges are really sharp. I’ll have to patch it, but I’ll feel mean, after all their efforts—like prisoners laboriously digging a secret tunnel, only to be discovered right on the eve of escape. I wonder whether my lot here have developed a racial memory for this behaviour, and so pass it on in their genes?

The memorable fact about these antechinus is that the males not only mate themselves silly but they mate themselves to death. Before they are a year old, over a period of two weeks they race about seeking females, fighting each other for the ladies’ favours and, when they win them, mating for six hours at a time. They do it with more than one female if they can.

Not one male is left alive at the end of this frenzied mating season, which is usually in early spring. Not one male makes it to his first birthday. Apparently it’s the stress that does it.

It doesn’t sound like much fun being a female either, even if they do live longer, what with males jumping them at every turn. I mean, six hours does seem overcompensation for the ‘ten-minute wonder’ that human females complain about. Not surprisingly after all that effort, pregnancy, which only lasts a month, is guaranteed.

These little marsupials don’t actually have a pouch; instead they have six to ten exposed nipples, which the young latch on to—and they don’t let go for the first five weeks while they continue to develop, so Mum has to drag them about beneath her. At least she knows they’ll leave home by next winter, before the whole business starts again.

But I don’t want their home to be mine, for they are nocturnal and I’m not. If I didn’t need sleep I wouldn’t really mind sharing the house with them. But I do, and between their scrabbling and hissing, and my nervous awareness of the high possibility of them running over my pillow, and thus my head, they stop me getting enough of it.

P.S. After three consecutive mornings recently where the trap door was closed but nothing was inside, I realise they are now escaping via the nibbled hole, sharp edges or not. I am trying to think of a material to patch it with that they can’t possibly bear to eat, but I’m having trouble.

KOOKABURRA KINGDOM

Moist ground, short grass, worms a-wriggling, birds a-watching—snap!

Kookaburras claim my fence posts, my gates, my tree guards, my guttering, the glasshouse roof and the bare wintry branches of my stone fruit trees. Like sentries in castle turrets, they keep constant watch on their kingdom. For ages they stare fixedly at a spot in the apparently motionless paddock. It’s as if they are commanding a worm to emerge there by such concentrated power of will.

In a cold wind they fluff up their feathers: basic off-white, elegantly speckled and heavily striped in chocolate brown, barred with black, underscored by amber, and with those sometimes hidden, so often surprising, sky-blue dabs and dashes on the wings. A backcombing breeze makes their flat heads look ruffled and peaked like punks, but their heavily made up eyes are not distracted from their task.

Their beaks are big and tough and capacious, hooked at the end. Good for catching much bigger prey than worms or beetles, but that’s what’s on the menu in this clearing. Just a snack in between the morning and evening song sessions.

These are Laughing Kookaburras, sometimes called Laughing Jackasses, the largest members of the world’s kingfisher family, all of whom are carnivorous for more than fish. This sort likes mice, as well as worms and insects and reptiles, and there are lots of small mouse-like marsupials here to make residency in my Refuge worthwhile. There are also lots of tree hollows, so it’s a good nesting and breeding place for kookaburra families.

While we think of this kookaburra as our national Aussie icon, it was only indigenous to the eastern side of Australia—although not its drier areas—from Cape York in the north to Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. A paler, slightly smaller relative, the Blue-winged Kookaburra, also laughs, but in a less rollicking fashion, and it sticks to the more tropical parts of the country.

With that massive beak, our Laughing Kookaburra was not a welcome introduction to the south-west of Western Australia, and to Tasmania and Kangaroo Island, where it is now established. West Australian farmers say our kookaburras prey on their fowl, which I’ve never heard of them doing here, but once out of their natural ecosystem, who knows?

I’ve learnt that Laughing Kookaburras live for several decades and are stay-at-home family birds, partnering for life and keeping their offspring around them in large family groups, where all the older ones help their parents raise the nestlings.

Human families used to do that in the pre-Pill days when four kids was the norm; six and up if you were Catholic, obeyed the Pope and relied on the unreliable rhythm method; two was unusual, a bit sad, given that there must be a physical reason why you’d stopped there; and the rare only child and its parents were much pitied. Bogging in to help feed the littlies, wipe their noses, find the other sock, tie their shoelaces or keep them away from under Mum’s feet was the accepted cross of being older, just part of family life.

As kookaburras haven’t heard about the Pill, things haven’t changed for them. My head knows that those morning and evening kooka choruses that echo around the ridges here are to help the different family groups re-establish their territorial boundaries, like auditory suburban paling fences. Yet my heart says they also do it for sheer joy, since their performance is so wholehearted, beaks pointing skywards, throats vibrating, as they sing the daylight in and out.

For several years one kookaburra chose the railing at a corner of my verandah as his special vantage spot. I could open and shut the door, walk past, empty garbage, change boots, stockpile wood—and he would ignore me. Only now and then would this carved and painted effigy deign to momentarily turn ever so slightly towards me, giving the impression of a raised eyebrow even if he didn’t actually have one. Not being potential tucker or predator, I was quickly dismissed as of no interest.

I’m watching one now: he’s sitting on top of a garden stake, and he’s not laughing. He’s very serious; deadly serious, you could say. All that moves is his tail, up and down, slowly, a lever to keep him balanced on such a small perching area. Below this kooka’s post a magpie struts back and forth, like a goalkeeper, keen to beat him to that worm. Magpies rule here. They’re also carnivorous, and it’s not the size of the beak that counts...

When I’m digging in the garden, several kookaburras post-sit like this and watch, ready to dive right next to my feet if that’s where a worm, or part of one, is exposed. It’s a little nerve-wracking, but not as much as it would be if I weren’t wearing gumboots. Toes are rather like fat pink grubs, aren’t they?

If a kookaburra catches a larger creature, like a lizard or snake, that mighty beak holds it firmly while bashing the dangling prey against a branch or a rock to kill and soften it for eating. When I was a child someone told me kookaburras laughed when they did this, which made me dislike them as cruel and gloating, but I know now that this isn’t so, and in any case, only human animals have those qualities.

I don’t see whether kooka or magpie scores this time but both are always extremely quick to react when something tasty appears. Zoom! I rarely see them disappointed—not many worms get away.

Just beyond them a wallaby grazes steadily across the paddock outside the fence, her joey-laden pouch seeming to skim the ground as she does. She’s going about her daily business, like my feathered neighbours, and not bothering about me or mine. It’s a good neighbourhood that way—and no barking dogs, whining mowers or hedgetrimmers, nor thumping music as son-of-house-four-doors-up washes the family car under duress.

TWO-BY-TWO

Once I saw a strikingly symmetrical composition of creatures in the orchard, a line-up of paired animals.

Two kookaburras sat opposite each other, on two stakes of a netting guard; below each one stood a magpie; and just beyond them, outside the fence, two kangaroos faced each other as if posing for a coat of arms.

It was a fortuitous flash that soon broke apart, but it made me think of the animals queuing for the Ark, and thus my Refuge as being like that. Only it’s not God’s punitive Flood they need refuge from—it’s Man.

CONSORTING COUPLES

Not all pairings are so visually brief as my kookaburra coat of arms. Amongst the small birds here, I notice several in constant couples. I’m not a proper birdwatcher; I don’t have the binoculars and the bird books or my attention as handy as I should to qualify for that, so these birds have to be pretty obvious for me to notice details of their relationships.

The Welcome Swallows are definitely in favour of monogamy and the nuclear family. They twitter away in their little voices only to each other, despite the intimacy you’d expect to be generated between us by their returning to take up their permanent casual lease here each year. They look kindly at me, but I suppose they think I couldn’t possibly understand, poor grounded thing that I am, so they don’t actually address me.

Swallows don’t always choose their nesting spot well. In fact, from my personal experiences I’m inclined to substitute ‘often’ for ‘always’, if I consider the faulty choice from both points of view: my convenience and their safety.

Needing some sort of ledge as a building platform, door and window lintels are popular. Then my hopper window gets spattered with white droppings if opened, or the doorstep perpetually does, or I occasionally do!

And they might choose a ledge so close to the tin eaves that the nestlings run the risk of frying as the days heat up. Or one that’s too narrow; I’ve seen a half-finished nest fall off, smash and be rebuilt twice on the same inadequate support. Not real smart. Or once they chose a ledge right outside my bedroom window, to be sure I heard the incessant twittering. Mind you, I did enjoy watching their growing-up at such close quarters that year.

What with predatory birds like currawongs always hassling and on the lookout for unguarded or fallen babies, it’s a relief to me and the parents when the nestlings are grown. Plus it’s quieter.

On the first flight, they teeter with shock on the clothesline before discovering the obvious joy of the soaring aerobatics of the adults. I know they have to learn to do it to catch insects on the wing, but those early tries look like pure fun.

As I write this, the swallow pair have just arrived for the year and are doing large loops across the clearing, in under my verandah roof and out again, sussing out a site. They seem to be favouring my front-door lintel, so I’m deliberately going in and out a lot, to let them know that’s not a good idea. Apart from unwanted droppings from above, on me and the mat, as the weather warms up the door will be open most days and I imagine there’d be a high chance of inadvertent flights into the cabin and an ensuing panic to find the way out again.

The Scarlet Robin and his pale lady friend also live here for part of the year but they’re an exclusive pair, sufficient unto themselves. I read that they have a ‘trilling warble’ but I’m not aware of having heard them speak to each other, let alone to anybody, or anybirdy, else. Since they are such a solitary couple, I hope he’s more affectionate to her in private, as in public he scrupulously preserves a royal distance of several yards between them.

They appear here in mid summer, to breed I suppose, but where they go afterwards I don’t know. I mainly see them sitting—plumply but separately—on fences or low branches, their round black eyes on the lookout for insects. He’s very notable, with a bright red waistcoat over a white shirt, and a black suit with smart contrasts of white, including a dab on his forehead. Typically, she’s much more demurely dressed, but she does wear a feminine light pink vest under all the brown tones.

Other small birds seem to have a veritable harem, a flock of consorts. Like the Superb Blue Wren and his dusky tribe of fairy wrens, trilling and flicking in the bare wintry twists of the wisteria vine on my verandah, hopping from one level to another like fat little aerial circus performers, but fast-forwarded, double speed.

In fact his grey and brown followers are his wife and his children of both sexes, as the young males take a few seasons to mature and develop their bright colours. Meanwhile they stay at home, and, like the kookaburra kids, help with their younger brothers and sisters. Their parents have a sort of open marriage—they remain together for good, but happily have affairs on the side.

Their flashy father is only temporarily so, for he loses his blue plumage and moults back into asexual brown once the courtship and breeding is done, until next time. Rather like putting on the best suit to get the girl and then relaxing in the favourite baggy tracksuit until the display effort is needed again. But he’s more than just a gaily dressed dandy; he does his fair share of the upbringing and housework as well as home security, and even helps with his ‘illegitimate’ offspring.

When his grown male children turn blue they will be his competitors and then he is as fierce in his aggression towards them as he is attentive in the fresh annual courtship of his legal lady partner. I assume it’s purely biological, to get her in the mood, but I like the thought that he doesn’t take her for granted even after they’ve been together for a few years. He may offer gifts, usually a yellow petal, to other females, but he still remembers to give one as an anniversary present to his wife.

The tiniest birds, like the highly acrobatic Yellow Thornbills, get about in big groups, fussing, fluttering, never sitting still for more than a second, tinkling away to each other. There are so many that even if they stopped for a minute I doubt if I could tell whether they were in pairs or harems. They’re more like a handful of yellow-turning leaves being perpetually tossed up in the air to flutter quickly down. However, while they live in groups, apparently couples do peel off for a bit of privacy to reproduce and raise their young—a sort of compromise between communal and nuclear lifestyles.

In others, like the Grey Fantails, the sexes are totally indistinguishable to my eyes. I watch them as they dart about, turning, turning, looking, looking in every direction from under their white eyebrow stripes. They land here and there for a quick proud spin-on-the-spot to spread and display their pretty grey and white tails, and then they’re off again. These restless fantails have equality in more than appearance, as they share all the work of parenting and building their interesting nests from spiderwebs and grass, easily identified because the structures are shaped like long-stemmed wine glasses.

With birds, the fancy plumage and the showing off are usually about love or war. Sound familiar?

OUT OF THE FIRE...

Often we only get to know our neighbours in times of adversity. When disaster befalls us all, we emerge from our individual TV caves or backyard cloisters and pitch in to help each other get through it. Bushfires have long been one such event in Australia, and they are now becoming bigger, hotter and more unseasonal under global warming.

In 1980, when my whole mountain range burnt so thoroughly that there was no green in the landscape as far as the eye could see, just the black—tree trunks, fallen logs and the crunch and powder that once was undergrowth—criss-crossed by the whites and greys of ash and exposed tracks, you can imagine what happened to many of my animal neighbours. As our little family was still living in the tent, which we did for fifteen months, maybe you can also imagine how scary that whole event was.

For weeks after the fires were extinguished by rain, we would hear mighty burnt-out trees give up their last hold and crash to the ground, often in the still of the night, so their falls echoed along the ridges and across the valleys like continuing death knells. As indeed they were for the many tree-dwelling creatures caught by a fast-moving and tree-crowning fire. Koalas, for example, do not cope with such an inferno.

When one big tree, burnt hollow and fragile, fell beside the track a few days after the fire, half-burying itself in the dirt and ash, it ejected a tiny creature that had apparently survived the fire, the loss of its mother, and thus sustenance since, and the fall.

Like Tom Thumb, it was no bigger than the adult human digit to which it clung with surprising strength. It was amazing that we had even noticed this mini-marsupial on the ground. A friend tried to feed it with an eyedropper and honeyed water, but it only lasted a few days.

By the way its little tail curved to hold the thumb, we thought it might have been an Eastern Pygmy Possum, young, but fully furred. This was not an animal I’d normally see, because of its small size and nocturnal habits. Now I don’t think it was, as the tail was too short, but have no better idea what it might have grown up to be. We didn’t find its family: they may have fallen out earlier, in the panic of the heat and smoke, and been incinerated to nothingness.

The charred ground soon became eerily strewn with the white bones of wallabies and smaller animals as their burnt-black hides fell away. Perhaps the surviving birds of prey, able to fly higher and escape, benefited from this mass barbecue, as well as helping to clean up, removing the smell of death that was very strong for a time.

One other animal that I have never seen before or after that fire was a wombat, although an old fellow had told me he’d seen a wombat or two, decades ago, way out in what is now a dedicated wilderness area.

Nor have I ever seen the distinctively rectangular wombat dung here, or found a wombat burrow. Whenever I’ve seen the latter in the past, in sandy country far from here, they were very obvious. We had a veritable wombat city on our previous bush block, near Merriwa. You couldn’t miss seeing the holes—unless you’d fallen in one first. I used to worry about the kids disappearing down them, as such burrows can be up to 20 metres long!

The wombats there kept to their trails no matter what petty human structures, like fences, were erected in their way. You’d be an idiot to build your house over a track belonging to one of these furry bulldozers, weighing about 40 kilograms when grown.

That was where I got to know wombats— Vombatus ursinus : sounds like a bad actor doing a German accent, but in Latin the ‘ursinus’ bit means bear-like. These quaint, lumbering characters are more closely related to koala ‘bears’ than to any other marsupial, and probably shared an ancestor about 25 million years ago.

Of course neither of them is a bear, and they live in totally different ways from each other, but they each have a backwards-opening pouch containing only two nipples, a tail so short as to be negligible, and certain internal similarities, such as digestive features, that set them apart from other marsupials.

My books tell me these ‘Common Wombats’ do inhabit forested mountains, and there are certainly plenty of native grasses and sedges here for them to eat, but because my own experiences with them have been limited to sandy areas, I wouldn’t have thought my rocky ridges an appealing habitat, powerful diggers though wombats are.

Yet the day after that fire went through, I saw a blocky black animal trundling purposefully down the small ridge opposite our house clearing. I was incredulous, but it was unmistakably a wombat, even though it was the wrong colour. No other marsupial has that solid shape, with the distinctive flattened battering ram of a head, the flat rump and short legs.

And colour no longer counted, as most of the living animals we saw had charred fur and would have been blackened anyway from their sooty environment. We few humans certainly were.

Where had this one wombat come from and where was it going? They are solitary animals, but in my post-disaster zone this one seemed tragically so, perforce rather than by choice. Since there must be very few around here, I wondered if any others had lived. Would this dark and determined survivor find a mate when the time came?

I could only hope so.

REDNECK BOYS

Last year the country was given many extreme displays of how chaotic our climate has already become. After weeks of rain here, the sun finally remembered how to shine. Glad to be rid of that relentlessly grey sky and sleety rain, the animals came out to make the most of the warmth. A sodden fur coat can’t be all that comfortable.

I saw a small gang of young male Red-necked Wallabies basking on the grass just outside my house yard, so I edged up to the fence for closer scrutiny. They did look up, but were too sun-drowsed to bother about me, and eyelids drooped sleepily again.

They’re an attractive wallaby, comprising my biggest population of hoppy marsupials. Their soft fur is subtly coloured in greys and reddish browns, with smart black trim in well-chosen places—perfect camouflage in my tawny tussock-floored and bracken-studded forest. The small dark front paws are often held poised and loose, sometimes crossed, so they look like the neat gloved hands of shy schoolgirls.

On that occasion I could see more of their white to pale-grey undersides, for many of them were propped, leaning further back on the base of their tails than usual, to allow maximum sun on their bellies. From the looks on their faces it was bliss.

At less relaxed times, these young wallaby males front up to each other with typical teenage bluff and bravado, to practise for the challenges ahead. They often play at fighting.

It looks as if they are trying to cuff each other about the head, front paws outstretched while bending their own heads right back to avoid being cuffed, but they are actually only trying to hold off the opponent. Their necks are very exposed at such times, but perhaps they never use the claws on their front paws for anything more aggressive than scratching fleas.

Their real fighting method is kickboxing, but since they still can’t balance solely on their tails, which they need to do if they want to use their big back legs to jump up and kick forward at their opponent’s vulnerable abdomen, as the grown-ups do, they’re always falling over, looking foolish rather than impressive.

Apart from their more-muscled build and larger size, it’s easy to pick the males. Their testicles hang precariously low, and descend even lower when they’re aroused. I know this not because I’ve been pruriently spying on them, but because they aren’t at all shy about their courtship. In fact they’re extremely voluble and active and there’s no way I could miss it, even from my verandah.

When a female is on heat she may have just one suitor, but more often I see up to six very keen males chasing her in a grunting competitive pack, all trying to get in the lead so as to be first to sidle up to her when she stops for breath, and attempt to win her favours.

There’s no forcing. The nonchalant female is in charge; they stop when she does, don’t try to head her off, take off again when she does. Their courtship appears quite gentle—cheek-to-cheek rubbing, a little sniffing towards the general area of the desired destination if she allows it, much eager sideways tail swishing on the male’s part, like the wagging of a dog’s tail. His excitement is clear, not only from the restless tail, but also from his very pink protruding penis, thin and curving upwards, like a new moon, and the way his balls are hanging so low, on strings it seems, like Maori poi balls. The equipment stays at the ready the whole time, long before any prospect of success.

Given that the chase takes them crashing through fences, over fallen branches, tall blady grass and tough tussocks and even tougher clumps of Lomandra and Dianella at breakneck speed, I wince involuntarily as I watch. I imagine a bloke would wince even more.

RED-BELLIED SQUATTERS

Last summer temperatures went see-sawing between 13 and 30 degrees, sometimes in the same day. My son Sam brought his family down from Lennox Head, on the warm far north coast of New South Wales, to stay for a week in late January. They came with swimmers and shorts, jeans and singlet tops. I had to unearth winter sweaters and even beanies and mittens for them to borrow. Naturally the day they left it was as hot and sunny as a proper summer’s day.

To prepare for their visit I’d been mowing and pruning like mad, not because I’m house-and-garden proud, but to remove snake havens. Edging borders were ruthlessly dispatched; ground-sweeping bushes were up-trimmed. For I’d seen more Red-bellied Black Snakes lately than in the last 30 years put together. They weren’t passing through my yard; clapping, stamping or hosing hadn’t made them move on as it used to. It seems they’d taken up residence, and I finally discovered where—and why.

My vegie garden is a netted enclosure, with weed mat laid under and around the netting, a wishful kikuyu grass barrier. Weed mat is woven, black and shiny; a rolled edge of it looks remarkably like a black snake. I’d gradually learnt to calm my heart’s leap, confident that the textured blackness spotted out of the corner of my eye was not a snake.

Hence on that memorable day in December, when as usual I was kneeling and weeding, delving gloveless into dense plantings, my mind took a few seconds to over-rule this and look twice—and then a few more seconds to accept the fact. Snake, not weed mat—and only half a metre away.

Heart thumping, I backed out the open gateway; the snake slid through the netting and disappeared into the lush growth beneath the hop vine. It didn’t reappear on the other side, on the open grass where I wanted to see it, on its way out of my house yard. Oh-oh.

I manage here pretty well most of the time, but this was the sort of situation when I feel inadequate for my Mountain life: scared and alone and useless! I retreated to the cabin and made a coffee to help me calm down enough to consider my options; I didn’t come up with any but observance and avoidance.

When I crept warily back, I saw what I assumed was the same snake, now stretched out on the warm dirt between my tomato plants. Raising its head, it seemed to ooze effortlessly through the netting and over into the adjoining compost heap, from which I’d been pulling kikuyu runners the day before. Barehanded.

Then I spotted another one, shiny black S-shaping its way across the lawn. Okay, I had two: a resident couple perhaps?

