Cassowary Hill

By David de Vaux

Cassowary Hill pivots between Australia and the U.S., and highlights ticklish instances of fondness and disconnection between the two countries. Over the shifting ground of awkward friendships, love affairs and farcical grassroots activism are cast the shadows of interlopers. Some represent large nations that torment the inhabitant

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lanercost Arts LLC
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732572126

David de Vaux

David de Vaux is an almost lifelong expatriate and traveler of British origin. He has worked in five countries, in teaching, publishing, editing, arts funding and theater, and his published work includes two collections of poetry, some short fiction and contract assignments. After living for eight years on a mountain acreage in northern New Mexico, he and his wife are now based in Portland, Oregon - but with a stake in north-eastern Australia and in a bucolic tropical bolt-hole there, within reach of children and grandchildren.

Book preview

Lanercost Arts LLC

Previous editions published in Australia (2015) and North America (2016) by Glass House Books, an imprint of IP Pty Ltd, Brisbane

This third edition (2018) published by Lanercost Arts LLC – [e-mail]

Copyright © 2015 by David de Vaux

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data de Vaux, David.

Cassowary Hill, a novel / David de Vaux. – Third edition, 2018

ISBN 978-1-7325721-1-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-7325721-2-6 (e-book)

CONTENTS

HOW TO DEAL WITH STINGING TREES

TROPICAL MORALS

COLLABORATIONS

EASTWARD HO!

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

THE MADRAS HOTEL

NEW AND OLD AUSTRALIANS

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS

A CLATTER IN THE WOODSHED

THERE WAS NONE BOLDER

WHEREAS CASSOWARY HILL

THE KOOKABURRA LAUGHED

VERY SARTRE

Acknowledgements

Original book design: David P. Reiter

Cover images: Ralph Loesche, Rainforest; Miad, Southern Cassowary

Author photo: Lanercost Arts LLC

The author is indebted to his editors Michael Levine in New York and Lauren Daniels of Interactive Publications Pty Ltd in Brisbane.

1.

HOW TO DEAL WITH STINGING TREES

AFTER THREE MONTHS OF WANDERING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GLOBE, I arrived home one October morning to find that my front door had been kicked in by a large bird. This was my neighbor, who was standing in shattered glass on my doorstep, looking at me in a troubled way with his head on one side. Alfred stood almost eye-to-eye with me, but not quite – because at 160 centimeters he was on the short side for a southern cassowary.

Although I had learned a little about him through Jack, my friend and the former occupant of my cabin, we had become acquainted only in recent years. Nor was I responsible for his unlikely name. And yet, while you might say that a bird is a bird, I knew him by this name, as much as others knew me as Thomas, but not, I hope, in the mode of people who patronize their pets with grandiose human names. Alfred was his own person, and no one’s pet.

As he turned away from me to the hole in the door, and then back to me, apparently unable to make his next move, I realized he was in shock. I think we were both in shock. Nothing like this had happened to me before, and I would assume that was the case for Alfred.

The metal-framed door, for the record, had two panels of quarter inch tempered safety glass, the lower panel now having fallen out in small, harmless pieces like Roman tesserae, the way a shattered windscreen does – a slight consolation. But it was bad enough. This was not a feat that I personally would care to attempt without hobnail boots. His toes must still have been a little sore. I wasn’t going to try shoving past Alfred to get into the house. Cassowaries have huge feet, with a bayonet-like middle toe that has been known to unzip a man’s torso in a second, although this is not standard behavior. In reality my friend was a gentle giant.

Since our first meeting, time had shown that Alfred had nothing against me, and his destructive approach to my front door was not what it seemed. As a member of one of the largest bird species in the world, and the biggest animal in our forest, he had no need to throw his weight around. He must have seen his reflection in the glass, becoming confused and enraged by the very idea of an interloping male cassowary on his territory, and uncharacteristically lashed out with his massive foot before giving it sufficient thought. Alfred was no fool, but I had noted that he generally took life slowly, avoiding sudden movements, though he was capable of astonishing speed on occasion. A fruitarian, he was rarely faced with the need for a quick response. However, another cassowary on his turf would have been annoying, and he’d momentarily forgotten his own often-observed reflection in my kitchen window.

