A Visitor

Walking into the house of strangers always entails a bit of apprehension on both sides. What if we don’t get on? What if they have no sense of humour? Will the toilet have unplumbable idiosyncrasies? This female Agile Wallaby actually lives here but I think, captures perfectly the stance and expression of a first time visitor.

I arrived at Rachel and Russell’s house after setting Magnus off from the airport. (Pre-arranged surfing trip) .  They live about 30km out of Townsville in a house overlooking Mount Elliot National Park, famous for its Cloud Rainforest near the peak, the rest of the slopes are covered in hauntingly beautiful Dry Schlerophyll Forest. Their garden mainly consists of 5 acres of this and over the years they have tried to improve it by removing non-native plants and planting native ones. As well as being world experts on coral, they are passionate about the wild animals and birds on their block and as Russell told me, my first job night and morning would be to feed the wallabies and provide drinking water. (Same procedure as red squirrels but different subjects.)

As we sat and had a cup of tea flocks of birds came down like a song to drink at the bird bath, 5 cackling Friar Birds, 4 tweeting White-throated Honeyeaters, 3 blue- winged kookaburras  2 pale-headed lorikeets, and a Great Bowerbird in the Eucalyptus tree.

My bedroom has geckos chirruping on the walls inside and tree frogs croaking outside and the toilet works perfectly – so it looks like it will be a good start to my volunteering visits!