For the next week, until my snake-loving friend could come and relocate them to the national park—and rescue me—I was on high alert, wearing gumboots whenever I left the verandah, eyes flicking left, right, near, far. And forget the homegrown vegetables!

When my friend came, he gently turned the compost with his metal crook, a long rod with a wide semi-circular hook on the end, while I watched from a distance. He found one, caught it in his crook, lifted it high enough to seize with his gloved hand in the right spot—not the neck as I’d imagined, but above the anus, he tells me, though of course you’d have to know where that is on a creature that to me seems one continuum from head to tail. It doesn’t have a distinct neck either, as the head is quite small, unlike a python for example, whose head is noticeably wider and flattened. That’s one reason why these can fit through my netting.

Whew! He got it. This looked easy.

Yet in the instant before he moved to drop it into the plastic drum—he standing in the compost heap, the snake’s long shining body writhing beside his leg—behind him I saw another mass of red and black loops gleaming in a kind of rolling eruption, uncoiling from the partly decomposed heap which now appeared to be seething with snakes.

Indiana Jones-type nightmares of snake-filled pits rushed into my head. The snake handler himself was admirably cool, uttering just one minor four-letter word before he secured the first snake and put the lid on the bucket, while the other one, or two, or three, got away.

Over two visits in the next few weeks, he caught and relocated four Red-bellied Black Snakes, missing one small one. Watching him made me realise that they were as timid as he’d insisted. Although they are very venomous, capable of harming or killing a person, they rarely deliver that venom, as they rarely bite. Their instinct is to hide when under threat, not to attack. Sometimes when he released them from their confinement, one would rear up and flatten its head like a cobra, but it seemed like a brief perfunctory bluster—‘You’d better not try that again!’—before it slid away into cover. I’m told that’s usual. It certainly worked as a deterrent for me.

My friend admires them, their sinuous and efficient way of moving, their fabulous honeycomb scale patterns; he offers them respect but not fear. He’s been called to remove snakes from all sorts of odd places, such as offices, which is the sort of situation when they might panic and bite, because cornered. Consequently he advised me to make a summer barrier for my doorway from the verandah.

It had never crossed my mind to be concerned about snakes climbing the four timber steps and slithering over the rough gappy decking into my house—there to be accidentally cornered and panicked! I swiftly made and installed a slide-down Masonite barrier, above knee-height, which made access a bit awkward as I had to hop over it, but I preferred that to imagining snakes hiding under beds and behind cupboards.

He explained that the tropical wet and the warmth of the season had encouraged them, but then the abrupt cold spells had sent them seeking the compost’s heat. They didn’t know what season they were in. I wonder how they’ll interpret signals for breeding or hibernating amidst such climatic confusion, and whether they’ll have been able to eat enough to see them though the months of hibernation.

They like to be near water, as frogs are a favourite food, and the little dam below the house yard would offer them a guaranteed ongoing smorgasbord. So I understand why they want to hang about near there; I just want them to leave my yard out of the accommodation options.

But at last I had my confidence and my vegie garden back: I moved my compost into closed worm bins, pulled up the weed mat, and have started to run aviary netting, too fine for snakes to get through, around the bottom of the fence. To attempt to stop the kikuyu runners I have instead dug a spade-deep and hoe-width trench around the outside and am filling it with gravel. I may also relocate my dense strawberry bed and the jungle of my rhubarb—in the interests of greater visibility and my own peace of mind.

I’ve since seen the snake that got away. It was lazing in my orchard and had grown quite a lot bigger—unless it was another snake altogether. Now that I know they have about twenty live young at a time, that wouldn’t be surprising. This was in autumn, when it was as hot as it should have been in summer. I was wishing winter would hurry up—assuming we got such a season. Perhaps there’ll be no safely snakeless season anymore.

In fact if the snakes can’t sort out the seasons, and we don’t get serious about sorting out global warming, the future will be very uncertain for their survival. As it will be for lots of other creatures, including us.

ROSIES ARE RED

A wet day on the Mountain, the rain cold and lashing and miserable-making. From my desk window the autumn leaves of the verandah vines were dull shadows of themselves, ochre rather than gold, without their sunny backlighting.

Then a flash of rich red refocused the scene. A Crimson Rosella had landed on the birdfeeder there and was skulking amongst the dripping leaves, pecking at sodden sunflower seed husks and keeping a watchful eye out for a currawong or magpie. I put out a handful of feed only occasionally, and at random, to keep them interested in including my verandah on their food-source check run, but not often enough to make them dependent.

The rosella flew off when a strong gust sent a cane chair flat on its face and loudly skittering along the boards. When the rain stopped, it, or a cousin, came back, less startlingly exotic a contrast now as the vine reclaimed a little of its colour with the increasing light.

I smiled at the quaint and clever way this rosella perched on one leg, clawed foot clinging to the narrow rim, and used the other as a hand, daintily holding the sunflower seed and raising it to its curved beak to nibble. Its head was cocked on one side for ease of feeding, but also to watch me.

‘What’s she up to now?’ its intelligent eye led me to imagine it was thinking.

These ‘rosies’ are my most common parrot, in the sense of most often seen—and uncommonly beautiful—a bright rich red, with blue cheeks and underwings and tail, and striking wings of black scallops edged with red. The young are mostly green.

Crimson Rosellas are my flying jewels, my singing stars. For, sequined at will amongst their repertoire of squawks and chatter, they have a sweet song, all musical trills and whistles. Good looks and a voice. Aren’t they lucky? Aren’t I?

There are times when they are quiet, with hardly a sound beyond a mutter or two, because it’s harvest time. When the predominant native grass in my ‘lawn’ is seeding, my yard is taken over by a purposeful band of Crimson Rosellas. They proceed en masse up the slope, through thin grass stalks as tall as themselves. Standing on one leg, each parrot daintily grasps a seedhead stem with the claw of the other, bends it towards its beak and neatly strips it, rather as we’d munch sideways along a cob of corn.

The harvest appears organised and amicable: no crossing of territory, no debate about personal patches, not one squawk of protest. It’s a silent harvest, though highly visible, as the richness of their red and blue plumage turns my plain yard into a moving tapestry.

A cleared yard isn’t a natural setting, but you’d think such brightly coloured birds would also seem out of place in my eucalypt forests. It’s only when I see them perched up there in the branches, amongst the dangling mops of gumleaves, that I realise how much red and purple there is in the apparently green foliage, how much blue and mauve in the greys and browns of the smooth-barked trunks and branches. And because they’re up so high, against the sky they are often in silhouette; only shape and sound give them away.

They belong.

Australia is rich in parrots of many sizes and colours. Many people are most familiar with the multi-coloured one that Arnott’s Biscuits made their logo in another century and a very different Australia. I always assumed that was supposed to be an Eastern Rosella, common in more open country than mine, such as Newcastle, where Mr Arnott began baking his biscuits in 1865.

However, I’ve learnt that this parrot was actually drawn from a caged Mexican one that Mr Arnott had been given, Newcastle being a seafaring port. I don’t suppose it matters that a foreign parrot became an Aussie icon, given that Arnott’s has been owned by an American company for over a decade now. Nothing’s sacred in a global economy, not even SAO biscuits!

AQUATIC JEWELS

When the waterlilies are blooming on my small dam, their large circular leaves are so abundant that they overlap, curling up at their edges. There are two green floating islands of them, one bearing lotus-like cups of pale pink, the other of pale lemon, almost white.

Since these aquatic plants had all but disappeared in the drought, I was eager to have a closer look at their new burst of life this season. And it is Life with a capital ‘L’, for the waterlily rafts host a multitude of fauna. Not Thumbelina, the miniature girl left on one in the fairy story, but many creatures just as pretty.

Two tiny pointed faces disappeared under the surface of the water as I approached. All that had been exposed were their protruding eyes, like those of frogs, and their nostrils. They are refugees, two of the Eastern Long-necked Tortoises individually rescued from being squashed on the tarred road closer to town, and relocated here. As even experts have trouble sexing a tortoise, I don’t know if I have any mating couples and hence a growing colony.

I was always taught that tortoises live in fresh water, turtles live in the sea, but I’ve just discovered that this has been changed, so that the term ‘tortoise’ only refers to purely land-dwelling ones. So Australia no longer has any real tortoises, as ours all need water. Name changes take a while to come into common usage: they will have to bear both old and new in the interim.

These little Eastern Long-necked Turtles or Tortoises get called Eastern Snake-neck Turtles or Tortoises as well, because their necks are as long as their bodies. They are also called ‘Stinkers’, and you’ll quickly find out why if you ever pick one up on the road when it’s off looking for a new home: it’s the turtle’s defence mechanism when it’s frightened, and it’s very effective! The other trick it has is to hide its neck and head under the shell, by twisting sideways. Or if annoyed, it might bite.

Like snakes, they eat frogs, and tadpoles. My mind boggles at the number of frogs I’d have in this dam if there were no predators. On this visit, I could easily see hundreds of tadpoles dangling from the water surface, of several types, and all fat and healthy. Some of the smaller ones already had legs sprouting from their translucent brown sides.

In the middle of the lily pads I spotted a tiny jewel of a frog. Dainty, brilliantly costumed in a white cravat and shirtfront under his neat suit of light green, a fit and princely frog groom for Thumbelina should she appear, banishing any image of an ugly, slimy thing at which she’d shudder.

What I have always called ‘water boatmen’ lightly rowed their skinny insect selves across the dam, trailing ripples that criss-crossed as they negotiated this busy waterway. I have now learnt that these are actually ‘backswimmers’ who swim upside-down just near the surface, holding a bubble of air to breathe from. The real water boatmen prefer the bottom of the pond or dam, look more like beetles with oars, and swim right-way up. But they both have four long fringed rear legs for rowing and two short front legs for paddling themselves along.

The online Buglopedia also told me that there are aquatic insects called ‘water striders’ and ‘water treaders’!

Other insects sat motionless on the lily pads, rather than working the water. A most strangely shaped one turned out to be a ‘water scorpion’ or ‘needle bug’, and the long thin tail I’d noted, reminiscent of land scorpions, was actually a respiratory siphon. Air bubbles, air siphons: such varied and clever designs for breathing under water.

For sheer beauty, I most admired the brilliant blue- or red-patterned and delicately jointed stick creatures, with fragile gauze wings, that were perched rigidly solo on lily leaves or curved in pairs on reed stems. Dragonflies. Were these incredible creations mating? It seemed so, as they often fly in tandem like that as part of the mating ritual—the male gripping the female around the back of her head, using claspers at the end of his body. Like going on a joint freefall drop with your partner: trust is all.

The spectacular-looking dragonflies are exceptional flyers, doing aerial sweeps to patrol for insects. As they fly, they catch their prey with their legs, which are edged with minute bristles like mini-garden rakes.

I came inside to refer to my old pond life book, to be able to say with authority what the strange dam inhabitants were, but like so many other books, I must have lent it out long ago and forgotten to whom. Being an hour and a half’s drive from the library, I had to resort to the Internet, but I’d always prefer a book.

The frog I could look up properly, flipping from one coloured picture to another to compare, checking out distribution maps, referring to the old State Forests environmental impact statement list of species found in this area. I think it’s an Eastern Dwarf Tree Frog. I am not happy about the ‘Dwarf’: sounds too clumsy for my little fellow. ‘Elf’ would be more delicately appropriate, and he is dressed in elfin green of the brightest new-leaf shade. I like to know the proper term, but privately, he’ll remain my small dam princeling—even though the book says he’s common!

A new water feature like a pond or a dam soon develops from a bare clay hole into such a different world, with its own special ecology, its aquatic weeds and rushes and wildlife. How they all find out about it or get there is a mystery to me; I’m just grateful they do.

WILD CHILD DAY CARE

Building my house yard netting fence was essential to keep the wild creatures out, I thought. They had other ideas.

The quoll first decided it was a safe nocturnal playpen for her kids, so they covered the night shift until the baby magpie got dropped off. Each year I get at least one of these, and they’ve all been whingers.

Last summer’s magpie junior was no exception.

‘Wah! Wah! Wah!’ he whined, non stop, as he waddled about the lawn. One bird book describes the noise as ‘almost continuous squawking’. I take issue only with the ‘almost’. He’d be momentarily distracted by a hose or a piece of poly pipe that he’d try to extract from the ground, but then the whining would resume. Mum would drop in often to check on him and shut him up with a worm or two, then fly off, with him clumsily trying to follow, whingeing even louder.

When he outgrew his mother and the nest, but was still wearing the mottled greyish plumage of the young, he followed her in short bursts of flight round the yard. On the ground he loomed over her, ever asking, ‘What’s for dinner? When’s dinner ready?’ He was well able to feed himself, but preferred the readymade meals from Mum.

It reminded me of when my son was a teenager: he’d stand staring into our full fridge—of course annoyingly holding the door open—and complain, ‘There’s nothing to eat!’ meaning nothing assembled for him to seize and scoff, just all the ingredients. As fruit was not the sort of takeaway he had in mind and he professed not to like leftovers, he had a hard life growing to the muscular six-foot-something man he eventually became.

I bet the magpie mum can’t wait until her lad is two, which is the accepted age to kick him out of the family. Peace and quiet at last.

She’d be especially exhausted because female magpies have to do all the work: find the site, build the nest, incubate the eggs and feed the young. Her snappy songbird partner will bring her a morsel or two when she’s nest-bound, but that’s it. The token washing of the dishes. Those show ponies are all the same!

While the magpie junior was still in care, the Crimson Rosellas turned up, and for a week the lawn and lower branches were bedecked with young ones, still green-backed for camouflage and still totally ignorant of the melodic calls of their parents. With heads bobbing and beaks open, all they produced was a constant rusty chorus of ‘N-y-air, n-y-air, n-y-air!’

But the slowest developers are the kookaburra kids. In season, I can have many young ones about, sitting in groups from three to six, turning every raised object in the garden into totem poles, and all muttering. They have a totally flat delivery and are hopeless at learning the words, beyond a creaky ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah...’

Listening to their progress is painful as they move relentlessly throughout the next trainee stage, ‘Oo-wah, oo-wah, oo-wah! Oo-wah, oo-wah, oo-wah!’ This seems to last a month, despite plentiful demonstrations from parents and relatives of how to get all the rises and falls of the proper song right.

Then one year I became aware of the King Parrots using the facilities too. Seeking the source of a single scratchy repeated note, like a stuck machine that needed oiling, I found two of them in a small tree in the orchard. The young one’s head was still green like the mother’s, not yet the vivid scarlet of a male, if that’s what he was. Leaning forward, beak open, he was emitting that one note without a break.

Perhaps they were just visiting, but I suspect she was trying to get rid of the kid, drop him off so she could have a brief respite from his relentless demands. Only he wasn’t having any of that and kept following her from branch to branch. She gave up; some kids just don’t take to day care.

I heard him continuing the carry-on further up the hill.

Perhaps the different species are checking out the playpen for next season, since, also for the first time, I had a visit from a Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo mother and child. I get groups of these big cockatoos in damp weather, but this time there were just two of them, sitting in the branches of the large stringy-bark uphill from the toilet.

Set amongst the rocks at the foot of this stringy-bark I keep an upturned triple-decker old ceramic insulator full of water, so thirsty birds there often provide a little entertainment and aid contemplation for toilet-sitters. The toilet deliberately has no door; it is fully open on its eastern face, as little weather comes from that direction, and the morning sun is pleasant on bare knees in winter. Privacy is one of the great benefits of not living in suburbia; there’s no one to peep over my fence.

These two cockatoos didn’t look much different from each other, dark brownish-black, with lemon cheek patches and tail bands, but I recognised that forward lean of the body, that whining tone. One of them had to be a young one, and it sounded like he was sawing down the tree without taking a breath.

I’ve just realised that I keep assuming these demanding young birds are masculine. As I wouldn’t want to be accused of sexism, let’s say it’s just a convenience: ‘it’ sounds too impersonal, and ‘he or she’ is too unwieldy.

While the baby boom lasts, I greet the oft-given comment of how peaceful it must be up here with a short and bitter laugh. ‘Huh!’ I say, quoll spots passing before my eyes, and outside the juveniles start again, ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah...’

But once it’s over, the frogs quieten down and the wild-child rearing should be done for the season. One year I was thrilled to spot eight White-headed Pigeons fly up from the rainforest gully and land just outside my gate. I’d seen one or two before, but this was a rare sighting. Through the binoculars, one of them seemed a little greyer than the others’ strong white and iridescent black plumage.

As I noted the event in my bird book, I heard a noise at the low window. I turned. There on the sill was the greyish pigeon. A young one? I checked the yard. All the grown-ups were gone, so I assumed the word about the playpen had spread to the rainforest. Since I never saw the young pigeon again, it must have been only occasional care they were needing for that day.

Next year it was back to the regular enrolments, which are more than enough. I’d close the books except that you never know what unusual new mum might venture in. She could be an excitingly rare animal or bird—and her youngster just might be a quiet one.

A BATHFUL OF TADPOLES

I don’t have a bath for myself to use, as I still don’t have a bathroom. I do yearn for the relaxing luxury of one, and take advantage of friends’ tubs if I happen to have time when I visit, soaking and steaming in perfumed bubbly bliss, with a book and a glass of wine within reach. Unfortunately the indulgent pleasure is marred these days by my glasses fogging up, as I can’t read without them.

The only bathtub around here is outdoors, cold water only: it’s the ’50s-style toothpaste-green tub that serves as the horse trough in my yard. One day in late summer, after rain had caused it to overflow, I noticed it was full of tiny brown tadpoles. The water level is usually well below the rim, but some misguided frogs must have taken it for a pond in its brief overabundance, and made a joint deposit for the future.

Tadpoles conjure up primary school memories of jarfuls of the poor little prisoners on bread and water, as we watched legs grow and tails diminish. I was mostly fascinated by their transparency, by being able to see inside to what we called their stomachs but I suppose were intestines. And of course the end result was interesting too, in those squiggles of ‘waste matter’ that the nuns wouldn’t let us call ‘poo’.

I don’t know what the tadpoles in my tub were eating but the layer of poo in the bottom grew larger and so did the tadpoles. I couldn’t empty it out to clean as I normally would because that would have been frogicide. I made sure to keep it topped up with cool water on hot days so they didn’t stew, but I resisted putting in food for them in case it affected the water for the horses, who still had to drink from it when in the yard.

My dams are full of tadpoles so I guess the horses are used to them, but a tub doesn’t offer the same scope for the tadpoles to escape an in-sucking horse’s mouth. I assumed the horses would sieve out any inadvertent traveller. I thought of Jonah and the whale—same scale differential really.

Then one rainy day when it was too wet to let the horses in, I relented and tore a leaf of flat lavash bread into pieces, letting them flutter down into the tub like the scraps of a discarded love letter.

At first the tadpoles didn’t approach these strange pale papery objects that floated above them. Perhaps when these soften and disintegrate, I thought, they’ll get the idea that this is food, even if unlike anything ever seen in their tubby universe. As tadpoles have multiple rows of teeth, they shouldn’t have trouble with the actual eating of it.

Then one of the smallest nosed up to a scrap and began nibbling. Just like with humans, it’s the kids who are game to try new things, who work out how to deal with new technology.

By the time I got back with my camera, the bigger ones had caught on and in twos and threes were swimming about pushing a piece of flat bread in front of them. Some were underneath, wearing the scrap like a hat, while smarter ones wedged it against the side of the tub to attack it. But some still weren’t convinced. Luddites, I figured.

I thought they’d be Bleating Tree Frogs when they grew up. They’d add to the large population already in the little dam. In times of thunder and rain, their overwhelmingly loud chorus sounds as if it emanates from hundreds of big frogs, whereas they are quite small. And as only male frogs call, there are possibly thousands of frogs in there!

A few weeks later, the tadpoles appeared to have stopped growing, let alone changing into frogs. The tiny rear legs still hung unused. They could have put metamorphosing on hold until better times, as some frogs can, but whether by choice or not, I decided that lack of the right nutrition must be the reason for not progressing. I began catching them in a sieve, tipping them into a bucket and transferring them to a more normal habitat—the dam.

I was sorry not to have seen them change, but I’m sure they’re happier in their new home. But ... would the dam locals make them welcome, would they have any idea how to survive the predators after such a sensorially deprived childhood, would they even know what to eat, would the water be too dark and muddy for them after their peppermint green world? Had my enforced relocation sentenced them to death?

I couldn’t help but recall a clunky rhyme from my Infants teaching days, so if it’s rattling round in my head, sorry, but you’ll have to bear it too.

Little Tommy Tadpole began to weep and wail,

For little Tommy Tadpole had lost his little tail.

His mother did not know him as he sat upon a log,

For little Tommy Tadpole was Mr Thomas Frog.

Well, the five-year-olds thought it was cute.

SEEKING A MATE?

While I have frogs on my mind, I must tell you about the strangest frog encounter I’ve ever had.

On this particular day, I’d moved the food processor to the bench from its usual home on top of my little fridge, by the window. I was about to chop a small mountain of parsley and mint for tabbouli. A favourite salad of mine, it’s also ridiculously good for me, with those two vitamin- and mineral-packed fresh herbs making up its substance, for once behaving like greens instead of garnish. The double benefit always seems out of kilter with the way of the world, like being told lollies are good for you.

For the amount of tabbouli I make at a time, the food processor is the most efficient method. The cracked wheat, or burghul, was soaking; the spring onions and the herbs from my garden were washed and nearly dry, waiting in the colander; the lemons were picked and squeezed; the bottle of golden-green olive oil standing by. There was such a lot that I’d have to process the herbs in batches so they didn’t turn into a paste. I was ready to go.