Most of us occasionally leap before we look, and conversely we can waver too long. A cassowary will tend towards the latter behavior. As Psycho Dobson, my dairy-farmer neighbor, once observed about Alfred, He’s built like a brick shithouse, and he’s a bit of a dummy, so I wouldn’t confuse him with any sudden moves. I came across him on the track once, when I was in the Land Cruiser, and he stood there like a Pommy in the shower; he didn’t know what to do next. Actually I didn’t believe the farmer, because Alfred always sloped off into the scrub when he saw or heard a vehicle, so I suspect this was largely a dig at my British roots.

I concentrated on putting the truck in the carport, getting out my bags and circumventing the front entry to use the French doors at the back. As I moved about inside, Alfred must have departed quietly to lick his wounds, and I was able to clear up the shattered fragments and tape a square of cardboard over the hole in the door.

Having returned to my home country a less abstemious man, in wine and other indulgences, than the one who set out, I uncorked my first bottle of Australian cabernet sauvignon, this one labeled The Barking Magpie, and claiming to be handcrafted where the vineyards meet the Southern Ocean. With a large picture of the magpie perched on a telegraph line, there was a description comparing this vintage with one of the great competitors of the bush. This seemed an unnecessarily aggressive way to represent the virtues of one of our homegrown beverages, especially a vin ordinaire.

Perhaps the magpie was a bird that might appeal to sport-loving Aussies, it occurred to me, for its brash and intimidating style – where others might appreciate the manners of the cassowary, which, although capable of using its great weight and strength in self-defense (even against its own reflection when confused), is actually a mild fruitarian and not a predator. On the other hand, for persons who liked a loud bird, there was a noise that Alfred sometimes made which could be matched by nothing smaller than an elephant.

On my first experience of this remarkable sound at six a.m. many years ago, I awoke in alarm and sprang from my bed, at first thinking that someone must be dynamiting in the vicinity. Once properly awake and aware that I was the only human in a large area of montane rainforest, I ran around inside the cabin, looking out of all the windows until I beheld my magnificent visitor through the kitchen window slats. He was barely a meter beyond the glass, the closest I had ever seen him, looking directly at me, as it seemed, although I came to believe that on these occasions he was unable to see beyond his reflection.

As I gazed in amazement, he swung his head down between his legs and delivered a powerful encore. There are few people who have heard the cassowary boom. So deep that it is close to an infrasound, or subsonic wave, the vibration is felt as much as heard. The nearest thing to this that I had ever come across was the sound of the lowest, foot-pedaled notes on the organ in my old school chapel. So profoundly deep were those bottom notes that there was a notice opposite the organist’s seat forbidding certain combinations of the foot-keys – lest mortared joints in the sandstone walls should turn to powder and stained glass saints rattle right out of their gothic window frames.

During the long tedium of my final flights, I had relished the thought of my imminent re-entry into familiar routines. I had also ruminated for some weeks on what I might find, once back in my sequestered hectares. Would there be another tree down across the entrance track? Would another possum have fallen through the flue into the kitchen range, and would the water tank have been drained dry because a white-tailed forest rat had nibbled a hole in the delivery line? The tall, traumatized bird standing in a pile of broken glass was one thing I hadn’t envisaged.

The final leg of the journey had been exhilarating. It was a bit over an hour’s drive from Cairns to Cassowary Hill. Having picked up my four-wheel-drive from its long-term park-and-shuttle facility, I fled the city on the Bruce Highway, stopping briefly at the last of the suburban shopping strips and picked up some groceries, torch batteries, and a few bottles of The Barking Magpie.

At a thousand meters of elevation, as I passed Lake Barrine on the Atherton Tableland, the morning air was like a hangover tonic. Taking the small road to Malanda, past little acreages and dairy farms, but branching off short of the town onto an even smaller road, my recently cabin-pressurized brain cleared. Near Lamin’s Lookout I turned onto the pot-holed lane that served Dobson Farm, that of my Pommy-bashing neighbor, Psycho, and about two kilometers further on plunged into the rainforest again, becoming the Cassowary Hill Nature Refuge entrance track – which I assumed had not been disturbed by a vehicle in three and a half months.

