Mountain Tails

by Sharyn Munro

  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 ke
pt 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 thei
r 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?