The pusher part of my machine is hollow, quite deep, and beige, not transparent like the container itself. I don’t know why I looked into the pusher as I removed it to put the parsley in the chute; I don’t think I usually did. But sitting cramped down there at the bottom of the pusher was what looked like a large cream-coloured blob, staring up at me with two big dark eyes.

Not being able to see clearly without my glasses on, I squealed anyway. Whatever it was shouldn’t be in this indoor thing, this clean, kitchen-type non-animal-habitat plastic thing! Rushing it out to the brighter light of the verandah, I tipped it up. Nothing emerged. I tapped the base firmly and out plopped the occupant—a frog. A big one for here, sort of putty-coloured, with two fine black stripes running backwards from its eyes.

‘How the hell did you get in there?’ I asked. ‘And why?’

No doubt still in shock, the frog said nothing, took a few plops to the verandah edge and disappeared into the greenery.

From the photos and known distributions in my frog book, I think it may have been a Whistling Tree Frog. The description said that the call is ‘a loud whirring’.

The fanciful idea occurred to me that my frog was a female who’d heard my food processor whirring and, thinking it was a very virile male, hopped in through the open window one day. She’d waited until all was quiet again, sought her ideal mate in the now-dormant food processor—and got stuck in the dead-end pusher, unable to launch herself back up and out. As I didn’t know which day she might have come in, I didn’t know how long she’d been languishing in there.

Having been so seriously disappointed in love this time, I wondered if it was her first ‘crush’, and if, after that romantic adventure, she would be satisfied with a male of lesser whirring ability to fertilise her next batch of jellied eggs?

Was it love or lust? Aren’t they both subject to a blind rush, beyond rationality, objectivity, judgement, and often, self-control?

I’m told that the image of the object of first love, lost but forever enhanced and romanticised by time and wishful thinking, can spoil the chances of any subsequent suitor meeting such unrealistic standards. So for her sake I hope it was lust, which has different, less fanciful mechanisms for rekindling itself, driven by biological urges—like the need to reproduce the next generation of tadpoles.

POOLSIDE LOUNGERS

Apart from being frog and snake heaven, my little dam is a drinking hole for many who don’t even get their feet wet. It’s not far from my house, so I see a variety of animals there daily. The larger marsupials prop at the edge, lean forward and steadily siphon up water for a very long time, only glancing about occasionally. They rarely just fill up and leave, for they seem to like lolling on the grassy bank, sunning themselves by the pool.

While I have many Eastern Red-necked Wallabies, I share my place with small groups of other hoppy marsupials, or macropods, and it is at this dam where I most often see them.

Perhaps I should explain that all Australia’s main native hoppy creatures, like wallabies, wallaroos, kangaroos, potoroos, bettongs, pademelons, quokkas, etc., are macropods (macro = large, pod = foot) that is, they all have big hind feet, for hopping. These macropods are all vegetarians, or herbivores, mainly grass-eaters.

Macropods are but one branch of the larger, better known Aussie fauna family, the marsupials, who all give birth to tiny embryonic young, which is why most of them have pouches—so the under-developed babies can continue developing safely and warmly. Most of our other iconic animals, like the koala, the wombat or the quoll, to name but a few, are marsupials, but they aren’t macropods—no big back feet. The echidna and the platypus aren’t marsupials at all, but monotremes, because they lay soft-shelled eggs.

Under the wider-spread family tree, all these animals are mammals like us, rather than reptiles or birds. The criteria being that we are warm-blooded, feed our young on milk, and grow hair; well, we do on some bits and to varying degrees!

Amongst my macropod neighbours, the wallaroos are really hairy, but only a few come by here, usually a small family trio. Yet one male has been hanging about the little dam on his own lately. I wonder if he’s grown up and been asked to move out from that family group, a threat to Dad’s authority?

He doesn’t seem at all bothered by me, not even when I went up very close to the fence one day to make sure he wasn’t hurt. In fact he stretched out and went to sleep while I was there. He must have been raised around here to be so used to me and my behaviour.

It always amazes me that the animals can tell it’s me, whatever my clothes, which, unlike their coats, change often. Although, come to think of it, my Mountain clothes, mainly once black ‘good’ clothes faded to shades of licorice or charcoal, are all so stained and spotted with paint or oil or other unidentifiable relics of past jobs that the animals probably register them as my recognisable generic coat. But what about my head shape? I might be wearing my worn Akubra felt hat, for sun or rain protection, or a red beanie if it’s cold, or no hat at all (winter only), with my grey locks on show.

Or am I being patronising, not giving them credit for more intelligence, for having learnt to know my face? It took dumb me quite a while to be able to distinguish between the different macropod species here, let alone within each species.

This fellow is unmistakably a wallaroo, with his long shaggy fur, broader features and thickset body; he is not as black as the wallaroo males usually are in my region, while the females are pale grey. It will be interesting to see if he changes. The wallaroos like the rockier parts of my block: rougher country for rougher-looking marsupials, at least compared to the neatly groomed wallabies and kangaroos.

Later that same day I spotted a family of Eastern Grey Kangaroos sunbathing and snoozing at the same spot on the gently sloping rear bank. They used to be seen only higher up on my ridge, but since the last big fire a group of them hangs around here a lot.

They’re the macropod upper class—naturally grand, majestic in stature, the males as big as a pony, dauntingly powerful when they stand fully erect, chest out, muscular shoulders back. Lacking giraffes or elephants, these are the biggest native creatures I’m ever going to share with.

Kangaroos all have admirable carriage: straight backs and necks, heads held high as they bound across the paddock or through the trees. The males are handsome, and while the females are smaller, they retain the well-defined facial bone structure of the species; they never look like wallabies. In their dusky greyish-brown coats, paler front fur, black highlights of ears, nose and paws, and their large dark eyes, they are most elegant.

When the kangaroo family lies down, heads kept raised to see what’s doing, but relaxed, their long back legs languidly crossed, I am reminded of the bony yet muscular legs of ballerinas. Four or five of them stretched out like this cover a lot of the dam bank area.

This resort is obviously popular, for the food and drink, the water views and the entertainment of watching me go about my strange business in the house yard up the hill.

It’s very close to the bottom gate through which I put the horses out. I may then tie them up to the fence posts and feed them there. Even if I’m chastising Shari, the greedy little fat one, or calling the other horses to come before she eats all the carrots, the poolside loungers remain undisturbed at the noise. I warrant a brief interruption, a glance—Oh, it’s only her—and they resume grazing or dozing. Human or horse: just another animal.

Kangaroo young are as cute as the wallaby babies—big-eyed, fluffy, uncoordinated, high-spirited, given to twisting themselves back-to-front to scratch at fleas or ticks, or leaning back at an odd angle, looking as if they’ll overbalance at any minute, to scrabble at their tummy fur, or corkscrewing themselves vertically into the air, for the sheer joy of being young and alive.

Like the wallaby joeys, they appear to play at sparring with their mothers, who are very tolerant, literally turning the other cheek until they’ve had enough, when they give the annoying child a cuff over the head and move on. The joey shakes its head several times, as if to clear the stars it’s seeing, then catches her up to try it on again.

I am pleased that the kangaroos now ignore me almost as much as the wallabies do, if I move steadily. As I’m seeing several family groups now, not just one, I’d say they’re here to stay.

Good! That’s what this Refuge is for.

Last year, for the very first time, I saw a Swamp or Black Wallaby and her joey on the grassy rise visible from my kitchen window. Dark-chocolate velvety fur, small head, usually seen in the ferny forests on the shady southern side of my ridge. I assumed the drought was sending them foraging further afield. They eat bracken, so I hope they started on mine.

I saw them a few more times but they came no closer. Since then I have twice seen one at the little dam, so I am hoping it was the young one, who may have remained here when grown and independent, even though the weather is now the opposite—too wet! It would be wonderful if a family of Swamp Wallabies took up permanent refuge too.

I’ll learn more about these newer neighbours when they’re fully at ease with me, when they understand how this Refuge works. That is, they’re the occupants; I’m just the resident caretaker and security guard.

FREE TO GOOD HOME...

I should explain why I’m so frequently cranky with Shari, the barrel-shaped miniature pony, skewbald, white with splashes of chestnut. Other people find her attractive, with her thick shaggy mane and forelock and her tail almost sweeping the ground. Technically she’s my granddaughter Jessie’s horse, but useless to her or anyone else in my opinion, as she’s unnatural, a bonsai’d animal. That’s not Shari’s fault, nor why I dislike her; that’s due to her personality.

She’s stubborn, greedy, cunning and incorrigible.

If I let her into the house yard with the other horses to eat the kikuyu grass, she causes havoc. So I no longer let her in, and she stands at the fence peering through the netting reproachfully.

You see, she likes to straddle small trees or shrubs and scratch her tummy by rubbing back and forth, or back up to bigger shrubs and scratch her fat rump. Consequently she breaks many twigs and branches, so the shrubs are lopsided, and she snaps small trees in half.

She seems to prefer my especially precious ones, like the bushy young lemon myrtle that had bloomed for the first time—just before she broke several branches. I yelled and shooed her off. An hour later she was back. I ran towards her, flailing my arms—and swearing—but too late; she had broken all but a third of its branches. Bushy no longer. I did save and dry the leaves from the broken branches, for tea, but the little tree had hardly been of a size to harvest!

Shari also finds my metre-high orchard sprinklers handy to scratch her face on, and breaks their moving parts. If I put stakes around anything, she rubs against those and breaks them.

And she has Houdini abilities.

The little wretch gets through my rainforest gully regeneration area fences. She puts her front feet over the bottom wire and then wriggles and pushes her fat body through, spreading the wires and loosening the posts to the point of eventually lifting them clear out of the ground. If there’s a join anywhere along the bottom wire run, her pushing eventually snaps it (I admit I don’t do great joins).

The four-strand plain wire fence was designed to keep horses out, the timber and steel posts to resist sideways pushing, not from underneath. But then Shari’s not really a horse.

Having broken the bottom run of much of my boundary fence, she goes in and out at her leisure, including onto the track, but as passers-by are rare, there’s little chance of her being stolen. And anyway I’d not know what had happened and would probably spend fruitless days searching in case she’d had an accident. So even in her absence she’d be a pest!

I tried to give her away to a home with better fences and less for her to damage. This family had small boys to love her and a pony her size to be her friend. They led her back to their place on the Friday, then spent the better part of the weekend retrieving her after she escaped twice, through electric fences, and wire fences far more tightly and closely strung than mine. The last time they caught her she was halfway back here.

Having been away that weekend on an activist camp, I returned on Sunday night, tired and a little dispirited at the environmental challenges ahead. The next morning I got up later than usual, and far from alert. From the verandah I could see the horses patiently waiting at the gate. Then I literally rubbed my eyes, for I could also see a low splash of brown and white through the netting. Bloody Shari!

Spotting her halter and lead rope on a verandah chair, I rang the family. They were very sorry she hadn’t stayed; the little boys had cried; they’d all fallen for her cute looks. Their mother said, ‘She’s the sort of animal Walt Disney would make a movie about. I kept waiting for her to say something!’

I’m stuck with her. No fence can keep her in. And no amount of appeals from her big brown eyes, peeping up at me through her long lashes and thick fringe, will make me think she is anything other than a nuisance.

THE GUZZLER

About ten years ago, before my partner put a grease trap on our kitchen drainpipe outlet, one of my wild neighbours discovered the culinary delights of our plate smears. After the scrapings had gone into our compost bucket, the hot washing-up water still managed to deliver such minute treats as traces of egg yolk or pasta sauce or small threads of melted cheese. Birds used to come and peck at these as they dried on the grass, but once their bigger neighbour claimed the scavenging rights, they didn’t get a look in.

One night, reading at the kitchen table (actually the ‘everything’ table, as it’s the only one), we heard noises: slurp, slurp, guzzle, guzzle, snuffle, snuffle ... and so on. Unmistakable sounds of someone having dinner and enjoying it immensely. Grabbing a torch, we went out to see who was, and where, and eating what.

We tracked the noises down to the sink outlet pipe, where my torch beam showed a plump brown furry creature, its back to us and its head almost hidden in the pipe end. The noises continued. We gingerly skirted widely around and above it to see better, but not alarm it. It briefly turned its head towards us, or the light, then resumed. Slurp, slurp, guzzle, guzzle, snuffle, snuffle...

Food came before fear with this one. As it didn’t seem bothered by us, I ventured closer to observe its features so I could then race inside to identify it in my Australian mammals book.

Fur—brown, quite coarse-looking; ears—small; eyes—round black dots; nose—long and pointy, pink tip; tail—apparently nonexistent. It was much bigger than a bush rat, and the back feet were long; I thought of what used to be called rat-kangaroos, like the Long-nosed Potoroo, a vulnerable species which I knew others had seen in these mountains. Oh please let it be something special like that!

We left the guzzler to continue its dinner while I looked it up. No, the head shape was totally wrong for a Long-nosed Potoroo; our critter’s face most resembled a Long- footed Potoroo, but that poor fellow was now rare and only ever seen far, far south of here, in Victoria. And they both had long tails.

After leafing through the whole book, I decided this must be a bandicoot, a Northern Brown Bandicoot, but what about the tail? Depending on its sex, it ought to have a tail length of between 130–170 millimetres. Perhaps in the dark we just couldn’t see it? No way to check now, as dinner was over and the guzzler gone.

But our place had got onto the top ten list and the abbreviated bandicoot returned most nights for several weeks. I could get as close as 10 centimetres away, even talking at normal levels to my partner, and it did not flinch. We thought it might be deaf, for if it actually looked at us, saw us away from the torchlight, it did scuttle off.

So I had plenty of opportunity to search for that tail, and there simply wasn’t one. Since no creature in my book fitted such criteria, I guessed it must have lost its original tail to a predator. This was either a case of a missing tail, or else it was a species not yet noted by anyone anywhere!

We grew to expect the evening sounds as the guzzler arrived for dinner: slurp, slurp, guzzle, guzzle, snuffle, snuffle ... yum, yum! Bandicoots being fairly omnivorous—from spiders and worms to berries and seeds—it wouldn’t have minded what was on the menu.

But even if well fed, being damaged, tail-less and possibly deaf must have made our bandicoot an easy prey, for it suddenly came no more. Assuming it would be around forever, and because it was always dark when we saw it, I hadn’t taken a photo, which I now regret.

Bandicoots are the only close relatives of the bilby, which is a sort of long-eared, long-legged, slender, soft-furred bandicoot. Because a bilby looks cute and is seriously endangered, it’s become a symbol for our many endangered animals, with the Easter Bilby now a chocolate alternative to the Easter Bunny.

There used to be two species of bilby: the Lesser Bilby and the Greater Bilby. The Lesser is even less now, because they are all gone, forever. The delicate and graceful Pig-footed Bandicoot, also now extinct, looked very like a bilby.

Bandicoots don’t dig burrows like bilbies do—not that such hidey-holes have saved them from harm. Although once common over the whole drier three-quarters of Australia, bilbies are now only found in certain deserts and small pockets.

When I was a child, growing up on a coastal hinterland farm, bandicoots were the only native mammal I ever saw. My parents simply considered them pests, on the same level as mice, because they dug holes in the lawn. We saw them hurry off into the darkness when we ventured to the outdoor loo. It didn’t occur to me that they were the only survivors of what must have been a rich, multi-layered world of animals before most of the bush there was cleared for orchards and market gardens.

The only other native animals of which I was then aware, the Redbellied Black Snakes, the leeches and the ticks, were also pests—nasty ones. I had no concept of conservation or biodiversity, of the inherent value and ecological links of the natural world. I knew I preferred the remnant patch of bush by the creek, but that was partly aesthetics and partly the secret shelter and mystery it offered for a child’s fantasies.

But now I treasure each instance of that biodiversity in my wildlife refuge. If there’s one member of a species here, there are probably others—like my bandicoot, but hopefully with tails and hearing intact.

There are other instances of damaged animals taking deeper refuge, closer to the house. A possum once wandered around here in daylight for about a week. Possums don’t do that; they are nocturnal, seeing well only at night. Assuming it was blind, I put out fruit, which it ate, but it also seemed confused, as would be natural. It must have been blinded recently or it couldn’t have lived to that size and age.

Quolls eat possums, and this one would have been easy pickings. It disappeared.

Life’s tough in the real world here.

JACKY DRAGON

The cutest creatures here, in my opinion, are the Jacky Lizards. Spade-shaped heads always up and bright eyes on the alert, they are seen either as fixed statues or fast-moving flashes.

Their elegantly patterned camouflage coat—taupe and brown, grey and white—mimics lichen-dappled bark or rocks. They have the most delicate feet and toes, especially the elongated rear ones, and a ridged spine like a small dragon, leading to a tail that narrows to a fine point.

But it’s their perky attitude that I find most appealing. Naturally, being lizards and thus cold-blooded, they love to sunbake. I suppose there are lots of them here, all looking the same but only seen individually, yet I feel as if it’s just the one, my little mate, whom it won’t surprise you to hear that I call Jacky.

About 20 centimetres long in total, he chooses exposed spots for sun-soaking, like my steps or my woodheap cover or my favourite round boulder in the garden. I’m always passing close by and he usually doesn’t take flight. ‘Hey, Jacky!’ I call, or ‘Hello, little one!’

When he does run, he elevates himself like a Citroën to his highest leg position, holding his tail rigidly straight out behind him. I read that, when cornered, the Jacky Lizard will puff up and open its mouth to display a bright orange interior, but my Jacky hasn’t done that yet. Well, I wouldn’t knowingly corner him, so I probably won’t see him do it; just as he probably won’t see me lose my temper, a behaviour of which I am capable if required. Actually he might; for example, if the brushcutter won’t start, despite my doing everything by the book and still missing that elusive compression point I keep being told about.

Recently I saw Jacky on a chimney. Not my chimney, which isn’t a ‘real’ one, just a stainless steel flue from a slow combustion heater, but the stone and cement one on the little cabin my sisters and I made for my dad’s last resting place. Jacky was right at the top of this circular tower, his head above it, as if on lookout duty, his tail draped around it and his muscular little legs gripping it tightly.

My dad would think it a good joke to have a miniature dragon guarding him.

As usual, Jacky ignored my approach, but his eyes followed me. I went for the camera and when I returned he had moved around the chimney to face where I’d been. I was walking about to get a good shot, but he would not change position when I was there. He must have thought he was so well camouflaged that if he kept still I wouldn’t notice him.

As if a dragon on a chimney is normal!

Or perhaps it’s just that he knows I won’t harm him?

MACROPOD MOTHERS’ CLUB

Many groups of wallabies graze around the clearing in which my house yard is sited. It’s rare not to see several wallabies at any given time, at the very least a mum with an older joey in tow. As they appear quite uninhibited by my presence, I am given the opportunity to be a fascinated voyeur of macropod social and family lives, which are very busy indeed.

Like that of all macropods, a wallaby’s birth and child-care system is incredibly complex. Wallabies have four teats inside their pouch, but only give birth to one young at a time. The females must be quite keen on this courtship business, despite their nonchalant demeanour, because they are ready for sex soon after the birth, and the mating usually leads to a fertilised egg.

The newborn’s suckling sends a pause signal to that new egg, in which state it remains until a few weeks before the suckling joey is ready to vacate the pouch for good, which is after about ten months of joyriding.

Rather like a full city car park, where the entry gate doesn’t open until a space is newly vacant, only then does the egg resume its development. Pregnancy lasts three to five weeks, and while that one’s growing, the evicted joey is being weaned, at arm’s length, so to speak.

It’s a miracle how the newborn gets to the pouch: only about 25 millimetres long, it looks as unformed as the very early human embryos we see in ultrasound pictures. This naked pink ‘grub’ has nubs of forelimbs, and a sense of smell apparently, and somehow works it way up the mother’s tummy fur and into the pouch, where it latches on to a teat and doesn’t let go for six months. The teat functions rather like an umbilical cord, because from its sustenance the baby continues to develop as if it were in a womb.

Even with a new one in the pouch, the mother still lets the older joey stick its head in and suckle until it’s over a year old. It uses its own special teat, since new and old joeys receive custom-designed milk from their individual teats. As I said, cute, and beyond clever—an extraordinary animal!

The mothers’ club members meet on the north-facing grassy slope. In the morning sessions they sunbake without a care for danger or dignity, their legs sprawled apart, leaning right back on their tails to expose their pale furry tummies to the warmth of the early sun. In the hotter afternoon sessions they take to the shade of the edging trees, stretch out wearily, lolling sideways, yet with heads erect to keep an eye on their restless young who catapult about like overwound clockwork toys.

These toddler joeys are always on the verge of tipping over; they leap about way too fast for their ability to manage their disproportionately long tails. In mad circles, they race into clumps of bracken, disappear, then spring out again further along, wide-eyed and bursting with energy.

As the pouch-bound joey grows, it’s not unusual to see mother and joey eating in tandem, the baby practise-grazing on what it can reach from the safety of the low-slung pouch as the mother slowly levers her way across the grass. If she stops and sits erect to check me out, the baby might withdraw until all I can see poking out are its black nose and eyes, ears hidden inside the furry parka hood of its mother’s pouch.

Bigger joeys, spending more and more time out of the pouch, each try their mother’s patience by interrupting her grazing to demand a drink of milk. When she decides that it’s had enough, she pushes it aside and resumes grazing. At other times I see a mother holding her wriggling joey still with one dainty black paw while searching for fleas in the soft baby fur with the other. The joey cringes exactly like a child does when you want to wipe its face or comb its hair.

