PARKING TICKETS

A Secret Gully story.

By Peter Harris
Copyright April 2000

As broadcast on ABC's "Australia All Over"

It's a lazy afternoon in Secret Gully and Snubby the wallaby is stretched out under the mandarin tree, thinking deep thoughts about the universe. Her Joey, fraught with the restlessness of youth, hasn't yet discovered how to relax. She's standing nearby, in the midst of a biology lesson, peering intently into her fur trying to catch a "Brown Bomber".

This particular Brown Bomber has nothing to do with the issuing of parking tickets, which is a controversial topic to which I shall return shortly. It's actually a weird kind of kamikaze insect that has discovered a novel way of getting through the wallaby's thick fur. Instead of crawling in patiently like a tick or the like, the Brown Bomber flies off into the surrounding air, wheels about and plunges straight into the fur at death defying speeds.

Snubby's joey is studying very hard, trying to learn how to put a quick end to this annoying insect. She's got no chance of course, as any wallaby could tell her, and she'll have to master the much more difficult lesson of trying to remain aloof from the body's discomfort zones. I sympathize with the little wallaby, because at this very moment as I try to write, there are a number of annoying signals racing up my arms, which I am valiantly trying to ignore.

There's the totally destroyed wrist which will never recover from trying to start the infernal brush-cutter. Then there's the bruised knuckles from the spanner slipping while trying to change the gas bottle. Apart from that there's the freshly darkened thumbnail from misjudging the flight path of an escaping cockroach while armed with a blunt object. And finally there's the itchy mozzie bite on the little finger, which I have vowed I will not touch again, but which keeps sending irresistible scratching signals across to the fingers of the other hand. Remaining aloof under these circumstances is one of life's greater challenges.

But to return to the topic of parking tickets, this is one of the annoyances that we haven't successfully eradicated in Secret Gully. It seems that whenever you bring a vehicle into the bush, a range of living things imitate the habit of the council's Brown Bomber and want to leave their own parking ticket on it.

Take the humble ute for instance. When this was a proud new addition to the fleet, I thought I would do the right thing and paint a heavy coat of tar underneath to help preserve the metal. Complete waste of time really. The local bee population came and stripped it all back within a week, leaving tiny black footprints everywhere. Must have been good building material.

The next major mark to appear was the ever increasing cobweb covering. It started quietly behind the headlights but soon spread across the entire body. You can't stop them. The spiders simply hide somewhere deep inside the cavities when you declare war. It's got to the stage where the local mechanic insists that I open the bonnet myself and cut a swathe through the webs before he ventures his hands inside the engine bay.

There's quite a range of spiders. The smaller ones arrived first. But there is an ever increasing range of large spiders which are usually picked up at night as you drive down the track and burst through the great webs, put out to catch unwary wallabies and other bush walkers. The webs wrap around the vehicle and the spiders simply move in.

Of course, this has been known to cause great risk to life and limb. Not so much from the spiders themselves, but from trying to wallop them when they surprise you as you travel at high speeds along the highway.

Just the other day I was guiding the unwieldy ute down a steep mountain incline when a great set of hairy legs appeared at the centre shaft of the steering wheel. Now this is one of those times when it doesn't pay to think quickly, because you'd scream. take both hands off the steering wheel and most likely plunge over a cliff. Instead I thought slowly. Very slowly!

Just underneath the steering wheel were my bare knees and thighs, so I didn't want His Hairiness to fall onto them. The gravel road and sharp curves made the steering wheel an unsteady sort of resting place and the spider turned first one way then the other, deciding which spoke to walk up.

I slid through the curves alternately steering with my right hand and then the left while the beast moved this way and that. My right foot was playing with the brake pedal like a deranged drummer until at last I was able to bring the ute to rest in a cloud of dust in a homesteaders driveway, just as the spider decided to drop into my lap. I leapt out of the vehicle and started slapping myself savagely. The homesteaders just stood in their cabbage patch and stared with disbelieving eyes at this strange and urgent ritual. They didn't even wave back when I got into the ute and took off. Too stunned I suppose.

On the way back home I was reminded of another parking ticket the ute had collected when my leg got splashed as I made a shallow creek crossing. The water didn't come through the window, but straight up past the gear stick through a hole in the floor, conveniently left there by a pair of bush rats as an easy entrance into a comfortable motel room on wet winter nights.

Over under the lemon tree, Snubby's joey has taken a large step in her education. She has begun to ignore the Brown Bomber. Her little body is a mass of twitches, but she is standing reasonably still and trying to model her gaze on that of old Snubby, her mother. Her eyes are glazing over a little, and given a bit of time and a hot lazy afternoon or two, she could begin to contemplate the deep mysteries of life, such as what will I have for dinner and why are chooks so stupid.

Education is certainly a life-long pursuit!