The Queen's Birthday

Roo crossing.

While Alison and her friends spent the long holiday weekend in Bendigo inspecting Grace Kelly's wardrobe, on Sunday morning Beau and I sped out beyond the western suburbs to do some geocaching. Beau had identified a tidy string of caches in close proximity to one another in and around the town of Eynesbury, Victoria. According to a sign we passed, it's home to one of the largest remaining grey box forests in the state. Eastern grey kangaroos live here, too, but the weather was too foul for them to be out.

Roadside at Five Ways, VIC

After knocking over a few simple but muddy caches, we stopped to tour Eynesbury itself, a historic town which has been almost completely redeveloped around a golf course. What remains of the original town looks nice; there's an elevated reservoir, and several sturdy blue stone dwellings, a number of which appear to have been adapted for utilitarian use. But the new houses are predictably ugly and flimsy-looking. There was a large site model on display at the sales office that I lingered over, and Beau bought a bag of potato chips at the open but idle convenience store next door. The shop was essentially just a large room that had been set up to sell the bare essentials to desperate townsfolk, and people like us who were driving through and had no other reason to be there. There were perhaps only 80 or so different products for sale, in quantities of only one or two each-- a sleeve of cookies, can of tuna, toothpaste, instant noodles, a tiny jar of mayonnaise, Coke, AA batteries and blister packs of sliced ham. I noted with some amusement that Aeroplane port wine jelly was also among them. Then we walked to the edge of a small lake where Beau rummaged in the bushes and discovered another cache that I had been ready to give up looking for.

The horse from Little River Ripley Reserve

In the rain and chill, that bag of chips had only whetted our appetites, so we crossed to the other side and ate lunch at the golf club, which had been established inside one of larger surviving blue stone buildings-- perhaps a former farm estate-- and expanded with sun rooms and other structural additions. What must have been the entire population of Eynesbury had just come in from the golf course, dripping, and was now placing orders at the counter. Our timing was almost perfect. Beau had a meat pie with chips and salad, and I had a bowl of vegetable soup.

After lunch, we left Eynesbury to find the cache that Beau really cared about-- one in a diabolically lengthy, complicated and far-flung series he'd been following for many weeks. Eventually we pulled into a small parking area off the highway at a place called Little River Ripley Reserve, which consisted of a metal pergola and a decaying picnic table amid a grove of enormous eucalypts that followed the banks of a stream. While I peed on an old grey box, he found the treasure, which included a small plastic horse I decided to keep.

We both had a nice time. I think Beau was disappointed by the rainy weather, but I thought it made for a good adventure. Thanks, Beau!

The Joeys

During dinner at the Shamrock Hotel in Numurkah a few days ago, Sue McGorlick mentioned an acquaintance of hers, Rachel, who rehabilitates orphaned baby kangaroos, or joeys. I'd been thinking about kangaroos and Australian road kill as a story topic for some time, so I asked Sue where this woman lived.

"Right here, in Numurkah," she said.

Rooster leans into a good scratch.

A couple of days later, on a sweltering December afternoon, Alison and I drove the short distance from Wunghnu to Rachel's house, a modern single-storey brick bungalow with an inner courtyard enclosed by a wooden fence. Outside, propped in a chair on the front stoop, was an effigy of Santa Claus in his heavy red-and-white cold-weather outfit; his cherubic face was covered with a rubber mask of the wolf man, gnashing his teeth.

"That's for the bad kids," Rachel remarked as she opened the gate to let us in.

Grazing in the middle of a patch of grass, amid flower beds, a large dog house and a portable swimming pool, were two Eastern Grey kangaroos in miniature: triangular heads, the ears of a wild hare and bodies engineered for propulsion. In profile, their leg-tail configuration reminded me of the legs of Mies Van der Rohe's Barcelona chair. Lizzie, the female, had been rescued from her mother after she'd been hit by a car in front of the college campus at Dookie, a town about 20 minutes south. Rooster, the male, was discovered hopping nearby, also without a parent. The two were the same age, but not siblings. Rooster's mother had likely met the same fate. According to Rachel, joeys can survive in the mother's pouch up to four days after she's been killed, so it's always necessary to take a close look when a downed kangaroo is discovered.

Lizzie prepares for a nap.

I had expected the joeys to be feral and aloof, but they enjoyed being petted and scratched, straightening their backs and leaning in blissfully. Their fur was surprisingly soft; on the ridge of Rooster's back it grew in both directions, permanently tousled. Lizzie's coat was fleecier and more Steiff-like, and on her belly she already had a tiny pouch of her own. I wrapped my fingers gently around Rooster's tail. It was heavy and bony. It felt like a garden house filled with wet cement, and as strong as a buggy spring. Rooster hopped away a few feet across the yard and then back to me for more attention.

Bag o' roo.

When it's time for bed, the joeys sleep in homemade cloth bags that Rachel hangs on a couple of door knobs in her living room. When she brought them out, Lizzie and Rooster climbed inside and Alison and I each got to hold a bagful of baby roo until it was time to leave.

Rachel explained that in another four months Lizzie and Rooster would be too big for her property and they'd be transferred north to a place near the border with New South Wales, close to where they'd be released.

"As sweet as they are now," she explained, "they go feral very quickly once they go back to the wild."