When the alarm goes up for the group to take flight, which they do in a very helter-skelter, every-wallaby-for-itself kind of way, these toddlers often rush to get back into the safety of their respective pouches, but it’s a terrible headfirst scramble and squeeze, and usually the mother takes off with a tangle of tail and long black feet and paws still hanging out. At this size they have to do a sort of somersault in there to fit and to get their heads back around to face the pouch opening.

Or else the joey doesn’t notice her leaving, since she doesn’t call him; he’s supposed to stick close by her and pay attention to what’s going on. When he suddenly becomes aware that he’s alone, he goes hurtling off in any direction. Pure panic—just like any toddler in a shop who looks around and can’t see Mum.

Except for the vocal carry-on, which we humans do best from the earliest age. As I currently have three granddaughters under two—Ruby, Layla and Matilda—I can vouch for the freshness of my experience in saying so.

SNAKE PERVERSITY

Being hopeless with machinery, and living a long way from town, I treat any mechanically minded visitor, male or female, as a precious opportunity. There’s always some collection of moving metal parts that’s refusing to function. This time, and unfortunately too many other times, it was my pump.

In the past, operator ignorance and/or weakness—mine—has mainly been to blame, and I’d excused my old Ajax pump for slowing down a bit, given that it and its partner, the Lister diesel engine, were getting on. For 30 years they’ve squatted over by my big dam, ready to be cranked into action at approximately three-monthly intervals, and pump steadily up to my cement tanks on the ridge. The faithful pair would work continuously for 24 hours or more without complaint.

The Lister had been overhauled once, and the Ajax had its leather seals replaced once—but not by me. All I knew was what I now saw when it was in operation, that the float in the dam was barely moving, when it used to bounce at each tug of the suction from the pump, and that it took three days to fill the tanks last time. Given that I had to keep walking up the hill to check the levels in the tanks, my arthritic knees were not happy.

So the pump needed attention and was finally about to get it. I had the kit of new seals ready; my son-in-law Joe had brought his toolbox, his male muscles and his mechanic’s mind—and his/my family.

I rather boldly suggested spraying some WD40 on the parts to be parted, as they’d doubtless be most reluctant after such a long time. Being an easygoing sort of bloke, he agreed, and walked over to do that and generally reconnoitre the day’s project, while I made coffee. I cut the specially made lemon semolina cake into hefty wedges—I believe in feeding my workers well—and put the coffee on to do its volcano act.

My granddaughter Jessie took orders and made mud pies and silty coffee in her well-equipped play kitchen on the verandah; I minded baby Ruby while my daughter Lucy set about filing the horses’ feet.

Joe came back. ‘I don’t think I’ll be working on the pump today,’ he said. ‘A big black snake—six footer at least—just went under it.’

‘Oh, it won’t be there long,’ I assured him. ‘It’d just be hiding from you. It’ll be gone by the time we’ve had morning tea.’

Only it wasn’t. We all drove over to see. It had wedged itself very discreetly under the steel angle strips on to which the pump and engine were bolted. As these were almost embedded in the dirt, I wouldn’t have known it was there. There was just the slightest line of shiny black where there shouldn’t be. We tried stamping on the ground, slooshing buckets of water from afar. From the safety of the car, Jessie’s squeals punctuated each effort and provided heart-stopping false alarms.

But the snake didn’t move. Perhaps it thought it was invisible to us.

‘Maybe it lives there,’ Joe suggested.

‘Oh no, it can’t! This engine makes a hell of a racket. And besides, I kneel down right beside it to start it—surely I’d have seen it—wouldn’t I?’

The thought of past or future secret snakey proximity gave me the shivers. It had never occurred to me to check for snakes there before.

‘We’ll have lunch. It’d be too scared to come out now after all our racket. Once it’s all quiet again, it’ll take off. It’ll be gone by then, surely.’

We had lunch on the sunny verandah. I’d made several salads—a mixed and mysterious green one of leaves and herbs gathered from the garden and tossed with roasted pine nuts in a raspberry vinaigrette; a red medley of kidney beans, onion, diced baked pumpkin and grated raw beetroot in a sesame and ginger dressing; my favourite cucumber and yoghurt cream salad version, the Armenian one, Jajoukh, which is made with fresh dill—and chickpea patties with a special tamarind and raisin sauce. The less adventurous Miss Jessica had an egg and salad lavash bread wrap; Ruby was still only up to milk.

Seconds were taken, plates emptied, tummies expanded, topped up with a cup of tea. The lunch had been leisurely, a good hour had passed. Joe and I set off to walk over to the dam, considerably more slowly than we had pre-lunch. I was confident that the snake would be gone by now.

Only it wasn’t. Nor by afternoon tea time either.

It was only after he drove out, taking the family, his toolbox, his male muscles and his mechanic’s mind with him, that I saw that the snake had departed. Talk about perversity!

PESKY POSSUMS

Of the marsupials who live here, my least favourite neighbours are the Common Brushtail Possums, who trespass in my garden and eat my plants, especially my roses. They demolish the leaves and buds and flowers, and don’t give a damn about thorns, chomping and snapping stems into grotesque prunings as they blunder heedlessly up my heritage roses, both shrub and climbing types.

In the past I had tried chilli spray, quassia chip spray, garlic chive surrounds, planting extra rose bushes near the fences—here, eat these!—and still the possums were stripping the main garden roses and the citrus trees. As a last resort my partner had electrified the house yard fence.

The first night it was activated, we watched as a bevy of possums conferred just outside the bottom corner. It appeared as if they were drawing straws, after a heated discussion—‘You go!’ ‘No, you go!’—had proved fruitless. But none of them was game to try it and the disgruntled group broke up and waddled off into the trees.

Yet the next night, and every night after for a few years, one battered old warrior climbed the fence without visible reaction. He had tattered ears and tufts of fur missing from fights past—and an addiction to roses. Knowing what the ‘Zap!’ feels like, I deemed such effort heroic; the garden could cope with one possum having a well-earned rose munch.

That fence hasn’t been electrified since the 2002 fires, but in any case, once the quoll had moved into the shed and taken over my yard as her territory, all possums moved out. Quolls eat possums. But this past summer no quoll came to breed in my shed, and a brushtail possum moved back in.

It has thick fur, fluffy almost, but is not cute. I assume its eating habits have removed my capacity for objectivity, but I don’t like its staring eyes, the shifty way it scurries along the verandah railings and up the eave rafters as soon as I appear, the heavy-footed way it walks on the roof, always after I’ve gone to bed, or the pellets it drops on the tank lid.

I pity New Zealand, where they have become a major pest since they were introduced, reaching population densities six times what we have to cope with here! Such an opportunistic creature, which cohabits so well with humans in suburbs and towns as well as rural areas, will be hard to beat.

One morning lately, inside the vegie garden I discovered that it had pulled down, broken off and eaten my tall snowpea plants and munched flat what had been my thriving parsley mounds. I’d have to put a netting roof over there if it had begun climbing the fence, the netting of which I’d deliberately left floppy to deter possums. I indulged in a fleeting moment of spiteful consolation—‘Serve you right!’—when I saw that it had also eaten the leaves of the rhubarb, which I’d always thought to be poisonous. But I didn’t mean it—not really.

And I realised that it had gone under the fence, which was in a temporarily vulnerable state, as it awaited the addition of finer netting to keep the snakes out. I could more easily put a stop to crawling than climbing.

I’d love to see the less common possums that have been noted in these forests, like the Mountain Brushtail Possum, the huge Greater Glider, and the rare Yellow-bellied Glider, now a threatened species, listed as Vulnerable, like my quoll. Since I don’t walk around in the forest at night, I don’t give myself much of a chance. I should get a decent torch and go spotlighting, but admit to being a bit nervous of going by myself. No real reason, just a feeling that I shouldn’t intrude. Still, Greater Gliders can make 100 metres in a single horizontal glide, which would be a sight indeed.

But I like smaller creatures best, and top of my wish-to-see list would be the Feather-tail Glider, smallest of all gliders at about 75 millimetres long, a cute brown and white creature with a wonderful fringed tail, who feeds on nectar and blossoms. I have had a quick glimpse of the mid-sized Sugar Glider in ‘flight’. The furry membrane that joins their hands and feet, much paler underneath, opened out flat like a parachute or a sail, with the tail steering, as it glided from a tall tree to a lower one. I was alerted to its presence by its warning call, a ‘shrill yapping’, that really did sound like a small dog barking. Having heard that before, but not seen the creature that made it, it was a treat to have the mystery solved.

Long ago, in my weekender time, I considered brushtail possums cute, but I didn’t have roses then. Or a house fence. The kids and I even used to spotlight and feed any possum that dropped by the verandah, to amuse visitors. Fruit mostly, but once my daughter insisted on giving it some of her birthday cake. That possum would never have tasted cake or icing before but there was no hesitation in scoffing the lot.

I stopped feeding them when one seized my hand instead of the apple I was holding. I didn’t take this as a personal attack, since it was probably blinded by the torchlight. When it dug its sharp little claws into my fingers, I knew not to pull back, but I squealed as it brought them up to its mouth. It bit down, but not hard and not for long: my flesh was not fruity or sweet enough and it dropped my hand in disgust. I didn’t take that personally either.

All I can hope is that the quoll comes back this season. She doesn’t eat roses—but she’d eat my fingers if she got the chance.

SHY YET SHOWY GOANNAS

Only once have I seen a goanna here. It was climbing a stringy-bark tree. Perhaps it was forced out of lower sandstone country by a fire, as this is not typical goanna territory. I’ve kept my eyes open for it or others since, knowing they are shy in the wild, but with no luck. My carnivorous quoll would be a competitor for food, so they may not coexist here.

This particular type of large, long goanna is properly called a Lace Monitor. It’s a matter of personal choice whether you call the family monitors or goannas. They are all predators, so ‘monitor’ might come from the Latin word meaning ‘to warn’. Apparently the word ‘goanna’ is a corruption of ‘iguana’, a tropical American tree-climbing lizard.

As this is the only type I’ve ever seen, mostly in sandy areas, you could say it’s my generic goanna. It’s one of Australia’s largest lizards, with the males sometimes exceeding 2 metres in length. They are strikingly handsome, prehistoric-looking creatures, so on a recent camping trip with a friend, I was pleased to have one visit our campsite.

It checked out the cold campfire and the garbage bag, but was disappointed in our vegetarian scraps—fruit peelings and limp lettuce leaves just can’t compete with chop bones or charred sausages.

Having always been told that, when disturbed, goannas will run up the nearest vertical object, be it tree or person, I kept my distance, wary of those sharp claws. While goannas are not aggressive, their powers are to be respected. Males fight fiercely and in prolonged bouts for the favours of a female, clawing and biting, sometimes to the death.

Spotting us, this one headed up the closest tree and splayed himself like a designer brooch across its broad trunk. He was so long it was hard to fit him in the camera lens. My close clicking disturbed him, and he moved higher up the tree.

He must greet the holiday season with very mixed reactions: possibilities of interesting tucker, but what nuisances people are, never minding their own business, always staring, pointing, exclaiming, clicking, forcing him up trees when he has work to do.

Admiring the dramatic pixellated pattern of stripes and spots on his loose tough skin, I could see where the ‘lace’ part of the name came from. It also recalled certain indigenous art styles, for which perhaps it had been the model. Its colour palette ranged from black to grey, white to cream, with touches of amber—smart and showy.

They are carnivorous, eating any carrion. Where my husband and I used to camp at the Myall Lakes in the early ’70s, before it became a national park, there were lots of goannas, and they would wolf down the stale meat pies a friend saved for them from his takeaway shop.

And many a farmer has cursed the egg thief in the hen house.

I once saw a goanna catch an egg that was tossed to it. It simply opened its vast mouth, flicked its head up and caught the egg in mid-air, swallowing the whole object effortlessly. No more eggs forthcoming, it turned and lumbered away, swishing its long tail in poised arcs, defined by the fine pale-brown point at its very end.

In the shade of a nearby ironbark, it sprawled its back legs flat and settled down to contemplative digestion of that egg which had so mysteriously arrived in time for brunch.

P.S. I have just seen another goanna here on the Mountain—only the second in 30 years!

PRAYING FOR PREY

One sunny winter’s morning I took my morning coffee out to the verandah, as I like to do when there’s no chilly breeze. Comfortably ensconced, feet up on the railing, I let my eyes wander idly over the remaining foliage of the vines and climbers that had provided my summer shade.

The apricot-blooming Crépuscule Rose is the only non-deciduous one, although its corner is being invaded by a similarly evergreen self-sown passionfruit vine, whose fate I haven’t yet decided. I was considering this matter when I noticed a movement amongst the leaves of the rose.

I put down my coffee and went closer. A small bug-eyed space creature clung there. It was a green Praying Mantis, well camouflaged, with the spines on its large forelegs seeming to mimic the serrated leaf edges. For this carnivorous insect, the main purpose of those powerful legs is akin to that of a rabbit trap: to snap shut, interlocking the spines and imprisoning the prey.

A mantis often holds these legs in a closely folded position that resembles hands joined in prayer, hence the name ‘praying’ mantis, when actually it’s holding them ready to swiftly grab prey once within range. They are very efficient hunters, mainly by day, possessing the ability, rare amongst insects, of being able to turn their heads—300 degrees in some species—and follow prey with their large eyes. Mantids have big appetites, eating live flies, aphids, moths, caterpillars, spiders. Bigger species will apparently ambush and eat small lizards, frogs, birds, snakes or mice!

Mantids are also known to be cannibals, eating each other or their young. The female often eats her smaller partner after mating. Perhaps, like Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, she ‘can’t get no-oo satisfaction’?

This one was a safely small variety, not that I was thinking of picking it up; although they have no venom, they can bite. My mantis looked very frail, but then danger is a matter of scale: to a ladybird it would have been a veritable King Kong.

It’s a good thing they’re only human-sized in science fiction films, and looking at that blank-eyed head I could see why they’ve been used as the models for so many ‘aliens’. It is a quintessentially inhuman ‘face’: there’s nothing to relate to.

THE QUOLL KIDS

Although the shed is quoll-less at present, a quoll family has taken up residence there almost every year and I hope will do so again.

Since there’s not much to hunt in the shed, the mother quoll has to go out foraging every night to feed herself while her young ones are growing. Once they’re older, she takes them with her or sends them out on forays of their own. These runs include my verandah, where I have my various waste containers, including a simple metal holder for a supermarket plastic bag as my ‘true garbage’ bin (it’s very old, from the days before we woke up to the plastic bag nightmare).

She jumps in, scrabbles around, selects and jumps out. I hear her every night, and if I shine the torch on her through the window above, she takes no notice. Her boisterous kids make so much noise they often don’t hear me open the door, so sometimes I surprise two pink-nosed little faces peering in astonishment over the edge of the suspended plastic bag, followed by an explosion of spots as they make their getaway, gambolling off like runaway rocking horses.

The quolls prefer strong cheeses like Blue Castello, and even though I think I’ve scraped the wrappers clean, they find them worthwhile. Anything dairy-based will do, or even substitute-dairy, like tofu. Spinach and ricotta lasagne, dropped on the floor and dumped on the compost, was popular, but bliss was an oily tuna tin when I had visitors. It was passionately and noisily licked from one end of the verandah to the other.

I always thought my quoll had twins, as each summer, from dusk till dawn, I’d seen just two spotted bundles of mischief cavorting about the house yard while she went hunting. They’re fully furred, although less spotty than their mother, old enough to be left unattended in the playpen.

I shut the front windows at night ever since two of them got inside into the sink, where they made a terrible racket cleaning up the unwashed dishes. When sprung by the torch, a flurry of spots leapt out the window, which I quickly shut before hopping back into bed. I soon realised that only one had got away, as an almighty din began; one had got confused and leapt down behind the fridge, where, once recovered from the shock, it was banging away at the coils trying to get out.

Quolls are not reluctant to make their wishes known, or, as my Nanna used to say, they’re not backward in coming forward. Once I temporarily added some timber to a hotch-potch pile near the house, not bothering to remove the corrugated-iron covering. I knew the quoll used this as her halfway house, but not how often.

Within minutes an extremely loud banging began from inside the pile and did not stop. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? How’s a quoll supposed to survive if you squash my space? Get those extra planks off at once!’

We rushed to do as told and lifted off the planks one by one until, the load apparently being light enough, the banging ceased. We were allowed to leave two planks on.

But for all her ferocity, the quoll doesn’t always win. One day she came home late—midday—and along the track, which was unusual. She was moving slowly, awkwardly. Then I saw why. On her back she was carrying one of her offspring, who was far too old for that, almost as big as herself. But this was a rescue operation for, as she passed close by the window, I could see that the young one had a large area of raw flesh on its hind leg. Only a dog could have done that.

Too exhausted to make it to the shed, she took her sad burden to her halfway house and disappeared into its dark depths. I put a container of water at the entrance to it, and hoped for the best. It was an even greater tragedy, because one had drowned in the horse trough weeks earlier. I’d cried at that, thinking she must only have one left—which now was badly hurt.

Next day, I glimpsed a patch of brown and white just beyond the stack; it must be the injured one resting in the sun, I thought, and tiptoed round the back to see better.

A spotted furry carpet of young ones, sleeping, curled together like kittens! I counted six. The mother must have brought them down from the shed to keep the sick one company. I was delighted that she felt so secure with me; they were only about 5 metres from the house, right next to my woodheap.

I then read that the average litter size is five, but they play in pairs. She’d had seven, so my shed must be a good breeding place.

And the quoll pairs were very playful, taking turns to keep me awake at night with their thumpings and crashings, chasing each other over my tin roof and along the windowsills. At such times I would grit my teeth and remind myself that all kids must grow up and leave home sometime.

But having seen the result of a foray beyond the netting, I wished she could keep them in the playpen forever. Or that I could net the whole property. Quolls can climb, dogs can’t.

LOST KOALAS

Since the 2002 fires, which reduced my green 65 hectares to stark monotones of black and white, I have seen no koalas on my ridge. Nor, more significantly, have I heard one at night, as I often used to.

There is no mistaking the call of a male koala, and it is such a deep, loud bellow that once you hear it you’ll never again think of this animal as cute and cuddly. It is a cross between the roaring of a lion, the grunting of a pig and the growling of a bear. Not that the koala is a bear; it’s the sole representative of its unique family.

Koalas are solitary animals, coming together only to mate, and over the years I had only seen a koala here on perhaps five or six occasions, although hearing one every year.

The first time we saw one was in early 1979. It was daytime, and five-year-old Sam spotted an unusual animal bounding up the track. ‘Look! A sheep!’ he said, pointing at the fat and woolly grey creature ahead. When it began to climb a small tree, and he could see its broad fluffy ears and its long black pad of a nose, he knew what it was, but its behind had indeed looked more like that of a tail-less sheep than of our national icon. Our first koala climbed effortlessly to a fork of the trunk, wedged itself, turned and peered down at us with surprised currant eyes. Perhaps we were its first humans.

They can climb and cling so well not only because of their sizeable curved claws, but because their hands and feet are designed to encircle branches. Just as our thumb is ‘opposed’ to our fingers and can touch them, their first two fingers are opposed to the other three, and the first toe is opposed to the other four. Koalas are our only tree-climbing mammal without a tail to help them, so I probably should feel more kinship with them!

Once when I was repairing an old fence, a visitor accompanying me was asking whether I saw koalas much. ‘No,’ I’d replied as I re-banged in a spike, ‘although this is the sort of tree they’d like. But you can’t look up when you’re bushwalking in this country or you’d break a leg.’ To demonstrate, I looked up to the top of the tree in front of me—and there was a hefty koala, looking down with great indignation, no doubt having been woken by all my banging.

Last year I saw a koala in the adjoining national park, on the next ridge where those fires did not reach. This one looked healthy, and was gadding about in bright morning daylight instead of sleeping. The fur of its rump was almost yellow in colour. So I know they are still around in these mountains, and can only hope they breed up enough to reclaim my place as new territory, for the young ones must move away when about eighteen months old to make their own way in the world.

In any given area koalas feed on only a few species of eucalypts; here one of their preferred trees might be the blue gums, of which there are plenty. To process the large amount of leaves eaten daily, I read that a koala has an extraordinarily long caecum, the pouch between the small and large intestines. At about 2 metres long, even compared to that of other herbivores like rabbits or horses, it’s huge.

I had to look up the word ‘caecum’, and it really just means ‘blind’, in the sense of a blind alley, a dead end. So koalas have a long blind alley, whereas we just have a sort of bay window in our intestinal pathway. You’ll locate it better if I tell you that ours is what the appendix tags on to, another dead end which has evolved to be so small that its proper name is the ‘vermiform’ appendix—that means wormlike!

We don’t eat as many raw greens as our ancestors did, when the appendix wasn’t just a vestigial organ, a small nonfunctioning remnant, a mere vestige of one that was once necessary. (I confess I checked ‘vestigial’ when I looked up ‘vermiform’; I love dictionaries!) Now its only purpose seems to be to become blocked, get inflamed, cause the pain of appendicitis, require removal and hence stress out young ladies who wear very skimpy bikinis. We must be evolving, as some people are born without one at all.

In poorer countries, less subject to marketing, with less access to takeaways and processed food, and thus where people still eat more fresh plant material and fibre—although not gum leaves—appendectomies are rare and the appendix is still considered to have a purpose. So are we in the West evolving backwards?