The track ascended further, winding around the side of a lesser mountain to the northwest of Mt Bartle Frere. Until my friend Jack Tryvet purchased these 72 hectares of near-pristine tropical forest in the mid-seventies, it was unnamed. Even the old-timers of the Djyribil tribe said they had no name for it. The terrain was too difficult and inaccessible for nineteenth-century pioneer farmers, and it seemed only to have been lightly logged seventy or eighty years before Jack got there, so that just a small percentage of the forest giants – some of the massive silky oak, tamarind, Queensland maple and kauri trees – had been felled and hauled out at that time. Besides, forest recovery in the wet tropics is rapid, so the only evidence of this former plunder was the relative dearth of trees with a diameter greater than three meters.

At first I found the condition of the narrow track unchanged since the day I’d driven out. It was scored by erosion in places and rocky in others, and the very architecture of the forest so grand, tall, and close-packed, the green lacework of the canopy filtering the sunlight overhead, that it commanded respectful negotiation. At the third or fourth steep bend there were indeed fallen branches blocking my progress. I’d been away too long for that not to be so, but none were thicker than a large man’s thigh and they were quickly carved up with the chainsaw kept ready in my vehicle for that contingency. The attached greenery was already rotting into leaf mold, showing that the logs had been down for weeks. Plainly, there had been no recent human visitors.

After five minutes, cresting a final rise on the track, I arrived in the grassy, sunny glade at the top. This was the one and a half hectares that had been partially cleared and contained unexpected palms, flowering ginger shrubs, a lawn – too profusely overgrown on that day to be called such – and a hand-built, half-timbered cabin that we called the studio. Built by Jack thirty years earlier, it was now my hideaway. The property as a whole was not only my current refuge, but also a legally designated conservation zone.

It was a relief to be in the scrub again, back in my rainforest home. And yet there had been times when I worried that I’d been living in the sticks for too long. As one who had taken himself into exile at 22, far from my English home and from the very particular conventions of my Pryce-Bowyer relations, to roam and loiter in obscure and disparate places for almost a decade, and then, for twenty years, to make an agreeable home of Queensland’s rural tropics, I might have become more adapted, not to say eccentric, than I’d realized.

Setting out for North America a few months before, the open-ended plan had been to combine business with pleasure. I’d hoped to find a new perspective on both the wider world and the inner Thomas, having left behind the mother of Annie (our only child, now grown up), and believing that Paulette and I had met our marital Waterloo.

My current sanctuary of a home, tucked away in a mountain, had been my writing studio for several years. I used to stay there a few days at a time. It was the ideal hideout, but I also used to wonder if people were right when they said that humans just weren’t meant to live in rainforests. No person who has holed up in one for a whole monsoon season can doubt that, they would say. But I did come to doubt it, and still do. Over the previous few months, as I lugged my swag on the other side of the world, it had become clear to me that the studio would henceforth be my full time address. I would drink with the flies, as they say, though I would never really be alone in that moist, tropical Arcadia, teeming with life as it was. Like Alfred, I was the type of animal that liked rain.

The flames of bloodwood and she-oak logs leapt once again in the firebox of my kitchen stove, and the aged Rayburn, having cooked me a homecoming meal, continued to heat the shower water while I contemplated the stillness of my surroundings, and the luxurious prospect of becoming a permanent part of that stillness.

Next day I made a trip into Malanda village to pick up the mountain of mail being held for me at the Post Office, called into the bank and general store, and thought of slipping home again before bumping into too many people. I had sorting out to do before I would be ready to see familiar faces. In a place like this one knew almost everybody. Most were amiably inquisitive and couldn’t be fobbed off without causing offense. There would be some things to organize later in the larger town of Atherton while the glazier had my front door for a few hours to replace the broken panel. (This time we’d use thicker glass, though I doubted that Alfred would make the same mistake twice.)

But, I knew I shouldn’t retreat into the trees just yet – the trees, that is, of Cassowary Hill. I had to talk to Paulette before I could do much else.

She could have been described, with that news reporters’ coyness, as my estranged wife; we had agreed at long distance – in a pained email exchange – that I would not be returning to live at Wongabel. I had left our family home still in a fog about how this was going to work out, knowing little of what was really in her mind. For the previous two years we had existed on autopilot, stretching out the remnants of a marriage. Events of earlier years had broken the spell. We had each spoken of leaving, but emotional and practical inertia had gripped our lives. However, we had finally agreed on a divorce and consulted lawyers.

Even if I had not met Emjay that year, or for one minute imagined another woman in my life, the relief I felt at that moment would have been profound – to have turned the page. It was as if traces of a dentist’s nitrous oxide had been wafting around in my brain, suppressing pain but also blurring thought and emotion, and now a welcome breeze had blown the soporific gas away. At the same time I was conscious that for my ex (as from henceforth she would be to myself and to others), the process might have felt different. I had spent my anger, writing it out in journals, talking it out with her, raging alone through exhausting, sleepless nights. I suspected that for her the terrible cocktail of anxiety, regret, and fury was differently mixed, and perhaps differently timed, so I feared that her suffering was not yet over.

I drove from Malanda over to Wongabel. Paulette and I had spoken on the telephone, though that was unsatisfactory because we were cut off by the wavering signal to my mobile phone at the Hill. There was no telephone line to the cabin, as indeed there was no physical connection or penetration of any sort from the outside world. Neither the postman nor any other service provider ever entered that forest.

Getting over to Paulette’s place (which of course had for over twenty years been our place) was primarily to speak with her, but I also needed to make some firm decisions with Tryvet about continuing with our house swap arrangement. I would pick up a load of my things. About twenty kilometers away from the Hill in a straight line, it was considerably further along the twisty cross-country roads. Paulette was expecting me and we exchanged a few words. We had agreed on most of the arrangements that had to be made, and neither of us wanted a fight.

As I parked outside my old workshop, I looked around at hundreds of reminders of a life shared for so long on this piece of an old farm. Where once were corn and potato fields were now outbuildings and gardens, exotic fruit trees, mature stands of eucalypts, melaleucas, grevilleas and banksias. Between these groves were the mown glades which in school holidays once reverberated with the shouts of BMX cyclists doing jumps over piled-up tires, or with the yelled scoring of badminton players, or on certain moonlit nights, with the whiz and roar of a bonfire as guitar chords and voices floated up with the sparks. These snug hectares and the old wooden farmhouse and outbuildings, much modified and extended, constituted the homestead we had created for ourselves. I took my filing cabinet, boxes of books, tools, clothes, and CDs, and shoved them into the back of the ute. I attached the trailer and filled that, too, with the semi-useful detritus of an old life. It was a trying task. Some things were best got out of the way, but otherwise I really wanted to leave this former world of mine intact. It was all hers now; she would care for it well, and our daughter Annie could return whenever she wished, to find the old place as she remembered it. Such were my thoughts. Of course, I hoped that Annie would also want to come up to Cassowary Hill, but it was not, after all, her childhood home.

Besides the main house, there was on the property the two-bedroom cottage that I had built twenty years before and which Jack Tryvet had moved into. A gradual process had brought us to this exchange of houses. Sometime in the eighties he was a regular supper guest, and after a while he would stay at weekends in a guests’ extension we had created. In the mid-nineties an old knee injury flared up, one that had given him sporadic trouble since he’d fallen into a terrorist man-trap in the Bornean jungle in another lifetime as he used to say. A poisoned bamboo spike had jammed into his knee joint. Surgery fixed it for a short while, but eventually the leg became so bothersome again that he found the more rugged life at Cassowary Hill difficult to sustain, so he rented the cottage from us and took up residence on the periphery of our lives at Wongabel. I began to use the Hill more and more as my writing studio, and the arrangement logically evolved into the simple swap that suited us both.

Tryvet was an almost unfathomable person, a fatally attractive man, still youthful in his late sixties – a Graham Greene character who was equally destructive to himself and to others. All in our family were, by turns, captivated and harmed by the old rogue. I had become used to pushing that to the back of my mind, but, as I drove along the little driveway down to the cottage, some of that history automatically surfaced. I stopped the truck close to the verandah, switched off the engine, and momentarily leaned my head against the steering wheel. How would I find him today, half a year into the new regime of sobriety he was planning when I last saw him?