The koala could teach us a few things about surviving on a restricted diet, as not many animals have so narrow a menu. Baby koalas have to be specifically prepared for this otherwise indigestible gum tree product diet. For seven months the usually lone offspring stays cosily milk-fed, developing in the pouch. Then it enjoys the good life, with free transport on Mum’s back and free food of milk and leaves for the next five months, until weaned at twelve months.

Apart from their super caecum, koalas need certain bacteria to digest so much cellulose, plant fibre. The mother introduces the necessary bacteria to the intestines of her young one by also feeding it a special soft green faecal substance she produces from her anus—pre-digested leaf pap. This unusual and effective process might spoil some tourists’ romanticised image of koalas, but after all, a koala’s normal droppings are just processed leaves, aren’t they?

I think it’s an extraordinary example of super-adaptation. Living here, I often find myself shaking my head: evolution, God—I don’t know to whom the credit is due, but I know it’s truly amazing and we’re the dumbest of the lot if we think we know even half of how it works. And that’s despite centuries of killing and cutting up creatures to try to find out.

Watch, and wonder, is a better way.

But to do that with koalas, I need them back here. In the mating season, apart from the savage sounds they make, males rub against tree trunks, marking them with their scent from a gland on their chests, to warn off other males. So I ought to be able to spot such rubbings.

I’ll be on the alert, looking and listening this year. Maybe I need to hang a sign on the gate: ‘Vacancies. Koalas wanted. Apply within.’

THE NIGHT MONSTER

Koalas aren’t the only roaring beasties in the bush. When we first lived here, the plan was for my husband to be away for work at uni several days a week, staying overnight, while the kids and I stayed here alone, with no phone, no car, no human neighbours.

In my blithe new-chum way, I wasn’t worried and I didn’t expect to be scared. Yet I was, the very first night he was away...

I was awoken by the most fearsome noise I had ever heard in real life. It seemed to be inches from my ear, just the other side of the fragile canvas wall of the tent. I knew there were no savage man-eating animals in the Australian bush, no bears, no tigers, and yet the sound was as if both of those had bred with a rabid dog to produce this offspring. Such a noise had to be accompanied by bared, sharp teeth. One slash of a claw and my children and I would be exposed to this monster of the night!

Very scared, but acting the grown-up, I grabbed the torch and rushed to unzip the tent door to the tiny annexe of mosquito netting, where we had stored tools and the kero fridge. Here I seized a hammer as a defending weapon on my way to unzip the outer netting door.

But zips are too slow and noisy to surprise an enemy, and the sounds had stopped long before I emerged into the darkness. The torch beam revealed nothing but the gum tree, looming, and the canvas shower bag, swinging. I zipped my way back to bed and lay in trepidation until nearly dawn. The kids woke me shortly after.

Later that day I lit the fire and balanced the billies on the old fridge rack, itself balanced on four rocks, that formed our ‘stove’, to boil water for the kids’ shower. We had four billies made from large fruit juice tins, with fencing-wire handles. At this early stage water for everything had to be carted in buckets up the steep slope from the spring. My legs soon became stronger, my back straighter, and I think my arms grew longer with the weight of the buckets!

From a fairly horizontal branch of the grey gum beside the tent we’d erected a pulley system for the canvas shower bag, which had a luxuriously adjustable copper rose. Four thin poles supported hessian modesty panels that still allowed great views to the far mountains, and bush rocks prevented muddy feet. However, my 30-something daughter would now prefer I hadn’t taken certain photos which show that the modesty panels began too high up to cover her three-year-old bottom.

I let down the bag to fill it—a bucket of cold water and two billies of hot water gave a surprisingly long and satisfying shower. I tipped it up to empty out any leaves first. Instead, a handful of black pellets fell to the rock floor.

At that stage I was unfamiliar with the various calling cards of my neighbours, so I couldn’t say who’d left these. Next night, and most nights afterwards, the night monster came to loudly mark its territory, wake us up, walk along the branch of the grey gum, shit in the shower bag, and depart. ‘Take that!’

On his return, my husband, who’d grown up in a leafy Newcastle suburb, had known the noise immediately and had laughed at my terrified descriptions. It was ‘only’ a possum, an all-too-common brushtail. On the farm and orchard where I grew up we’d had a dog, and no trees except two tall fir trees near the house, so I’d never heard or seen a possum. As you now know, I wish I could have stayed in that blissful state!

After a short time of our tent living, the night monster possum began including us on his route earlier in the evening, so he too could sample the dinner. The tent being tiny, we did everything outdoors except sleeping. Any dish placed on the ground or on the washing-up stand would be lumbered up to with his full-nappy gait, inspected, and usually cleaned up. Rice was very popular. No matter if the dish happened to be beside our feet; we were irrelevant. After all, he was here first. We didn’t mind because he then ceased to wake us in the middle of the night, and no longer felt the need to mark his territory in our shower bag.

The charm of possums faded for me at the same rate as their tastes developed for my garden plants, vegetables and fruit trees. In retrospect, it’s surprising how long that took.

NIGHT TIME IS OUR TIME

In the late 1990s, one moonless winter night that I won’t forget easily, I was driven outdoors to head up the hill to our pit toilet. I’d hardly left the cabin steps when I heard harsh screaming coming from roughly that direction. I could only shine the torch up there in fits and starts, because I needed to illuminate where I was walking, to avoid falling up the rough steps cut into the bank.

Reaching the track, I stopped and flicked the torch beam about, to see what was making those noises. I wasn’t at all sure anymore if I really wanted to keep going towards the toilet.

On a low branch of the spreading white mahogany tree, one large light-coloured bird was perched, flapping big wings and screaming, while a similarly sized bird was frantically flapping in mid air just below it, apparently attacking. Between the two of them the racket was loud and sounded aggressive, but I knew, from koalas for example, that this could be a wrong, human-centric impression.

Were they fighting—over disputed territory, a caught dinner—or were they mating? I started to move closer, to try to identify the birds and the cause of all the commotion. Used to shy nocturnal creatures like possums, I shone the torch directly on them. Big mistake.

Sudden silence as their faces turned towards this source of interruption. A brief meeting with their round eyes, before a great pale rush of wings, as the one on the branch took off and flew straight at me and the torch. I screamed, ducked, and fell over, dropping the torch.

Thinking they were about to attack me, I covered my head with my arms and yelled for my partner, who was cosily oblivious inside the cabin. I’d seen that Hitchcock film, The Birds! But they didn’t attack; having vanquished me at one swoop, they disappeared into the blackness. Just as well, for my partner remained oblivious—until I burst in the door, a babbling, shaking wreck who, unable to find the torch again, had fallen over twice as she stumbled downhill in the dark.

Having later tried to identify them, I think they may have been Barking Owls, who don’t have the iconic owl face mask, and are said to have growls and ‘tremulous screams’ amongst their repertoire. It happened so swiftly that I couldn’t be sure, but these owls are sometimes called the ‘screaming-woman bird’.

Whatever they were, their message was clear: ‘Mind your own business and stay inside at night. That’s our time!’

Interestingly, I read that Barking Owls prey on magpies. Since I’ve always considered magpies the bosses of the bird world here, at least in daytime, I can’t imagine they’d be easy pickings; they wouldn’t give up without a fight. Maybe the Barking Owls’ screaming frightens them out of their wits—and nests?

My usual experiences with owls are limited to a ‘mopoke’ call heard in the night or a regurgitated pellet of undigested food found on the verandah railing. I’ve heard the ‘mo-poke’ all my life: on the farm where I grew up, when we just called it a mopoke, and here, where I learnt that it’s the call of the Boobook Owl.

We have Powerful Owls here too, and apparently Masked Owls and Sooty Owls, which I haven’t seen, but none of them say ‘Tu-whit-tuwhoo’ as storybook owls do. I have no idea how owls came to be associated with solemnity and wisdom, unless it’s their large staring eyes and surrounds, vaguely resembling spectacles?

The contrast between Pooh Bear’s gentle and scholarly friend, Owl, and my wild night creatures couldn’t be greater. Can you imagine Owl screaming at anyone?

Or how about Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’? Had he seen and heard an owl like mine, it would surely never have given rise to an image of owlish elopement in ‘a beautiful pea green boat’ with a feline lover, and certainly not of singing to her, ‘small guitar’ accompaniment or not. ‘Tremulous screams’ in tremolo?

I have loved that poem since I learnt it by heart at about eight years old, when I was moved to do a large picture in poster paints of the postnuptial couple, as ‘hand in hand on the edge of the sand they danced by the light of the moon’. I can still remember the artistic problems posed by the moonlight on the water; the illustration urge must have been present from an early age.

I knew the poem was bit crazy, wordwise—I mean, eating ‘mince and slices of quince’ with a ‘runcible’ spoon?—and I was aware then that this was part of its charm for me. That it was entirely fanciful was obvious even to my book-fed romantic self, but it truly never occurred to me that if an owl waxed lyrical about Pussy’s charms, it would be for her qualities as flesh for supper rather than as a prospective wife; that any owl as big as a cat would kill and eat it if it could.

What did I think owls ate? I probably tried not to, same as I was trying not to think about the origin of the lamb chops Mum served up for tea; mince was less evocative. Mince, quince—I often preferred the world of words to the real one.

I am now more realistic and accepting of the rules of survival of the wild natural world; I am not often able to be so with the wider human world, because the rules are wrong. Greed is not natural.

SKY LORDS

A pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles lord it over these mountains, often accompanied by a third, presumably their young one. They circle overhead on the air currents, barely moving a wing. At times so high as to be mere floating specks, at others low enough for me to see their pale hooked beaks and the colours on their plumage; at heights in between, dark silhouettes of the distinctive wedge-shaped tail and the up-curved swoop of wings.

They seem to be the natural kings of the upper sky, effortlessly surfing the invisible currents, crossing from ridge to ridge, watching the clearings in the valleys far below for a rabbit or other small mammal. Their main mode of flight is thus elegantly languid, appearing to be almost lazy, yet it is absolutely economical, perfectly poised, ready to bundle themselves into an aerodynamic lightning bolt to hurtle earthwards after the prey detected by their extraordinary eyesight.

That eyesight is equivalent to mine—if I was using binoculars with 20 times magnification power!

Elaborate aerobatics are also used as foreplay, to impress the female partner. She plays hard to get, feigns nonchalance, now and then surfing the air currents on her back to briefly ‘hold hands’, link claws, with her slightly smaller suitor. When she gives in, her mate helps repair whichever of their several nests they have decided to use that year. She often has two young hatch, but usually only one survives to adulthood—by killing its sibling. So we shouldn’t complain about pushy brothers or sisters; at least they didn’t push us right out of a (probably very high) nest.

For years I didn’t, or couldn’t, hear their plaintive calls, so didn’t know they spoke, but perhaps it took me a few years here to rid my ears and head of the ingrained city-noise and city-ness. Their call doesn’t fit the image of a fierce and mighty hunter. My bird book describes it as ‘pseet-you, pseet-you’; it’s a very thin piping. When I first connected it to them I thought one must have been hurt, somewhere in the trees below me, and the other was fretting. Perhaps when I hear it a lot it is actually a young one? Unbecoming as it is, toddler eagles might be whingers too.

Being so regal, you’d think they’d be removed from all the noise and squabble down here, but if they are the lords of the upper sky, the magpies have a clear opinion of where their dominion ends, and 6 metres above the treetops is far too close to the border.

The magpies harry them away noisily and fearlessly, like yapping fox terriers shooing a lumbering bull. Eagles aren’t good at quick evasive action and must manipulate their large wings with unaccustomed frequency to move up and out of this enemy airspace and back into their own thinner air.

Perhaps the magpies’ supremacy is not so surprising when you consider how fiercely those red-eyed black-and-white speedsters defend their nesting tribe against the perceived possible threat presented by humans entering their space: dive-bombing walkers and bike-riders in suburbs and rural towns, forcing councils to erect warning signs and people to put odd things on their heads, like ice-cream containers with eyes painted on the bases. Their swooping is mainly done as a warning and they don’t often persist if people leave the area, but, like humans, some are more aggressive than others.

Maybe the eagles are the born kings, and the magpies are the dictators who claim power and run the show on the ground. It always strikes me as odd that these same ‘bully birds’ are among our best songbirds. The last part of the Latin name of my species of magpie, properly called Black-backed Magpies, Gymnorhina tibicen, means ‘flute player’.

And I love their song as much as they seem to love warbling it.

My mother wasn’t the sort of person to go about singing much, but one song from her schooldays in the 1920s stuck in her head, found voice on her rare fine days when nothing had gone especially wrong, and thus became lodged in my own head:

Maggie, maggie magpie, high up in the tree,

Do you whistle early in the morning cool,

To wake us up for breakfast and in time for school?

Why does the magpie sing, and why so beautifully, and does he do it because he must, or because he wants to, or both?

This whole question of ‘why birds sing’ is freshly and fascinatingly discussed in the book of that name by an American Professor of Philosophy and Music, David Rothenberg. He came to Australia to play with lyrebirds—and I mean play as in musical instruments, for he’s a clarinettist who likes to jam with birds, to improvise around their songs. I met him at the 2008 Watermark Writers’ Muster in Kendall, New South Wales, where I heard him perform with birdsongs he had recorded. You can listen to some of his lyrebird sessions on the book’s website.

But not all birds have songs; many only have calls, with specific meanings and for practical purposes. I mean, we all talk but we don’t all sing. In my case, it’s out of consideration for my neighbours that I don’t.

Eagles don’t sing either, but then they seem to be serious creatures, and I’ve been fairly close, such as when I’ve surprised one on the road, busy with the mush of red flesh and grey fur of roadkill, once a wallaby. Or landed on my track, where something must have caught its eye to bring it down to earth, but had escaped.

Close up, the immense bulk of their feathered legs is a shock, bringing with it the reality of how much weight they can carry. Driving back one day, in sight of home, I saw an eagle fly low across the track in front of me, heading through the forest and down the gully, and carrying an obviously long-dead, partly disintegrating wallaby in its claws. It must have been difficult to manoeuvre between the trees and gain height at the same time, and it dropped the body. No doubt it came back later when I was safely out of the way.

I’ve never seen more than two together on the ground, but apparently if there are more around a carcass, they feed in twos and the others wait their turn! This isn’t manners, it’s being smart enough to know that sharing works better than wasting time and energy fighting amongst themselves or being greedy. I think we’d call that sustainability.

And they do mostly feed on carrion. Until the fairly recent past, farmers believed they preyed on sheep flocks, but it has now been realised that they only go for dead or dying lambs that are already down. Thousands of wedgies were killed annually by farmers, bounties offered in some states, and the mighty bodies strung on fences as warnings. Now they are protected all over Australia.

When they spread their wings to take off, which is hardly a quick getaway, I see they span more than 2 metres. What power they must exert to become airborne! Once one took off from the track in front of me, on a low trajectory that went right over my head. Needless to say, I ducked. And squealed.

When my daughter was small, her hair blonde like the tussocks and she about the same height, an eagle came so low to investigate that I worried it might think her a plump rabbit, swoop down and pick her up. It easily could have.

I think of that whenever they swoop low over me now: looking into an eagle’s eye is not a friendly experience. But then royalty never would be too familiar with flightless riff-raff like me, I suppose.

A QUESTION OF MURDER

This being a wildlife refuge, all native animals are protected, but as these get smaller, avoiding harming them gets harder. It can be accidental—a matter of visibility, a reflex action—or a deliberate decision following a philosophical dilemma.

For example, you wouldn’t step on a small lizard, but what about a native cockroach, a spider or an ant? You wouldn’t swat a butterfly, but what about a pesky moth or a nesting wasp? Do all buzzing flies and whining mosquitoes automatically deserve to be stunned or squished?

It soon becomes complicated when you go down the path of deciding where to draw the line and why. Often it simply comes down to survival.

Gardeners pick off and squash or compost caterpillars, drown snails or glue up aphids so the birds can get them—organic pest control just means no nasty slow lingering deaths by poisons or powders. I can’t do the first two but I have used glue spray in the past. I’m not sure what I’d do now, but as I no longer bother about gardening to that extent, I don’t have that dilemma. There’s no point in protecting the roses from aphids if I can’t save them from possums.

Yet almost every time I sink my spade into the earth, slice through the grass and lift out a beautiful slab of topsoil ... I murder a worm. Just cut it in two. I don’t mean to and I do apologise to the waving cut pink ends, but that’s no comfort to the worm, is it?

I used to have a vague idea that the halves could operate independently, but I’ve looked it up—no. Wishful thinking by a guilty, big-footed human. They have heads and nervous systems, tails and sex organs—they even have five hearts! And they do so much for us, cleaning up the planet’s debris and turning it into soil; I add ingratitude to my guilt.

Worm farms are quite trendy now in suburban gardens; it’s a perfectly acceptable and quite competitive topic at dinner parties, as people compare their worms’ rates of consumption and range of diet.

‘Oh, mine eat anything I give them; I’m not about to tolerate fussy eaters.’

‘I find mine are actually quite discriminating: they won’t eat sliced white bread but they love a good hard rye!’

‘Well, my heap went down 3 inches overnight: they’re real goers, my lot!’

‘Mine take their time but I must say they do a very thorough job. Quality, not quantity, you know.’

And even though I’ve never heard anyone talking to their worms, I wouldn’t be surprised if they silently admonished them: ‘Chew your food thoroughly or you’ll get indigestion! Crusts are good for you! Yes, I know this is rather a lot of Aunt Gwen’s gramma pie to get through at one go, but there’s really nothing wrong with it—truly!’

There’s a lot of worms in my soil, perhaps because it’s a high rainfall forest ecology, with the humus being broken down by them. The theory has been advanced that they are the reason I have fewer termites than drier areas, where termites are the cleaner-uppers. I’m grateful for that, having seen the incredible amount of damage termites can do.

A friend of mine is rebuilding his mud-brick house with steel framing and windows and doors after the little beggars ate everything made of timber, and then kept going—furniture, books, toilet paper. They rapidly find and eat anything they fancy, even coming through the mud-brick floor exactly at the four wooden bed legs and eating their way up them!

So I thank my mountain worms on several counts for being here.

I cope with my guilt about the accidental slaughter of average earthworms, slim threads of flesh, but I have trouble with the larger ones. For every now and then I come across a worm as thick as my middle finger and up to a foot long, that is so evidently an ‘animal’ of distinct body parts and colours and habitat, that it feels as bad as killing a lizard. ‘Sorry’ isn’t enough.

So you see what I mean about the slippery moral scale on where to draw the line.

BREAKING AND ENTERING

Some small creature had been forcing its way in or out of the house, which is supposedly my territory. It was quite a saga to find out what and where.

First I heard an odd plop on the verandah. On investigating, I found a plug of mud in the shower base; it had fallen, or been pushed out, from under the iron corrugation of the roof above. Odd. Maybe the possum’s heavy lumbering over the roof had caused the fill to vibrate out? Something else I can be annoyed with it for.

I didn’t get around to plugging the gap for a week. I mixed up the mud in a bowl, but made it too wet, too sloppy to hold its shape, so I had to wait for it to dry out more. In the meantime, a visitor kindly threw the mud out and washed the bowl, so I had to start again. But I did eventually plug the hole, and could see no others.

Then something ate through the kickboard under the kitchen sink cupboard; it was just old flaky chipboard, easy to nibble a hole in that, but was the something nibbling in, or out?

I mixed up sawdust and wood glue and plugged that hole. It got eaten through again. I found a length of thick plywood in the shed and nailed it over the whole kickboard. Take that!

Next I saw that a small neat hole had been apparently drilled in my western mud wall, near a vent to the underfloor. Coincidence, said a friend, just an enlargement of a wasp hole. Wasps do pinch mud for their nests, so that sounded likely. I plugged that hole.

But the following morning a small stone in the rock and cement footings below had been worked loose by digging around it. That took effort, determination—or desperation. Perhaps it was a bush rat. But did it desperately want to get in or out? They are nocturnal, so when should I cement that hole, night, or day, to ensure it was out when I did?

Under the floor is my ‘cellar’, an accidental, too-low but useful space, where I store my full and empty homebrew bottles. As I have to go down there for supplies now and then, I’d rather not share that space with trapped bush rats.

All I was catching in the live trap on my bench at night were antechinus, tiny marsupials that can slip through a minute crack. I saw each one clearly when I relocated it down the hill in the morning, tipping it out into the tussocks where it bounced once, then regained its feet and raced into cover, unfazed by its night of incarceration. They wouldn’t need to go to all this trouble to break in, although I thought I’d managed to seal all their possible entrances. But if something bigger was creating a freeway, they wouldn’t be shy of using it.

One night I spotted a large greyish animal on the verandah railing. A bush rat. I groaned. They are bold and persistent but they stay away when the quoll’s here—where was she?!

Next day I heard a grating sound in the pantry roof; it must have been trying to gnaw through the ceiling. I banged the broom handle up many times and demanded it desist and leave, complaining like any downstairs tenant. The noise stopped.

That night I saw a slim dark shape run nimbly along the rafter above the couch where I was lying, reading. So it was inside now.

Next morning a small yellow dish on the bench caught my attention. It was so so empty and clean that I couldn’t recall what, if anything, had been in there, but I often use that dish to dry seeds. Ah yes, pumpkin seeds from a particularly good organic Queensland Blue I’d bought. Had it eaten every scrap?

I looked around, behind the fridge, under the cupboard, behind jars; there under the portable gas stove, perhaps a metre away from the dish, was a neat pile of rat shit and pumpkin shells. It must have taken the seeds there one by one, to eat in private.

I went out and checked the footings: the rock plug had been pushed out again. But how was it getting from under the floor into the house—and the roof? These native critters are always ingenious, and always one step ahead of me.