The windows were closed and the doors locked. There was always only one reason for that, but I banged on the French doors nevertheless. Not a stir. His utility was parked in the carport and through a window I could see his canvas sling bag, the one he used when he went anywhere, thrown down on a chair. I ventured a couple of restrained honks on my horn but, as De La Mare might have noted if he’d been there, they fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house. The old bugger must have fallen off the wagon. He only slept like this – unrousably in the middle of the day – after a binge on the turps.

In spite of our history, there remained a stubborn affinity between Tryvet and myself. At present there were practical reasons why we didn’t go our separate ways, and indeed, why I hadn’t kicked his arse from Wongabel to Wollongong. But I could not have begun to imagine, at this time, the turmoil which he would soon be stirring up for me – drawing into a mad and gathering maelstrom even my client Bia, my neighbor Farmer Dobson, the wife of a former Prime Minister, the U.S. Senate, Australian ABC television, a distinguished diplomat, a murderous five-star general and the innocent non-human residents of Cassowary Hill.

I found an old cheese cracker packet in the garbage can behind the cottage, tore off a piece of the card to write a message on the back, and weighted it on the doormat with a stone:

Called in Thurs 3pm. Seems like a tomb here.

Come and see me tomorrow or at the weekend.

I’ll be home. TPB.

My immediate tasks at Cassowary Hill were practical ones, and they would take at least a week to complete. Firstly, the vegetation there grew as you watched it in any season, let alone if you left it to its own devices for over three months. So there was slashing and clipping to be done around the cabin itself. A chain saw and a pair of long-handled clippers were, in that place, the regrettable tools of a foreign intruder. But the track, if left unattended for too long, would disappear altogether as the foliage on either side put out its lateral growth; fallen trees formed barriers, sometimes with bulky living epiphytes still attached; neighboring trees spawned suckers in the gaps between them, and inexorably the life on either side of the track conspired to fill the space in the middle and close out the light from above. Then the aerial roots of ficus plants would descend from the branches of their host trees, and into the whole vigorously thickening tangle of cellulose, the pioneering tendrils of tropical creepers would advance from every angle, exploiting the newly available beams and struts.

To the uninitiated, the generative power of vegetation in the wet tropics can be unnerving. Before Cassowary Hill became its official title, Jack satirically experimented with typical names of English country houses: Briar Court, Arden Woods, The Brambles – and for a while even ironically called his place Tryvet’s Triffids, in reference to the terrifying advance of malevolent vegetation in John Wyndham’s horror novel. Fecundity in nature can make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Such is the awesome fertility of vegetation in the wet tropics, unceasingly seeking to reclaim and repossess. Yet it’s easily matched by the thousands of insect species that thrive in that environment – by the collective vigor and rapacity with which the communities of running, crawling, squirming, burrowing, or flying creatures will colonize, inhabit, dismantle, or devour a rotting log, the corpse of an animal, or in some cases even an injured but still-living host.

There was also a pressing need for routine maintenance of the systems I had in place to supply my own water main, hot water, electricity, cooking, drainage, and sanitation. These were green systems, powered by the sun and the swift flow of water in our mountain stream.

A little while after I had taken on the cabin as a writing studio, Tryvet and I agreed to undertake the steps needed to establish a legal nature refuge in perpetuity, involving a conservation agreement with the state government. It was Tryvet’s property, and with it he had chosen to do something quietly heroic, the real beneficiaries of which would be the flora and fauna of the place, including a number of endangered species. Amongst the most rare animals of the forest were green ringtail possums, Lumholtz tree kangaroos, giant lizards known as Boyd’s forest dragons, and the double-wattled southern cassowary whose domain it really was. For a man who had spent much of his life prowling around in deserts and jungles and the back alleys of exotic cities – generally focusing with equal dedication on the pursuit of women, fast cars, fine liquor and terrorists – it could be seen as an improbably altruistic impulse. But I had found him to be a man of constant surprises, some considerably less pleasing than this one.

The nature refuge was a positive outcome of the working friendship between Jack and myself and an offshoot of the agreement by which we lived in each others’ houses. That arrangement might have been judged by some as a curious denouement for the former protagonists in a carnal triangle, but who could deny the benefits to conservation?