Meanwhile I decided to defrost the fridge. Taking advantage of the 10 degree or less weather, I set the breakables in a fridge bag out on the verandah—so the clumsy possum wouldn’t knock them over. I simply sat the plastic lidded containers of soup and fetta and yoghurt on the table there, as they wouldn’t spill.

Next morning I found the lid off the fetta, which was still there swimming in its brine, pale but apparently unharmed. The lid must have blown off. Perhaps I hadn’t pressed it down tightly enough.

Then I noticed the tiny blue fragments on the table, shavings of what was once a lid. Ah yes, there was the frayed lid not too far away on the decking. The rat must have been responsible, since they gnaw through plastic, rubber and timber. It hadn’t eaten the fetta or tipped it over. Must have been disappointing after all that effort to find it was cheese, I thought, since bush rats don’t seem to like it much. Served it right! I took the fetta inside and washed the thick slabs, replacing the brine. No real harm done.

Later I noticed that on the verandah boards near the old (unlit) kero fridge were strewn a few pegs, a rectangle of white polystyrene, probably from one of my seed boxes, and scraps of string. The damn rat must have been mucking about up there and knocked things off. I picked up the pegs and reached for the foam—only it wasn’t.

The soft sogginess quickly told me that the fetta had been tried after all—and rejected. Nibbled round the edges, air-hardened and slightly yellowed, it looked exactly like a bit of deteriorating foam.

Over the next few weeks, that pesky rat also gnawed photo albums and—unforgivably—books. It had to go.

Bush rats, possums—Mrs Q, where were you?! Having read just the other day that quolls only live for about five years, although I don’t know why that’s so, I was worried now that mine may have met her end. I hoped a female from the next generation turned up soon, overcome with nostalgic yearnings for a home like that of her childhood; good accommodation must be hard to find.

My live trap was too small, so a friend lent me two wire mesh rat traps and I baited them with slices of apple spread with peanut butter. Next morning I had two very lively creatures, brown with paler tummies; mini versions of the rat I’d seen, although less grey. Quite cute for rats, but still they went for a ride to the national park.

So my ‘it’ was a ‘she’.

The holes in the footings were cemented up. She made a new one on the other side of the house; having been told rats don’t like kero, I poked a kerosene-soaked rag in there as I had no time to cement that one.

The following morning I caught Mum. She went for a ride too.

Since then, for months there were no new holes or evident gnawing.

And yet, just last week I saw the big one—Mum?—inside the house. My heart sank. ‘How, where??!!’ I demanded, but she scurried along her old familiar route on the rafter and ignored me. Had she taken all this time to find her way ‘home’?

If so, she’s come back not only older, but wiser, as the hurriedly set mesh traps have remained untouched, untripped—and the rat untrapped.

These bush rats are not the ‘bad’ rodents introduced by Europeans, which are the black rats, the brown rats and the house mouse. They are Rattus fuscipes, one of Australia’s seven rat species of the ‘new endemics’, having come here around a million years ago. So they have more right to be here than I do—just not inside my little house!

When I was growing up we had the ‘bad’ mice and rats in the shed where grain and corn were kept. Dad was always setting traps—the ‘Snap! You’re dead! (or maimed) sort—and catching them. I once offered to bring one in for my senior high school biology class to dissect, as the teacher had been pondering aloud how to procure a rat. She was grateful, but in the end it wasn’t to win me any brownie points with my classmates.

I hadn’t thought how I would get it there. Dad just popped the body into a plastic bag before he went to work, and left it for me. Unfortunately the tail was hanging out, and neither myself nor Mum nor my small sisters wanted to touch it to poke it out of sight. I carried it at arm’s length as I walked to the bus stop, my school port in the other hand.

The bus was late. I didn’t like to put the rat bag down, as the body seemed more real when it slumped. I imagined I’d put it under my seat on the bus, out of sight. But when the bus came, it was very crowded; there were no seats. I had to stand and hang on somehow. I stood my port on the floor between my feet, held on to a seat corner with one hand, the rat bag suspended from the other at a safe distance from my legs, trying to keep it low so no one would notice.

It was a 5-mile trip to school. Every time the bus stopped, I had to let someone squeeze past, manoeuvring the rat bag so it didn’t touch me—or anyone else. We were into the suburban edges of town, getting near our school stop, near the end of my ordeal, when I began to think that I could smell a rat—my rat. So did some others.

Which led them to seek the source, to look—and to see the tail. ‘Ugh! What’s that!?’ the nearest girl standing in the aisle asked. She was a rather snobby girl anyway, but from the disgusted look on her face when I told her, I knew I’d ruined any chance of ever being invited to her parties!

Of course she squealed. And then ... well, can you imagine the exponential vocal force of a bus full of schoolgirls?

The bus driver pulled up. I edged forward to him, mumbled an explanation. He looked pretty disgusted too, and told me to stay up there right behind him, then yelled at the bus to quieten down or we’d all be walking to school.

Naturally I got off the bus first when we arrived. I was highly aggrieved at being treated like a leper when I was just doing my class a favour, but I understood it. I’d learnt the hard way that town kids don’t like close contact with yucky things like blood and death, or leeches, or the contents of pan toilets—or maggots; neither did I, but I had to acknowledge they existed.

It was another case of shooting the messenger, me, the farm kid forever tainted by real life. ‘Rats!’ I say.

LYREBIRD LADS

If I drive out the long way, through the national park, I have a favourite stretch of road, where it passes through the rainforest brush. This rises high on both sides, densely green, impenetrable with vines and glossy-leaved trees and mossy trunks, both standing and fallen. Creeper-draped saplings lean towards each other across the dirt road, almost touching overhead—a sparkling, dappled emerald and lime-green tunnel.

There’s a 40-kilometre per hour speed limit in the national park, but I like to drive slowly to savour this lush beauty, and because of the wildlife that darts in front of me. The panicking pademelons, the gangly brush turkeys, and less commonly, the Superb Lyrebird, his long tail a hindrance for a dash across the road.

I always think of lyrebirds as rainforest birds, preferring forests full of leaf litter for their courtship display areas. I don’t think I have them at my own place, as I haven’t seen any in my ferny gullies or shelves, although as my rainforest regeneration plantings grow bigger, I am hoping they’ll come back.

Sound should tell me if they are here, or when they move in, but I’m starting to wonder if I could pick that complex mix of mimicry and invention.

The male lyrebird is a rather ordinary looking brown bird when he’s not performing. He was named for the perceived resemblance of his elegant tail to the musical instrument, except that when he raises it in display, he doesn’t usually hold all the feathers together in that shape. The boldly notch-patterned brown and white outer feathers, each ending in a black curl, go to the sides, while two long, slim, central feathers curve up and out the back, and a whole bunch of delicate silvery plumes rise and fan forward over his head.

However, if successful in wooing a mate, in the heat of passion he does fleetingly hold his tail feathers up and all together like a lyre with strings. Few people would see that, but we expect it because that’s how artists have represented their tails.

Both our Australian lyrebirds, the Albert’s and the Superb, have some of the most complicated songs of all the birds in the world. From their chosen or fashioned performance stages, they not only mimic calls and sounds in their environment, by birds and other animals, including man and his machinery, but interpret and assimilate the sounds into their own songs, and pass them on to other generations.

Friends of mine live in a sandy valley nestled up against curving sandstone ridges. There is plenty of cover for birds in the thick under-storey of native shrubs between the ironbarks, native cypress and casuarinas, and beneath them the ground cover is mainly sticks and bark and rocks and sand, with little grass.

Water is precious there, so they have made a small rectangular pond close to their house in the dry gully, for the animals and birds who live there too. On one visit I saw a young lyrebird take a bath there.

As with many bird couples, the female has no need of superb tail or song, for she’s the one to be courted for her favours. I thought this visitor to the pond was a female at first, because of the thickish tail, but I learnt that the tail feathers of young males can resemble those of the female or a mixture of male and female.

They don’t breed until they have the full fantastic set for properly courting a female. Like a male being able to grow a beard, I guess, although these days it seems that a small tuft below the bottom lip will do the trick.

This lyrebird had the broad central tail feathers of a female but the developing marked side feathers of a male, which will one day form the lyre shape. And since it was raising and fanning that tail a little, a young male it was.

In subdued grey and brown, he walked daintily around the entire perimeter of the pond first, dipping a toe in the water every now and then, as if to test the temperature. He bent over as he did so, perhaps admiring his reflection in the pool.

Finally he ventured in, widely splayed feet immersed first, then went in further, to the depth of his knees. He wriggled and splashed, dipping and ducking under, fluffing up his body and head feathers until he looked like a punk version of himself.

Hopping out, he didn’t shake dry, but took off immediately up the hill. I could see another one, perhaps of his teenage mates, waiting under cover of the shrubs. Waiting to become as superb as his dad.

What a treat to have in your front yard! I wouldn’t mind a few of those moving in as my neighbours. There must surely be males round here looking for new territory.

Maybe I can add ‘Lyrebird’ to the Vacancies sign on the gate.

SPIKY VISITOR

Most mornings I pick fresh herbs, like lemon balm or peppermint, to spice up my breakfast herbal tea. My main herb garden is in a rockery just in front of the house. On this particular morning I had to go without, for that bed was occupied by an echidna, startling me with the sudden glimpse of wrongness of texture and colour, of bristling light-brown quills and dark-brown fur instead of green leaves.

I tiptoed away to get the camera; when I returned, the echidna was still busily snuffling amongst the herbs. Crouching about a metre away, I clicked. It lifted its long, narrow, hairless snout at once, turning its head towards the sound, its small dark eyes apparently not seeing me. The snout was covered with dirt, as you’d expect, given what it does with it, but I could see the two nostrils on top, near the end. Echidnas don’t have a mouth, just a hole at the end of the very sensitive snout, or beak as it’s often called, from which they shoot a long sticky tongue to catch ants or termites. They must catch a lot of dirt at the same time.

While their vision is not great, their sense of smell is excellent, their hearing very sensitive. So I froze until it went back to ant-hunting. I inched closer, hoping to get a shot when it looked up again. Which I did, but the click was too close for comfort and it immediately became an immobile ball of spines without a visible head. From past experience I knew its cautious nature would keep it like that for a long time, so I went back to my breakfast, herbless.

When I came out half an hour later, I saw from the verandah that it had unrolled and was heading in my direction, with its funny sideways rocking gait. I grabbed the camera and knelt on the verandah steps. When it was sniffing at the bottom step, poised as if to climb up, its small face uplifted towards me, I clicked. It backed off and vanished under the steps at once.

Five-year-old Jessie came later that day and I told her about the echidna being right here near the house; she’d never seen one, she said. A few hours later, as if to order, the echidna reappeared, waddling downhill across the short grass towards the bottom gate. We hurried ahead and crouched, waiting for it to emerge underneath the gate. As it did, she got a close-up look at the snout, eyes, fur and spines, and the short, clawed feet, the hind legs looking like they’d been stuck on backwards.

Echidnas were now real to Jess. When I was her age, my world of stories was European, of woodlands and meadows, not bush and paddocks; of porcupines and hedgehogs, not echidnas.

Once an echidna stayed in the yard long enough to get used to me being near as it went about its business, scratching itself, digging, sniffing. Echidnas stay on the move except when a female makes a burrow for the post-natal stage. In case mine decided it was safe to do that here, I kept an eye on her.

An echidna lays a rubbery-shelled egg, the size of a grape, into her own pouch, which is really just a muscular fold on her stomach. The echidna isn’t related to the porcupine or the hedgehog at all, but to the platypus, the world’s only other egg-laying mammal, or monotreme.

Like the rest of us mammals, the echidna is warm-blooded and suckles her young, but she doesn’t have teats or nipples. She just sort of oozes milk through the pores of her belly skin for the baby to suck. The echidna still holds mystery for zoologists, and I’ve read varying opinions about the weaning and child-rearing process.

When it’s still a naked, grey–blue, blind, earless, helpless little thing, perhaps only 75 millimetres long, the mother evicts it from her pouch and buries it in a nursery burrow she makes in the ground or under a log or debris. This is instigated when the baby starts to grow spines, which would be pretty uncomfortable on the mother’s tummy!

Some say it emits a dreadful smell, which is its only protection. The mother returns every five days to feed it until it has grown quills and can head out to fend for itself. As that dependent stage goes on for about seven months, it’s not much of a childhood, is it? But whatever it does, given that it’s one of the oldest mammal species, it’s clearly successful.

That echidna left the yard, but I know when one is visiting, because of the snout-shaped holes in the leaf litter and exposed dirt, and the bark pushed off posts as it forages for termites. Well, there was at least one time when I didn’t know.

Long after the days of tent living and the canvas shower bag, my shower was still outdoors, next to the wall where the fuel stove’s hot-water pipes emerged. Its most sophisticated version had tin around it to chest height, and a roof. I stood on a rubber mat laid over a wooden pallet, and showered by torchlight. So it was always rather uncertain if I’d located all the creatures that had taken up residence since the last shower. Spiders in the folds of the face cloth being my main concern, a fierce and hopefully effective shaking was required before use.

For peace of mind, I do this severe shaking routine indoors too, with any soft items, like towels or coats or dressing gowns, that have been hanging up for any time. If left hanging too long undisturbed, like over a season, they could harbour more than spiders; their folds could be sealed together with mud by wasps, who create mud honeycomb nests for their eggs, and seal in stunned living spiders for the first meal of the pink grubs that hatch. Not nice when inadvertently squashed against one’s person, or even knocked onto the floor and trodden on with bare feet.

In the shower, I hadn’t thought of larger animals except for lizards or snakes. I always checked around, then hung the torch on a nail. I’d become complacent, which is a big mistake with wildlife.

So I wasn’t prepared for the evening when, as hot water streamed over my shampooed head, a large dark thing bolted out from under the pallet on which I stood. By the thin peripheral light of the torch beam, both of us were shocked, but only one of us screamed.

Dashing the soap from my eyes, I grabbed the torch and managed to spot the rear end of an echidna working its way out under the tin wall. I suppose other people in other places may have shared a shower with an echidna, but I’d say that time was a unique experience for both of us.

I’ve only recently read that an echidna’s sex can be determined from the rear legs; while both males and females have enlarged second claws for scratching amongst their own spines—rather like those pointy ‘teasing combs’ used for 1960s bouffant hairdos—the male’s claw is greatly enlarged and very obvious.

The next spiky visitor I see, I’ll put my sexing skills to the test, but what I’d really like to see is their mating. No one seems to know much about this, but it must be an awkward and prickly process. Like the wallabies, the lead-up can involve six males following one female, but for one to six weeks, in a ‘courtship train’, which is a sight in itself. I’d be content with that.

Recently I saw an aspect of an echidna that I wished I hadn’t: its underside. Driving along the tar road one afternoon, I spotted it, unmistakably an upside-down echidna, shockingly, unnaturally, on its spiny back. It looked so terribly vulnerable, out there in the middle of the road, even though I knew it was probably past being able to be hurt.

Somehow it is even worse to see an echidna roadkill than a wallaby one. Not only because I see them less often, but also because they are so unmistakably not dreaming but dead. Wallabies doze in all sorts of odd poses and places, but you’d never see a live echidna on its back. The spines are there to protect it from predators; it rolls into a tight spiky ball when threatened.

Yet here it was, the soft belly helplessly exposed, the strong-clawed paws that once would have dug it to safety out-flung, stiff and useless. Neither its spikes nor its claws were any defence against the uncaring, unstopping driver of the vehicle that bowled it for six—and out.

I pulled up, and seizing a coat in case the poor thing wasn’t dead and might claw me in its distress, I moved it off the road before it could get squashed by the next car. But it was very dead: cold and stiff.

All the way home I thought about this tragedy. How could it have happened?

It may have been an accident, if the person was driving too fast, since echidnas aren’t exactly speedy except when burrowing; they don’t leap out of nowhere onto the road, as wallabies do. That echidna can’t have realised the threat of the noise and vibrations that was rapidly approaching, or it would have rolled into a ball. Or did it, and was forced to unroll by death?

Or did it hear the threat, and try to escape by hurrying across this unburrowable tar and gravel? But it wasn’t night; you couldn’t miss seeing and recognising an echidna on this stretch of road, flat and straight, making it visible from a long way off. So did this predator come up at high speed, see the moving target and aim for it? Not so different from shooting animals for sport, some might say.

I say murder, hit and run at best, yet no one will be punished for this.

HORSE DILEMMAS

My daughter keeps her horses up here because she lives in town. Lucy’s always had horses here, and when her babies are older she might find time to ride again.

In the meantime they have become a problem. I’ve already complained about the pesky little Shari, but in the last few years, since I wrote about them in The Woman on the Mountain, the two geldings, Sabbath and Zack, have aged enough to need supplementary feeding; they cannot keep in good condition despite all the green grass and seeding tussocks on the 30 or so acres of their fenced area. We had them checked for parasites, poor teeth and liver damage, but in the end the vet decided it was due to their inappropriate breeding.

They simply aren’t Mountain horses.

Over our three decades here, other, more suitably bred horses were tougher, never needing extra feeding, even in winter. Grain or hay was kept only as a treat or as bribery in catching them. Lucy’s first horse, her beloved buckskin pony, Jess, thrived on the paddocks here for sixteen years and died of old age.

I’d always said I did not want domestic animals such as chooks or milking cows, because it would restrict my time away, tie me down, and it’s too remote to ask anyone to come and feed them. Dogs and cats are out because they’d harass, hunt, wound or kill the animals who are the primary inhabitants of this wildlife refuge. But the horses seemed to manage on their own, with Lucy coming as needed to worm them and trim their feet, which are unshod.

Originally I hadn’t considered issues like the damage hard-hoofed large animals do to the ground, and I’ve justified their continued presence by their role in fire hazard reduction because they eat the flammable blady grass. Which is still true, but I wonder if it’s worth it, as now I feel guilty if I’m away for a few days, let alone a whole week.

Each morning, from their positions along the fence line, with a good view of the verandah, they start neighing for breakfast from first light if they spot me, so I have to sneak out to the toilet or shower. The house yard is the easiest place to feed them twice daily, letting them graze my kikuyu ‘lawn’ menace in between.

Of course they eat more than the kikuyu, but not every day, since they know that would cruel their chances of coming in at all. No, they do it erratically in both timing and choice: one day Sabbath will fancy a munch of citrus leaves, just enough to keep the tree bonsai’d, and then be good for weeks; or Zack a mouthful or two of Chinese Star Jasmine, just enough to wrench it off the support and set it back a season, and then ignore it.

This may not be as perverse as it strikes me; I was told that horses can tell when the plants have a mineral they need, or when the sap is rising—or something else that doesn’t excuse them in my books. They know very well what’s against the rules of entering these premises, because only the guilty one starts slinking off when my yell of indignation is heard. The other looks smug and gets on with eating imported grass.

But when it’s raining, I can’t let them in because they make the ground too boggy. I don Driza-Bone, hat and gumboots, grit my teeth and do my duty.

It will be boggy and slippery outside the fence, and getting amongst three pushy horses out there is neither appealing nor safe, so I lower the rubber buckets over the fence on my hoe: two big ones and a small token one for Shari. Then I venture gingerly out while they’re all busy, sneak a halter on Shari and tie her up, otherwise she will stick her head in Sabbath’s bucket and not remove it, even to take turns, until it’s empty. He’s the biggest horse but he can’t budge the fat little piglet.

If displaced, he’ll move over to Zack’s bucket and try to pull it away by seizing the rim in his teeth. As Zack is the boss, theoretically, this is not allowed, so then there’s a flurry of nipping and backing up and flying hooves and skidding in mud and the last of the feed spilling.

It’s all much easier if Shari’s not about, off feeding somewhere illegal, like in my regeneration area or out along the track, on the wrong side of the fences that are supposed to keep horses out.

This country will support only a tougher type of horse, bred for the bush, like stock horses; not part-Arabs or thoroughbreds, bred to be spoilt by or at least part-dependent on man. The feed costs a fortune! We share the expense, and when Lucy gets her dream of a few acres near town, she will take the horses and care for them and maybe her three daughters can learn to ride on the old fellows. Shari will be kept busy finding new ways of causing havoc.

I used to dream of Haflingers, the blond-maned Austrian horses that are beautiful in appearance and temperament, and could double as carriage horses when the world’s oil runs out or gets too expensive. That was considered an extremist idea, back in the 1970s: it’s looking very realistic now, isn’t it? But then, just a few years ago, man-made global warming was generally placed in the same crazy category. My ‘greenie’ ideas are almost mainstream now that the chickens are flying home to roost, tragically even faster than we’d ever predicted.

But Haflingers are expensive, and soft-hoofed animals that ate blady grass would be better, if such a creature exists. Alpacas have been suggested, but I suspect they’d need netting fences to hold them. And being smaller, they might be susceptible to the paralysis ticks we have here in abundance. There’d surely be an attendant problem: there always is, but we don’t always know its nature in advance.

Whatever the solution, I know that responsibilities come with keeping domestic animals of any sort. We have bred them to be dependent, taken them generations and continents away from their original ecosystem of survival.

But some, like dogs and cats, survive only too well in our native environments when their owners lose control of them, or choose to let them loose: they turn feral; breed bigger, fiercer offspring; and destroy the native fauna, the animals that belong there and that have no designed mechanism of defence against these alien creatures. Others, like rabbits, goats, wild pigs and deer, destroy the vegetation, and thus often the native animals that depend on it for habitat and food.

If we want to use animals, be it for producing food, mowing grass or keeping us company, we have to accept those responsibilities.

It’s why I prefer the wild animals. They inhabit and run their own world independently in a sustainable balance, feed themselves, sort out their own squabbles, cost me nothing—and they let me live alongside them, hopefully causing no harm.

The only problem is that they don’t eat blady grass!

MASTER OF ART

We humans think we’re pretty clever, that we are the highest of the animals, often citing our degree of culture, our appreciation of the arts, as the justification.

But when you look at nature, there are so-called minor creatures who embody in their very selves several of the artistic techniques or ‘movements’ we thought we invented. There are Day-Glo lizards, Rococo frogs, the Surrealist platypus, the Art Nouveau lyrebird, the Pointillist goanna—to name but a few.

The stick insect is the epitome of trompe l’oeil, a term used in the decorative arts that literally means ‘deception of the eye’, a technique giving a convincing illusion of reality. You may have seen this used as a painting on a blank wall, creating a fake window or door with a view beyond.

Stick insects are often missed because of their intricate deceptive details. I only spotted this one because it had alighted, or fallen, onto the back of the truck, probably overnight when it was climbing the nearby tree. My brain wasn’t deceived here because the fake stick was out of place against flat metal. Once carefully relocated with a real stick to a young birch tree, silhouetted, it would have easily deceived a fresh eye.

Closer inspection showed tiny bumps, as if a twig had snapped off here and there, and shades and patterns of bark-like colour. As delicate an art as any miniaturist’s, as clever as any sculptor’s, as fanciful an extension of natural forms as any Art Nouveau practitioner—or perhaps Art Deco, it being more geometric of line. The folded wings I could see might cover softer bigger wings, but mostly only males get to fly; the females usually just glide.

Such creatures were once lumped into the same family as grasshoppers and crickets and cockroaches, but now they have their own order, Phasmida. Also called Walking Sticks—meaning sticks that walk rather than props for the infirm—Phasmids are vegetarian.

I was astonished to learn that they are now popular as pets! Why? Unusual, harmless, quiet, cheap to feed? But not much action, and awfully fragile!

And, given that their whole being is dedicated to the art of trompe l’oeil, I imagine they’d feel exposed in a glass cage with a token stick or two. Perhaps that’s part of the fun for the owner—creating an equally trompe l’oeil environment so visitors can play ‘spot the stick insect’?

RUSTY ARISTOCRATS

Speaking of art, some of the most magnificent creations here are the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos—living sculptures of ebony.

Impressive at about 60 centimetres tall, Australia’s biggest cockatoo, they seem oversized for the branches they perch on, regally deliberate in their movements, blackish-brown feathers stiffly carved and defined, the ebony relieved only by pale yellow dabs on their cheeks and yellow bands across the tails.

Farthest down the line when the singing talents were handed out, they don’t seem to care, for they’re uninhibitedly raucous. When a small group flies over or sits in my nearby trees for a spell, usually when it’s wet and misty, all else gets drowned out. They sound like something mechanical that’s rusting up and badly needs oiling. There’s often about six of them, and they don’t perch long, but while they do they sort of creak loudly at each other; it’s hard to describe it as ‘calling’ to each other.

Then one will take off and gradually the others follow. To watch them fly through the dense forest here is an aviation spectacle, for they seem too large to make their way between the trees as easily as they do. Their mode of flying is unmistakable: deep wing movements, grand and deliberate, with nothing ‘flappy’ about them. The wings hang heavy and straight on the down strokes, like the caped arms of a kid playing Superman.

Once I came across two of them sitting in a low branch of a battered and twisty old forest she-oak, neatly cracking open the woody ‘nuts’. They took no notice of me standing only metres away, but continued calmly with their feast, each with one claw clamped to the branch, the other claw manipulating one nut after another up to the hooked beak to break the hard seed-pod compartments open and prise out the small seeds. Low squawks every now and then expressed approval of the quality of this year’s crop. These cockatoos like the bigger and harder cones of introduced pine plantations too.

My closer view on that occasion let me see why the feathers appear to be carved: they are each edged with a very fine line of pale yellow. While these cockatoos can’t raise a high and showy crest, the way some of their longer-crested relatives can, the thick badge or tuft of feathers above the beak does ripple forward and back, like raising an eyebrow, in punctuation of their conversation. In side silhouette they can look as if they have a rather unruly mohawk ‘headstyle’.

They reminded me that day of two formidable elderly Victorian widows in black bombazine dresses, tut-tutting aristocratically over high tea. When I think of the whalebone corsetry that went under those costumes, the high brooched collars, the stiff necks, stiff upper lips and hair tightly drawn into buns under black top combs and short black veils—perhaps that impression is not so far removed from my earlier one of the carved images, only less exotic. In fact, they are sometimes called the Funeral Cockatoo, with ‘funereus’ as part of their proper name.

I am always grateful when they visit: cuteness I get lots of, but magnificence is rare, even if incongruously rusty.

A QUESTING COCKATOO

The Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo is a little less grating of voice than his big black cousin, but there’s only one who ever passes over here and he appears not to like my place, since he never stops by.

Once or twice a day, early morning and/or towards sunset, he flies over, uttering no more than one or two squawks. Sometimes he’s low enough for me to see the lemon-flushed feathers underneath, against all that snowy white. Mostly his ‘sulphur crest’ is just a bright yellow Leunig curl at the back of his head, but occasionally I have seen him raise it like a tall Mardi Gras head-dress, almost interrogatively, it seems.

I wonder about him. The mundane theory is that he’s a scout, checking my orchard and garden for readiness to call in the flock for a feast. If so, he’s a poor one, as for 30 years he’s apparently been doing it without spotting, or reporting, anything worthwhile, since no flock has ever turned up here. But as he’s away all day, every day, the journey must be long, the destination precise and regular.

My theory is that my cocky’s a tragic figure, like the ancient mariner, not content to join the great white clamorous flocks eating farmers’ corn and decorating dead gum trees, or getting their kicks destroying people’s timber decking and windowsills.

Instead he’s condemned to wing his lonely way over the remote mountain forests and valleys, searching for his soulmate, who, like himself, has the spirit, not of a white cockatoo, but of a poet, belonging to more ethereal realms than the paddocks. Shades of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who also bucked his predetermined path and fate, but I’ll be very disappointed—indeed, disillusioned—if I ever see him with more than one other cocky.

These cockatoos are highly intelligent, like some of us, can readily learn to talk like us, and can live for more than 70 years, like most of us in Australia—unless you’re indigenous. Cockies aren’t solitary creatures; the family groups tend to stay together indefinitely. So my cocky is very unusual in his solitude, and it’s not unrealistic to think that he is the same one who’s been on this quest for decades.

If courting he would raise his sulphur crest, so when I see him do that, does he think he’s spotted a kindred spirit at last? Is the question he seems to be asking, ‘Are you The One?’

There is something about these mountains that draws eccentrics. Perhaps it’s the rugged grandeur of their scale, the extent of their forested wilderness, where anything is possible and the civilised norm doesn’t exist. They certainly drew me in.

THE LONELY EMU

One Sunday afternoon during our part-time years here, my daughter and her visiting schoolfriend came running down the track to the house. Red-faced, breathless, they insisted an emu was chasing them.

Naturally I scoffed at the idea and exhorted them to be sensible: there are no emus up here! Or ostriches—or elephants, I’d laughed.

Yet a few minutes later a very real emu did come loping over the last rise of the track. There was no house fence then, so as it drew closer we all hopped up on the verandah. Having visited the Koala Park Sanctuary in Sydney, we well remembered being harassed by emus booming at us as they demanded our playlunch or morning tea or lunch or snack pack—there was no denying the persistent power of a hungry emu. Greedy, we’d thought at the time. We had all been shorter than the great gawky creatures, and quite frightened of their strong, sharp beaks, their imperious eyes under dark fluffy eyebrows, and their snaky, half-naked necks, stretched out low to reach our clutched food, as they chased us on those powerful long scaly legs. We squealed and ran for cover; some of us panicked and as we ran we threw the birds our potato crisps or whatever they seemed to desire so much.

Emus, we thus knew, were not like normal birds: they were bigger than any eagle, reaching up to 2 metres tall; they didn’t fly; and they could be pushier than any schoolyard bully.

But this was mountain forest country, not the western plains. What was an emu doing here? Where on earth had it come from—and why come so far into these mountains?

As we fed it biscuits and set out water for it, we decided that it must have been a tame emu, a pet. We got up the nerve to descend from the verandah, as we had to pack the car for the trip back to Sydney. The emu followed us everywhere, with its splayfooted rocking bounce, its darting neck and plaintive booming. It seemed to like being near people.

I made a few phone calls around the region but no one had heard of any pet emus or seen any wandering ones. What could we do with this one? An emu is not like a budgie; you can’t put it in a box and take it to a zoo or a farm. For the same reason, it wouldn’t have been easy to dump it up here had it been someone’s pesky pet.

It was getting late; we had a four and a half hour drive ahead. There was nothing for it but to leave and hope the emu found its way to a new home or back to its old one. Guilt set in as the emu followed us.

Have you ever tried to out-drive an emu over a rough road? They can sprint up to 50 kilometres per hour!

Finally the kids reported that they could no longer see it in our cloud of dust. We all felt sad and guilty, imagining its fretful slowing, its puzzled watching of our disappearance, our rejection. But none could think of what else we might have done.

I often wonder about the fate—and the history—of that lone and lonely emu. I knew the emu was our tallest bird, and that it was on our Australian coat of arms, along with the Red Kangaroo, but that was about all. I now know that they are nomadic, will travel hundreds of kilometres to a new territory, are good swimmers as well as runners, and that they eat a wide variety of plants and fruit and seeds and insects, so I’m hoping it would have made it to a suitable new home. But it ought to have been doing this in a flock, not on its own.

I had no idea that the males take over the incubating once the female has built the nest and laid the eggs. While the gadabout female heads off and finds herself a new bloke, or two, the male sits on the nest for about 55 days, not eating or drinking or defecating, standing only to turn the eggs, until they hatch. Now that’s some father love.

In my grandparents’ house in rural New South Wales, where I’d spend each September holidays in the 1950s, they had emu eggs, huge dark greenish-blue ovals, in a bowl. My Pop, a shearer and miner, said people in the country, especially the Kooris (we no longer use the word he employed), liked to carve them, because the shell had a thick white inner layer that showed up when you cut the dark top layer away. He himself carved and polished cow horns and made bird sculptures from them: there’s one looking down at me now. I expect he got them from the abattoirs, but I tried not to think about that.

These days people farm emus, and, like the first people, use the lot: eggs, leather, oil, meat and feathers.

Nanna and Pop also had two whole emu plumage rugs, thick and fluffy, one dyed deep red, the other green, on the polished linoleum of the ‘best’ room that nobody used much. I didn’t like to stand on them, didn’t like to imagine how they got the feathers off in one piece, nor what the emu looked like, skinned—but I couldn’t help it.

I have often found my overactive imagination to be a double-edged gift.

WALLABY WEIRDO

At one stage I had a rogue wallaby who consistently broke the rule of staying on the wild side of the house yard netting fence. He was a male Eastern Red-necked Wallaby: darker and more evenly red on the back and whiter on the front than is usual, and with a distinctively kinked tuft of fur at the base of his tail. I’d looked up the mammal book in case he was a separate species but it seemed he was just a weird member of that family. The outcast, the black sheep.

When I first spotted him in my orchard I went looking for breaks in the fence, but there were none. He must be an especially good jumper, I’d thought. Not even the kangaroos had ever jumped this fence in the eight years since I built it.

Then I saw him get through it. Hingelock netting is composed of 320-millimetre-wide rectangles that gradually increase in height. Mine has 600-millimetre-high chickenwire clipped over it at the base. It had occurred to me that a joey might get through the top rectangles, but only if it could jump high and aim well at the same time, which would be unlikely given how scatterbrained and uncoordinated they are.

But a grown male? He had to be double-jointed!

He became a regular visitor and I saw him come and go at many different spots with ease—definitely double-jointed, I decided. I also concluded that he was a loner, out of place in the busy social scene beyond the fence. Much like me, really. And, since in those days I never saw him eating anything but grass, I didn’t mind him visiting.

I began to say hello and have a bit of a chat when I saw him. Not that he contributed much, but he’d look up and acknowledge me before resuming grazing. I could use the excuse that I like to use my voice around the wild creatures so they get to know my ‘call’—and that’s true—but the fact is that, living by myself, I have started talking to my wild neighbours. Nothing too deep, just passing pleasantries.

When I caught him eating the small rose bushes on the bank, I angrily reprimanded him—‘Why must you do that? Why can’t you just eat grass!?’ He just kept at it. But in between my small explosions of outrage we were quite comfortable in each other’s presence. He began to take his midday nap in the shade of the trees uphill from the toilet, or under the cherry tree. He might lift his head if I appeared, then resume dozing.

Then I started to worry. What if it was genetic? A tribe of double-jointed wallabies would be quite another matter!

I watched him carefully when he was outside the fence, but he was always alone. Whatever made him an outcast, it put him off the ladies. Not once did I see him chase a female. Nor did he hang around with the males—something else we had in common, at the time. Perhaps he was asexual, a neuter? The reason remained a mystery, but it seemed I was safe from being overrun by his offspring.

I hadn’t reckoned on him passing on his strange ability by example.

One spring, I’d had to go away for a month, and on my return, even from the gate I could see that the garden was newly green and blooming. I immediately walked around the yard to see what delights spring had brought.

The air was full of perfume—the honeyed white cloud of the May bush, the exotic intensity of the jasmine smothering a stump nearby, the innocence of the old-fashioned pink sweetpeas in front of the verandah, and the faint almond scent of the Banksia Rose that had turned my clothesline post into a fountain of foaming white. But the Banksia Rose didn’t look right. The lower parts of its drooping stems were all bare.

So, I realised, looking about in dismay, were those of all my newly leafed and very young European trees—and the rose bushes were totally denuded.

‘The possums are back!’ I groaned aloud.

But no twigs were broken, as the hefty possums do when they climb. And there remained one high topknot of leaves on the big Autumnalis old shrub rose. I noticed too that only the lower parts of the climbing roses, the Crépuscule, the Madame Carrière and the Graham Thomas, were stripped. The upper stems were fully leafed. Whatever was devastating my roses, it could not climb.

I walked round the back of the Banksia Rose, and there was a small wallaby, caught in the act. It bolted, propped a little distance away and turned. Clenched between its teeth was a stem with several tiny roses bobbing at the end—a coy marsupial Carmen.

I laughed, but stopped as I spotted eight more wallabies. I stared, and they stared back, in a single frozen instant of mutual shock before they took off, through the hingelock fence, above the lower chickenwire. They exited at many different spots.

I walked up closer; the hingelock netting was unbroken, although its rusty rectangles were bent out of shape. I’d underestimated the wallabies. In my month-long absence the others must have figured that if my weird wallaby could do it, so could they; and since I wasn’t here marking my territory, it was theirs for the taking.

So I had to clip chickenwire to the upper section as well, an expenditure of money and time that I certainly didn’t need. But eventually I managed it. The wallabies gave up their acrobatic feats of invasion. Except for one.

I couldn’t see how even a double-jointed wallaby could get through chickenwire. He looked at me most boldly when I threw up my hands and asked ‘HOW?’, before resuming his nibbling of rose leaves.

Then I saw him make one exit and one entrance—by climbing up the netting, not by pushing through or jumping over. What on earth had he been genetically crossed with? Wallabies aren’t supposed to climb; it isn’t natural for wallabies to climb. But then, I suppose neither is it natural for humans to walk on tightropes. I guess he was just clever and keen—and weird.

For months I wasn’t sure if he ever left the yard at all. He was so relaxed that I saw him drinking at the horse trough near my clothesline. It was an incongruously domesticated scene, because he was a wild animal.

I began to rather like his company, and wished I didn’t like my heritage roses so much. I’d hoped the latter might get ahead of him and survive his indiscriminate pruning, but he was too conscientious for that.

The irony was that his favourite was the Autumnalis, an 1812 shrub rose that had been the only rose the possums didn’t eat. So I’d propagated dozens of cuttings and planted them in various parts of the yard, in rows like hedges and in corners so they could spread. They should have been metres-high and-wide, bearing masses of bright green leaves and clusters of little pink buds and creamy-white roses. Perversely, he stripped them all, thorns notwithstanding.

But just as I’d given up, resigned myself to sharing the house garden with him and his unorthodox topiary forever, he disappeared. I worried about what had happened to such an outsider, away from his particular refuge. And I missed him.

I still keep an eye out for him, look twice at any darker wallaby out there in the paddock, but whether he found a less demanding fence or a less crabby hostess, or met a tragic end, I don’t think he’s coming back.

And unfortunately my latest possum intruder eats the Autumnalis as well as all the other roses.

ELEGANT, NEGLIGENT DUCKS

Being inside a cloud makes for mystery, not clarity, and at 1000 metres up, I get a lot of cloud visits. My large double dam, slowly being throttled by reeds, was floating in the filtered light of thin cloud as I walked around it, glad to be out of the cabin after a week of wet days.

I like to see what’s sprung up or out after such weather. For example, there’s usually some new fungi, glowing in pleated orange lampshades on blackened tree trunks or erupting in pristine white parasols in the middle of a paddock. They may not last long, so I like to photograph them in their prime.

Not so ephemeral, but certainly shy, are the waterbirds who use my big dam. As it’s not near the house, they usually have it to themselves, watched only by the kangaroos and wallabies and the horses. These all love the native grass in the clearing above the dam, and keep it cropped so short you’d swear it was mown, which is probably also why no trees seed there.

The waterbirds get a shock whenever I do appear, to start the pump for example, and either take off in flutter and flurry, dive under the water or scoot into the reeds. Often only the dark ruffled chicks of the Dusky Moorhens are left circling and chattering to each other.

But this day, the enveloping cloud seemed to muffle sound as well as sight, and through the reeds I spotted a pair of Wood Ducks. I crept towards them, and got closer than usual, but they sensed me coming and waddled off into the mist. Keeping their heads averted as if I didn’t exist, they were muttering to each other at the disturbance. I’ve noticed that they rarely do look at me.

This shy and very elegant native duck is my most consistently resident waterbird.

The male has little patterning on his pearl-grey body, and a chestnut-brown head, with a black strip, a feathery mane, at the back of his head. His folded wings create bold dark stripes down his back. While he gets the smart tuxedo treatment, she has a more delicate feminine patterning. She’s a softly spotted greyish-brown, with white stripes across her brown head; since her mane is also brown, it’s only noticeable in profile, as an odd shape. Hence they are sometimes called Maned Wood Ducks. Until they are grown up, the young ones of both sexes look like their mum.

Occasionally the couple fly over to the small dam below my house yard, but they hardly get to land on the surface, trailing arrows of ripples behind them, before the bossy magpies hassle them to leave. After a lot of protesting squawks on their part and insistent cries from the maggies, the pair take wing, back over the treetops to where they belong. No outsiders allowed in the magpies’ local pool. They will allow the ducks to fossick amongst the tussocks around the dam wall for a time, but not to go in.

Just once, I saw a lone cormorant on this dam. Looking very out of place, it remained there for quite a few hours, perhaps resting after a long flight. Black and white, distinctly shaped, I think it was a Little Pied Cormorant. The magpies didn’t bother it, so maybe there is a hospitality code for weary travellers?

Recently I spotted the ducks pecking about on the bank. By the time I got there with the camera, they’d taken flight. I waited as they wheeled about; they headed back to land on the water. As the female hit the surface, her mane feathers fluffed out, punkish, backlit by low sunlight, as noticeable as her partner’s for once. The magpie sentinels must have been on a break, for the pair swam about for several minutes before waddling up the bank.

Some years ago, my partner and I found a baby Wood Duck stumbling up our track, a long, dry, and very exposed way from the big dam where its parents were based. It had obviously been attacked, with an open wound on the side of its head. We wrapped it in a sweater and took it home to keep warm and safe at least, but without much hope that it would survive. It didn’t.

Further up the track to the dam we found two dead ducklings. There were none visible on the water. The parents could have been frightened off by a predator and abandoned the nest. I wonder how any young survive, since it’s fairly common to see a Wood Duck couple leading their string of ducklings right into the traffic to cross a busy road; they aren’t the smartest or most responsible of parents.

I guess they just have lots of ducklings and consider them expendable. Cute and fluffy to our eyes they may be, but that counts for nothing in their tough world. With Wood Ducks, it’s survival of the luckiest.

MYSTERY THIEF

Just when I think I have the measure of the small creatures that might possibly invade my cabin’s inner sanctity, they confound me anew, as did this particular ‘tail’.

I had been using cotton buds—those plastic sticks with cotton wool on the ends—for dabbing Hypericum oil (St John’s Wort). As I was only using one end at a time, I would lay the cotton bud in the saucer beside the little brown bottle of oil. This sat on my high chest of drawers in the bedroom.

For about a week I kept going to use the other end of the half-used cotton bud that I thought I’d left in the saucer, but since none was there I clearly hadn’t. Senility was approaching faster than I’d expected. Then I began saying to myself, ‘But I’m sure ... well, almost sure ... I left one there!’ Had it been bumped off, blown off? But to where? I began to suspect theft, but by what, for what purpose?

Agatha Christie’s Poirot would have been proud of me: I moved the saucer and bottle to the kitchen, to a lower, more watchable bench; I made a note whenever I left a half-used cotton bud there. They kept disappearing. Whew! I was no more senile than I’d been a few weeks ago.

I placed an unused cotton bud there instead. It was still there in the morning. So it was the oil that was the attraction, but why not just suck it or eat the cotton wool off the stick? Why take the stick away, and to where?