Water from a stream on the property had always been pumped to a tank located on the hillside above the cabin, and a petrol-driven pump had been used for the purpose, manually cranked up at intervals, as necessitated by the falling level in the holding tank as water was drawn off. Gravity delivered water from the tank to the house. The wood-fueled stove in the kitchen was for cooking, hot water, and ambient warmth in our mild tropical winter. There was no electric power, and kerosene lamps provided lighting. These arrangements were effective but, in the spirit of the conservation agreement, we decided to install a green pump – a significant advance on the old clonking ram pumps, but still powered by the flow of stream water diverted through a drive tube between an upstream dam and the pump itself. We also put solar panels on the carport roof, and six storage batteries inside, with a voltage inverter.

In my recent absence the green pump had stopped. The diaphragm had ruptured and I needed to fit a new one, which I would cut out of an old tractor inner tube. I also needed to saw and split a new store of dry logs for firewood. But the greatest urgency was created by a fresh crop of young stinging trees that had sprung up along the path to the stream. They had to be dug out.

The gympie gympie stinging tree has been described by an Australian scientist as the world’s most painful plant. He says we should be thankful that it doesn’t hunt in packs. The invisible silicon hairs, which pierce the skin to inject a neurotoxin, are present on every part of the plant – leaves, branches, trunk, and roots. Being stung is a profound experience, equivalent to being simultaneously electrocuted and burned with acid. Fortunately, the stingers only occur in places that have been opened up to full sunlight, such as along footpaths or where big trees have fallen, creating a break in the forest canopy. Salutary experience had taught me to be alert to those conditions.

I had devised a method for dealing with stinging tree saplings without being stung in the process, using a hay fork and a long-handled spade. The stems of young stingers are springy, and the large, heart-shaped leaves are a menace as they flop about. At the time of my own experience of their excruciating potential I was alone, so I drove myself the ten kilometers to a clinic in town, and came close to passing out on the way. The doctor gave me morphine. There is a story of American GIs on jungle training in Queensland in the 1940s, who were given a short break to swim in a forest creek. The sweltering young men stripped off their fatigues and ran, eager and naked, towards the creek through a copse of slender trees. They were stinging trees. The leaves raked so much of one man’s skin that he had an immediate and fatal heart attack. It is said that on another occasion a soldier shot himself after using a stinging tree leaf as toilet paper.

And yet, compared with the Amazon or African rainforests, there were few real dangers at Cassowary Hill. You came to know how to live there safely. The venomous red-bellied black snakes made visitors anxious, but I knew that they were as diffident around humans as we with them. There was a huge one living behind the retaining wall at the back of the carport, and if I was lucky enough to arrive on the scene when he was sunning himself in the open, my heart thrilled. He was a sleek and dignified native – which could not have been said of his interloper.

For the moment I was more concerned with practical chores than nature study, in order to be free for my real job. There were two manuscripts awaiting the last stage of my edit. I’d been working on them sporadically while away, and my clients had been patient. As sole proprietor of Dogsbody Press, and its only worker, I felt the obligation acutely. Contract writing and publishing services could provide a precarious living, but none at all without good faith and a decent reputation.

With the editing jobs done, I could start on the Moraes project – the ghost writing assignment that had been the main rationale for an American trip.

Bia Moraes was a celebrated photographer. When I had arrived in California in July of that year, in addition to a suitcase containing my personal things I was carrying a laptop, a half-empty briefcase, and a microphone. When I returned home, the briefcase was crammed with Bia’s notebooks, photocopied letters, news-cuttings and articles; and the laptop was loaded with gigabytes of sound, text and graphics files.

TROPICAL MORALS

RETURNING FROM MALANDA ONE AFTERNOON I ENCOUNTERED DOBSON, my farm neighbor, as I was going past his dairy. I generally tried to butter him up, but in truth he was the archetypal surly redneck. A man of terrifying convictions, he once informed me that our national day for indigenous Australians had been instituted as a closed season on the persecution of darkies. He laughed at his own macabre jokes because no one else did, but in this case what he thought was my incomprehension obviously confirmed his once voiced suspicion that I was one beer short of a six pack.