Thinking of the tooth fairy’s palace of baby teeth, I began imagining a delicate white edifice of criss-crossed plastic sticks, a summerhouse for some small creature. But what was it and where did it live? Surely my cabin had no cracks big enough for a creature lugging cotton buds to squeeze through?

Nothing was being caught in the live trap, although the cheese was taken every night, so it must be something so small, so light, that it didn’t set off the spring under the cheese platform. Mature antechinus are heavy enough to spring the trap. The other odd thing was that something was also dragging my little yellow pear tomatoes from their dish, and eating them. Antechinus are carnivores.

Then one night I heard the trap door snap shut, but none of the usual noisy scrabblings followed. In the morning I carried the trap down to the forest to release whatever it was. I turned it up towards me, so my captive could slip to the bottom, and opened the door for a peek first. There were two very small critters in there; two slim, sleek, grey animals with pale tummies, pointy noses, pink ears and delicate legs that seemed longer than those on any antechinus I’d seen. They leapt up towards me—or freedom—which was not antechinus behaviour either. I quickly tipped them into the tussocks and they disappeared.

Were these my cotton bud thieves? Or were the two events unrelated? Poirot, where are you when I need you?

Despite looking through my books and asking friends at another wildlife refuge, I still don’t know what they were, nor if they took the cotton buds, or where to. A Dunnart? A New Holland Mouse? Or a House Mouse, at which I should go ‘E-eek!’?

Having no further need of oiled cotton buds, the thefts were stopped; the mystery remained unsolved. But I am still hoping to find that fanciful white structure; after all, if a bowerbird has an aesthetic sense, why can’t a mini marsupial?

INEDIBLE EDIBLE GRUBS

When I’m not murdering earthworms in my erratic forays in the garden, I’m probably coming close to scalping witchetty grubs. When exposed to the sudden light, these fat white corrugated grubs, like Michelin Men amputees, curl helplessly and wave their ends at me.

One end is yellowish-orange and black, which I’m told is the head, although I haven’t looked very closely. I always quickly re-bury them elsewhere and hope for the best.

The name ‘witchetty grub’ is used for wood-eating larvae, not only of the cossid moth of Central Australia, where it was/is an important protein food for indigenous peoples, but of other moths and longicorn beetles. It seems that they get called witchetty grubs only in the context of being considered as food. As a vegetarian, I don’t even have to consider whether I’d eat one. Since they’re quite fat, and grow to about 70 millimetres long, there’d be more substance to one than on a frog’s leg I imagine, but I’m not tempted.

And yes, once upon a long pre-vegetarian time ago, being wined and dined by a prospective lover at a fancy French restaurant in Sydney, I did try frog’s legs in some sort of sauce—and snails. The garlic butter on the snails was the best part of the meal. Isn’t it amazing what you do when you’re young and silly and want to impress with your sophistication?

According to others, witchetty grubs can be eaten raw, when it’s said they taste like almonds, or cooked in hot ashes, when they’re like cooked egg in a crispy chicken-skin wrapper. I’ll take their word for it. Raw! Can you imagine it writhing on your tongue before you bite? Ugh! But then, in my young-married days, I did eventually overcome my distaste and eat raw oysters, knowing they were alive, by blanking out the knowledge for that instant. I couldn’t have managed that if they’d wriggled.

Real witchetty grubs live underground and feed on the roots of certain trees, especially acacias, but I find my variety well away from any trees, perhaps feeding on old rotting wood buried in the ground. I assume they’ll become big grey wood moths of some sort.

I love those intricate drawings of cut-through sections of multilayered man-made or natural environments. Yet if I saw one that showed all the tunnels and hidey-holes of the busy and burgeoning life underground, no matter how small the creatures, it would possibly stop me ever putting spade to soil again.

It’s that old concept of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Once awakened, alerted, informed, my sensitivity and my conscience will give me hell about life under earth, and I have enough trouble dealing with life on earth.

PETRIFIED BIRDS

I have great admiration and affection for the nocturnal birds called Tawny Frogmouths. As a teenager, hurrying home along our darkening country lane after the late bus had dropped me up at the main road, I would often start at the faint glint of eyes in an oddly angled silhouette on a fence post.

This being the early sixties, I was not only allowed but expected to walk the several kilometres home by myself, even if it was winter, with night coming in early and no street lights along the road. I never had a torch with me.

My family owned one but it was kept for blackouts and for going to the outside toilet, the ‘dunny’, on moonless nights—a scary trip to be avoided if at all possible, moon or torch or no. If I couldn’t talk someone into coming outside with me, I’d first peer out from the back door to check if the axe was still embedded in the woodchopping block, so I’d know no baddie was hiding behind the tank stand with axe raised to murder me. Then I’d dash across the yard to the toilet, where at least only spiders threatened.

Back then I didn’t know what the fence-sitting creature was, but I grew to know well its shape, its silhouette. Years later, when first living here, I came across that familiar shape in a very wrong time and place. Daytime, driving down the dirt road through the forest, my husband and I saw a large streaked and spotted brownish-grey bird entangled in the barbed-wire fence beside the road.

It must have been struggling for some time, as it had wound itself further around the twists of a barb through a wing. Gritting our teeth at the pain we knew we must cause, we put a coat over the bird and unwound it off the fence as carefully as we could. Still wrapped, we brought it home, and made a temporary shelter for it.

Cutting the top off a box, we attached a screenwire flap and set the ‘nest’ in a sunny spot by the window. We eased the bird out of the coat and onto the soft dry grass bedding in the box. There was a bit of flapping and then it settled. Nothing else seemed to be wrong with it apart from the wound on its wing and the shock. We didn’t know if it had torn a tendon or just flesh, so whether it would mend to fly again.

We left it alone for a few hours to adjust. But what was this very odd-looking creature? From our bird book, it was unmistakably a Tawny Frogmouth, and the attitude depicted there was also unmistakably that of my fence-sitter of years ago. When alarmed, at night they fly away, but by day or at its dim edges, their defence is to freeze in that extended pose—petrified in several senses of the word.

I tried to give it water from an eyedropper, and after a few goes it accepted the drops. I shall never forget the way it did so. Head up, neck outstretched, beak raised and slightly parted as if for a kiss, eyes closed. The quaint erect fluff of feathers above its beak, like a lady’s ‘fascinator’ hair adornment that had slipped slightly, waved gently each time it sipped a water drop.

As we grew more accustomed to each other, I saw more attitudes and aspects. Its mouth or beak was a very wide gape, so that’s where the ‘frog mouth’ comes from. There was also something froglike about the flattish sloped head and the way the round black and yellow eyes looked up at me from its extended ‘eyebrow’, where a frog often has a stripe of different colour.

After a few days it seemed more active, especially at night, so we put the open box on its side in our small interim vegetable garden, which had a netting fence surround but no roof. We’d had no success in getting our frogmouth to take any food, as mushed up oats or similar vegetarian offerings or even dead flies didn’t appeal to a hunter like this.

For a few days more it sort of stumbled about lopsidedly in the garden, moving the injured wing more and more, hopefully catching food like beetles. Then one morning it had gone. Flown the coop, we hoped, to resume its wild life.

Decades later, I was walking through my forest in the late morning, when I spotted two of those shapes ahead, silhouetted on a branch. I started at the familiarity. One would have gone unnoticed, taken for a broken-off dead branch, but two almost identical broken branches side-by-side stood out—as two Tawny Frogmouths playing dead.

Even when I went right up below them, they held the pose, frozen at a half-upright angle, brown and grey, mottled and flecked and streaked just like the branch on which they were perched. Their eyes were tightly closed, like a child when first learning to hide: ‘I can’t see you, so you can’t see me.’ These birds were adding, ‘And if I stay very still you’ll go away.’

I did.

MISSING TAILS

I am fortunate to be able to live amongst so many wild creatures, who belong here more than I do or ever could. Yet there are lots of tails I’d love to see but never will, because they’re extinct, or so few are left that they’re on the critically endangered list, or the steps on the way to that, the vulnerable or threatened species list.

The more I learn about the amazing animals around me, the more I grieve that so many equally unique and interesting Australian creatures are now gone. Their combined richness is what biodiversity means, and even though we may not understand how, all creatures, including us, have or had a place in an ecosystem; we are all linked. Like any chain, break or even weaken a link, and things eventually fall apart. Unfortunately those links are often invisible to us short-sighted slaves of Progress—until the effects of the breakdown, mostly irreversible, cause us trouble.

Australia holds the shameful record of having wiped out the most mammal species of any country in the world: 27 unique types of furry warm-blooded creatures, like us but oh so different, will never exist on this earth again, thanks to our clumsy Progress. And we’ve done it in only a little over 200 years. We’ve been rotten caretakers, compared to the original ones, who managed it so well for thousands of years.

We can add 23 bird species and four frog species to the tally of Australian creatures that are now gone forever. We can’t do a thing about this but we can help in trying to prevent it happening to the 22 animal species that are critically endangered right now, and the 345 species that are threatened!

My wildlife refuge is my own way of doing this, plus having my property conserved in perpetuity under the Native Vegetation Act, but there are various avenues and degrees of involvement for concerned people, landowners or not, including volunteering, observing and recording, donating and lobbying.

Even in towns, we can at least try to do no more harm, for example by keeping pets in at night when many native animals come out to feed. Think of small creatures like the Lesser Bilby, lost forever, every time it seems a chore to do so. It probably didn’t ever live in your area, but others of the 54 extinct animals did. If you want a more personal iconic image, find out from your local National Parks office what is under threat in your region, what birds, mammals and reptiles might not be around much longer.

When I see the wild animals around me living such efficient and rich lives in the natural world we inhabit here, requiring of me only that I should leave them alone, I wonder that we got our priorities so wrong, on such a large scale, in this country.

Most of the developed countries have similarly diminished the biodiversity of their original and often unique plants and animals, and sadly many of the developing countries are racing to catch us up in thoughtless greed.

Think of the tragedy of the once-mighty Amazon rainforests and all the creatures they supported. Or closer to home, the Great Barrier Reef, rescued from pollution, but now victim of global warming, doomed if governments don’t take brave steps towards a new way of sustainable living.

Change is essential. Tourism related to our World Heritage reef employs far, far more than the carbon-guilty coal industry, but it’s concentrated in fewer hands and buys less political influence. Forget finding Nemo: after all, what’s the point of cute fish or pretty coral if we can’t keep our polluting and privately profitable coal industry?

That’s apparently also worth more than our beaches and coastal cities, destined to be submerged as the polar ice melts and the seas rise. Who needs polar bears anyway?

It’s way past time that, as a species, we human animals got it right in how we value and treat what’s left of our natural world. And we don’t have much time to stop the ticking carbon clock. Apart from the intrinsic, intricate and unique beauty and diversity of our Earth—its land and sea and air, and all the creatures that live within—we need it to survive, so we can.

And even if we don’t have tails, I’m sure the other animals will tolerate us—so long as we stop wrecking this world we must all share. It’s the only one we’ve got.

The Greater Bilby: going, going...?

ADDENDUM

In memory of the tails that are gone forever...

EXTINCT MAMMALS

Eastern Bettong

Burrowing Bettong

Brush-tailed Bettong

Desert Rat-kangaroo

Pig-footed Bandicoot

White-footed Rabbit-rat

Central Hare-wallaby

Rufous Hare-wallaby

Eastern Hare-wallaby

Banded Hare-wallaby

Lesser Stick-nest Rat

Tammar Wallaby

Toolache Wallaby

Lesser Bilby

Short-tailed Hopping-mouse

Long-tailed Hopping-mouse

Big-eared Hopping-mouse

Darling Downs Hopping-mouse

Lord Howe Long-eared Bat

Crescent Nail-tail Wallaby

Western Barred Bandicoot

Desert Bandicoot

Broad-faced Potoroo

Gould’s Mouse

Christmas Island Rat, Maclear’s Rat

Christmas Island Rat, Bulldog Rat

Thylacine

EXTINCT BIRDS

Tasman Starling

White-throated Pigeon (Lord Howe Island), Lord Howe Pigeon

Red-crowned Parakeet (Macquarie Island), Macquarie Island Parakeet

Red-crowned Parakeet (Lord Howe Island), Lord Howe Parakeet

Rufous Bristlebird (western), South-western Rufous Bristlebird

King Island Emu

Kangaroo Island Emu

Emu (Tasmanian)

Roper River Scrub-robin

Buff-banded Rail (Macquarie Island)

Lord Howe Gerygone, Lord Howe Warbler

New Zealand Pigeon (Norfolk Island race)

Norfolk Island Long-tailed Triller

Norfolk Island Kaka

Southern Boobook (Lord Howe Island), Lord Howe Boobook Owl

White Gallinule

Paradise Parrot

Lewin’s Rail (western)

Grey Fantail (Lord Howe Island)

Grey-headed Blackbird, Norfolk Island Thrush

Vinous-tinted Thrush

White-chested White-eye, Norfolk Island Silvereye

Robust White-eye

EXTINCT FROGS

Southern Gastric-brooding Frog

Northern Gastric-brooding Frog, Eungella Gastric-brooding Frog

Sharp-snouted Day Frog, Sharp-snouted Torrent Frog

Southern Day Frog, Mt Glorious Torrent Frog

To be aware of, and, I suspect, horrified by, the wide range and number of our Threatened Fauna—critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable—who are at various stages along the way to joining those missing tails if we don’t act, go to:

http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/threatened/

CONTACTS

TAIL-SAVERS

Here’s a few places to start finding out how you can help prevent more tails from going missing, whether you own land or not! Most initiatives aren’t national; states have varying names and rules for similar progams.

Not all have websites, but where they do, to simplify the list, I have just given those, assuming that non-computer-using readers can look up the names in their phone books. Apologies to any major service I’ve omitted, but for the future, please let me know by posting a comment on my website: www.sharynmunro.com

I haven’t listed peripheral groups, such as the widespread local Landcare groups whose activities help with regenerating habitat, the loss of which has been a big factor in the demise of many species. My last book began: ‘Wherever you live, you need to feel safe and in tune with your surroundings.’ This is so for all creatures, not just we humans.

STATE CONSERVATION COUNCILS—umbrella bodies for many local and regional groups and programs, so great sources of linked contacts.

NEW SOUTH WALES

Nature Conservation Council of NSW: www.ncc.nsw.org.au

Landholder conservation options: www.environment.nsw.gov.au/cpp/

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Conservation Council of Western Australia. Inc:

www.conservationwa.asn.au

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Conservation Council of South Australia: www.ccsa.asn.au

TASMANIA

Parks and Wildlife Service Tasmania: www.parks.tas.gov.au/tpws.html

QUEENSLAND

Queensland Parks & Wildlife Service’ Nature Refuges:

www.epa.qld.gov.au/nature_conservation/nature_refuges/

NORTHERN TERRITORY

Conservation Commission of the NT (Natural Resources, Environment & the Arts):

www.nt.gov.au/nreta/wildlife/nature/index.html

VICTORIA

Parks Vic: http://www.parkweb.vic.gov.au/1conservation.cfm

Plus they suggest trying Friends of Parks Vic in each area, and:

Trust for Nature: http://www.trustfornature.org.au/

Bush Heritage: http://www.bushheritage.org.au/

Wildlife Victoria: http://www.wildlifevictoria.org.au/

THE THREATENED SPECIES NETWORK (Australian Government Natural Heritage Trust & World Wildlife Fund Australia):

Victoria email: tsnvic@wwf.org.au

NSW & ACT email: tsnnsw@wwf.org.au

Queensland email: tsnqld@wwf.org.au

Or go to: www.wwf.org.au

SPECIFIC

Save the Bilby Fund: www.savethebilby.icemedia.com.au

Save the Tasmanian Devil: www.tassiedevil.com.au

SOURCES

Any zoological facts in this book are correct to the best of my knowledge, as told to me by people who ought to know, or as referenced from my own books, many of which are getting on, like me. Op shops and charity book sales don’t usually offer the latest editions! However, I have checked online, and most facts remained current.

BOOKS

Australian Museum, The Complete Book of Australian Mammals, 1983, Cornstalk Publishing.

Barbara Burton & Harry Frauca, The Koala, and The Echidna, 1974, Lansdowne Press Young Nature Library.

Bruce Edwards & Harry Frauca, Possums, 1972, Lansdowne Press Young Nature Library.

David Rothenberg, Why birds sing, 2005, Penguin.

Ed. Jack Pollard, Birds of Paradox, 1967, Lansdowne Press.

Helen Piers, Frogs, 1979, Angus & Robertson.

Jill Morris & Lynne Tracey, Australian Frogs, amazing amphibians, 1995, Greater Glider Productions.

Pauline Reilly, Lyrebird, 1994, Kangaroo Press Pty Ltd.

Peter Slater, A Field Guide to Australian Birds, Volumes 1 & 2, 1970, 1974, Rigby.

Peter Wilson, Australia’s Insect Life, 1970, Horwitz.

Ralph Buchsbaum, Animals without backbones, vols.1 & 2, 1964, Penguin.

Raymond T. Hoser, Australian Reptiles & Frogs, 1989, Pierson & Co.

Rutgers/John Gould, Birds of Australia, 1967, Methuen.

WEBSITES USED AND RECOMMENDED

Wikipedia (by individual subject search)

www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/threatened/ (search for specific animals)

www.australianfauna.com

www.animalinfo.org/country/austral.htm

www.marsupialsociety.org

www.echidna.edu.au/monotremes/echidna_watch.html

http://www.bugsurvey.nsw.gov.au/html/popups/bpedia_26_vtol_ba-sw.html

http://www.backyardnature.net/earthwrm.htm

http://www.whybirdssing.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The traditional owners of these mountains, who respected all creatures and would never have let any tails go missing; ABC Radio National’s Bush Telegraph, whose ‘Country Viewpoint’ segment provided the initial outlet for some of these pieces; my friend and webmaster Fred Baker, whose encouragement to blogging led me to record my wild friends on camera and thus helped my memory, especially in illustrating these tales; my ‘official’ photographer, friend Robert Bignell, whose Old Brush property is also a haven for wildlife and sympathetic half-wild humans; editor Anouska Jones, who treads as lightly on my manuscripts as she does on the earth; designer Nanette Backhouse, who gave the book its final breath of life, so that ‘the words were made flesh’, with the perfect face to present to the world; and my publishers, Benny and Gareth St John Thomas of Exisle, who suggested this book, for their ongoing support.

THE WOMAN ON THE MOUNTAIN

Sharyn Munro

Living alone on a remote mountain would not be every woman’s choice. In fact, Sharyn Munro had so often been asked, ‘Why do you live there?’ that she decided to write a book as her answer. The Woman on the Mountain is the resulting lyrically written account of her journey towards a sustainable and truly rewarding lifestyle in her beloved mountain forests, with ‘only’ the abundant wildlife for company.

That decades-long journey was no planned passage, but a stumble over setbacks, propelled by almost accidental decisions. After the ups and downs of relationships, single parenting, and an unlikely variety of jobs, at 56 she found herself alone—in the bush. Unsure whether she could manage the hard work and mechanical demands of a self-sufficient lifestyle, she nevertheless gave it a go—and mostly succeeds.

She has also learnt to live in tune with nature on her wildlife refuge, despite the occasional discordant note, helping to repair past damage and trying to do no more. ‘Civilised conservation’ she calls it, ‘having your cake and eating it too—before the wallabies do.’

Sharyn’s sustainability concerns became global as climate change loomed—and arrived.

As more people long for a simpler life, The Woman on the Mountain reveals what can be achieved when vision and passion are combined with a little hard work, a lot of adaptability—and a dash of humour.

FRONT COVER FLAP

How would you feel if your neighbours ate your roses, solicited for sex on your front lawn or took over your shed? This is what Sharyn Munro has to put up with from her animal companions in her mountaintop refuge! Every day she learns something new about Australia’s amazing native animals, and in Mountain Tails she reveals what it’s like to live so close to nature—both the good and the bad!

PRAISE FOR SHARYN’S PREVIOUS BOOK, THE WOMAN ON THE MOUNTAIN...

Many of us dream of taking a bold step into a brand-new life away from it all. This is just what happened to Sharyn ... Why she went there, how she faces the challenges and accepts with whole-hearted love the trees, wildlife, and magical space around her is a story to inspire us all to make the world a better place.

—WOMAN’S DAY MAGAZINE

A complete treat, this book is daring and heroic.

—ISLAND MAGAZINE

...a book that might change your life.

—DR PETER HAY

BACK COVER FLAP

Sharyn Munro writes to make sense of the world. From award-winning short stories to non-fiction, her work explores her fellow creatures, human and non-human, their connection to each other and to place. She lives alone in a solar-powered mud-brick cabin on her mountain wildlife refuge in the New South Wales’ Upper Hunter—except when she’s out campaigning to save the planet for her grandchildren. Visit Sharyn at her website: www.sharynmunro.com.

BACK COVER MATERIAL

By the acclaimed author of The Woman on the Mountain, this collection of true tales about Sharyn Munro’s wild neighbours will delight her scores of fans as well as earn her many new ones. For 30 years Sharyn has shared her mountain forest wildlife refuge with the native animals, from quolls to kookaburras, snakes to kangaroos, frogs to koalas. As her sole companions for the past six years, they have provided a wealth of material that Sharyn has captured here in both words and drawings.

From short cherished glimpses to long endured invasions, Sharyn shares her experiences—intimate, humorous and incidentally informative—as well as her hopes and fears for these unique creatures’ futures. So come and take a walk in Sharyn’s gumboots and experience life on the wild side!