He was said to have a ferocious temper, and I had always been anxious for his animals, having heard Tryvet say that Dobson could lose control of himself completely if a cow happened to take a wrong turn in the milking bails, once actually clubbing one to death with a steel spring leaf from the nearby wreck of a truck chassis.

I want a word with ya, mate! he yelled this time from inside a cattle pen. I stopped the Toyota, turned off the engine, and ventured a breezy response.

No worries, Psycho. Always ready to stop for a neighbor! I still found it hard to call him by this name, but he once snarled when I called him Mr Dobson. I took his nickname as an advisory, but supposed it was bestowed on him in good humor long ago by larrikins at the Malanda pub. Few seemed to know him by any other name, and he answered to it.

I want you to know that I’m going to put a locked gate at the bottom of the track up to your place, he said unceremoniously. I was flabbergasted by this bizarre announcement.

Psycho was a misanthrope (and also asexual by all accounts, it being said that the legend Piss Off was tattooed on his foreskin, but that may have owed more to the fertility of fellow barfly imaginations than Psycho’s), and verbal threats were the greater part of his conversational repertoire.

All I could say was, Surely, it’s Jack Tryvet’s private road?

Pigsarse to that! When Tryvet first got here, he and I pegged out the route for his entry road, because he said it would be best for us to agree on it, as we’re neighbors like, and it would have to start where his easement through my farm finishes.

So you both agreed to it, then, I suggested, puzzled by this new manifestation of his truculence.

Yeah, we did. But I didn’t know then that we’d got his boundary wrong, did I? It turns out the first hundred meters of Tryvet’s track, beyond the easement, cuts across a corner of my land. He spat on his hand and smeared the cow dung on his forearm.

Well, that’s most unfortunate, Psycho. But surely after all these years the regular use of the track has established a right of way by default?

It might have done, maybe, but not now that the public’s gonna to start comin’ in. He paused, and looked at me defiantly. I had no idea what he was talking about and waited for him to explain further. If there’s any right of way bin made by them legal rules, it’s just for Tryvet goin’ back and forth…

Or whoever is resident on his property, I added.

Well that might be or it might not be, said Dobson menacingly. But now it’s bin made a conservation park, the public’s gonna wanna be comin’ in, ain’t it? I just managed to follow his drift amidst all the gonnas and wannas and comins and goins.

It’s a nature refuge, Mr. Dobson. That’s all. The public won’t be coming in. There’ll be no more use of the track than you’re accustomed to.

O yeah? I know yiz friggin’ greenies are liars, and I don’t trust yiz as far as I could throw ya. Why would ya make it a conservation park if it weren’t to start bringin’ in the friggin’ public?

No, that’s quite wrong. It’s just a way of protecting the vegetation and the animals that live there, I assured him. It won’t affect you at all, and there won’t be any extra traffic on the track. Quite the opposite, in fact: we want to make sure that there never is any development and the last thing we want is to have a lot more people and vehicles going up there.

Bullshit! Ya think I’m goin’ to believe that? Kinoath no! Anyway, I’m not concerned about the damage the traffic’s gonna do to the scrub up there. Them trees need clearin’ out anyway, mate. That’d be good grazin’ land, and if yiz had half a brain yiz ’ud know it’s friggin’ wasted like it is. He paused, and I just shrugged and waited for him to finish. No, I’m not havin’ any more friggin’ greenies coming through my farm. If someone has an accident on my land, where the track cuts across it, they could sue me. Some flamin’ loser could slide off the side of the mountain and bloody sue me for damages, and I can’t friggin’ afford the insurance to cover m’self against that sorta bullshit. So, I’m puttin’ up a locked gate on me own part of that track in one month’s time. Yiz ’ve got a month to bring in a dozer, mate, an’ make yerselves a new friggin’ entry road.

I told Dobson that I was sorry he’d misunderstood the implications of the nature refuge and that I would pass on his concerns to Jack Tryvet. Driving up the offending track to the studio, I mused on the law of opposites. If one was lucky enough to live in Shangri-La, it was inevitable that there would be a Psycho lurking on the boundary. The Garden of Eden had a serpent in the vicinity, after all.

When I got up to the studio, I poured myself a