The carnival was over, well the Australia day festivities were over! The leftovers from the barbecue were tucked away into the fridge and all the guests had gone, even the ones who had held out to the very last, and even Ron (the young American who looks like Jeff Goldblum) who stayed on for a bit of karaoke fun; and even my niece, Loretta (who has her own house now), had to tear herself away. So at last, we were down to just the three of us – my brother, Bill, my nephew, Will, and little old me…

It was past ten o’clock – late for people who get up at five in the morning – but Will had just put on his favourite karaoke compilation and we couldn’t bear to retire to bed without singing “Morning has Broken”, then “The Sounds of Silence”, then…. well you get the picture. Bill didn’t want a microphone, he preferred to lie in his comfy recliner while Will and I sang the golden oldies. We must have sounded alright because Bill soon fell asleep.

William put down his microphone and joined me on the sofa. The song, “Sunshine On My Shoulders” came on and I didn’t think I knew it so I offered the microphone to my nephew.

“No, you sing,” he said.

The song came back to me and I could see John Denver’s face in my mind’s eye. The words were happy but the tune was sad; and I thought about John Denver’s premature demise in a plane crash; and the words made me think about sunshine on my shoulders – about my being in my homeland of Australia…

“I feel like crying,” I admitted to Will.

“So do I,” said my twenty-five year old nephew.

“You’re so soulful,” I responded, “maybe that’s why I love you so much.”

“I love you too,” he said.

And I ran my hand through his hair (as aunties are apt to do), and I sang a few more songs, and now it’s time for bed. I’ll leave you with the lyrics of the song and wish you a sunny day wherever you may be.

Don’t worry, they are friendly, beer swilling, Australian crocodiles of an ornamental variety. There is a nice frog and a sociable magpie too…

My brother needed to go over to Capalaba yesterday; it’s not far away and I thought I would take Bill for a spin in my smart car (the Imprezza or, as we say in Australia, “The Impresser!”). Bill got in and I remembered there were some nice Mint Imperials in the compartment between our seats; Roland had put them in the car for me before lending me his car for three months (I was impressed by both the car and the Mint Imperials).

“Would you like a mint Bill?” I asked, taking two mints out with a flourish.

“Thank you,” he said taking the mint and looking very thoughtfully at it.

He began to chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” I enquired.

“Someone once told me never to refuse a mint if it’s offered, and I have always followed that advice,” his voice trailed off enigmatically.

“Oh Bill, I just thought you might like a mint,” I laughed too before adding, “the people with bad breath never take the hint or the mint.”

Bill nodded. For a few moments we were both silent, each of us thinking of instances when, disappointingly, offers of mints were rejected…

Of course, that is not me –  “Too in love to eat mince” – I don’t need an excuse not to eat mince. Besides, I had just had a breakfast of egg and bacon (no toast – still dieting!), and mince was not even on the menu. You see my lovely brother, Bill, had gone outside the back door for a smoke when I heard him chuckling.

“Sally, this is so funny, you should come out and see this,” he called.

I ran, coffee cup in my hand, outside to see what was so amusing. Bill gestured towards the tree in his next-door neighbour’s back garden.

“See those two magpies on that bough?”

I nodded.

“Well the larger one is a fake magpie!”

True enough, the real magpie was besotted. He sidled up to his bird of choice, not seeming to mind that she may have been regarded as somewhat “plastic” by other, more discerning magpies. He chatted her up and showed off, trying to get her attention by hopping from one bough to another. He was just like any other boy in love.

Bill’s neighbour, Mary, was in her garden and heard us talking about the magpies.

“Want to see some more?” she asked me, hardly waiting for my reply as she dashed up the steps of her house and disappeared behind the screen door. Moments later her arm appeared – there was something in her hand… The magpies had eyes like hawks (except that they have cute little bushy eye-brows, as I’ve told you before) and several flew onto the porch railings whilst others waited in the wings (so to speak) on the side fence.

Now Mary is well-known in the neighbourhood for her love of magpies – you see she feeds them mince – and that is what enticed them to eat from her hand.

“I feed them raw sausage – cooked is too fatty – or they roll it in the dirt,” said Bill.

“And I feed them bacon fat,” I thought to myself.

Bill and I are of the opinion that magpies should be given a varied diet. But the magpie in the tree was not tempted by any tit-bits; he let the others vie for Mary’s outstretched arm while he stayed in the tree. As I said, he was too in love to eat mince….

“Which way shall we go?” my brother asked.

“Somewhere new. How about Lindum way?” I suggested.

Bill nodded.

“You lead and I’ll follow,” I said enthusiastically.

I love cycling with Bill. He always finds exciting places, off the beaten track, for us to discover. Yesterday was no exception. We turned off the main Wynnum road onto Fleming Road and before long we were in new territory to me; this time it was definitely horse country. It’s funny how things look so different when you’re cycling, especially at a leisurely pace; you have the chance to notice and appreciate everything.

We found a nice cycle path that looked promising but ended abruptly near properties with acreages and horses; however, there was a dirt track with tyre marks, that meandered around to the left of the creek and into the bush. Just as we reached the point where we wanted to turn back, a Ute pulling a trailer that carried two quad bikes appeared from the bush. I waved at the men in the truck as they passed by and was surprised a few minutes later when one of the men was stood holding a gate, waiting for us to come through so he could lock up.

“You must be brave,” said the man.

“Why? Are there croc’s?” I joked.

“Far worse than crocodiles,” he laughed, “swarms of mosquitoes! We’ve just been in there spraying them now.”

“So you are the men we have to be grateful to,” Bill said.

“I bet it’s horrible in there,” I added, to let the man know that we appreciated the difficult conditions of his work.

“Awful!” he twanged, “the mozzies swarm around our helmets in a black cloud – you can hardly see!”

I thought of the old film, “African Queen”, in particular the scene where Katharine Hepburn has the flying horrors from a swarm of black insects, and I got the picture.

“It must be a terrible job for you,” I sympathised.

“You must be kidding,” he broke into a broad grin and waved his hand in the direction of the quad bikes, “How many people get to drive around in those all day long?”

Just some shots of the countryside around Cabbage Tree Point, where we went fishing at the weekend. I love the old house (now used as a storage shed) on the hilltop.

It is just Bill, William and me here holding the fort  at the moment while the rest of the family are away. As you probably know from my previous blog posts, Bill is my eldest brother, with whom I am staying for some of the time whilst I am in Australia; and William is Bill’s eldest son. We are looking after Lita’s chooks and we’re trying to remember to feed Lily the cat (not to be confused with Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink – if you can remember that odd song); we are also being very helpful to one another because, now that we are all alone, we realise how much work there is to do.

Yesterday Bill and I had, independently, the same brainwave to do some shopping for dinner; however, we did not discuss our intentions so it was a surprise to each of us when we arrived home, within minutes of each other, laden with our purchases.

“I bought beef-mince,” said Bill putting the mince on the kitchen worktop.

“And I bought rump steak,” I said, pulling out the steak.

“Do you like mince?” Bill asked.

“Not much,” I answered truthfully, “Do you want mince for dinner?”

“I don’t mind at all – have whatever you like,” he answered.

My brother went outside to his shed, probably to sand down a chest of drawers, and I got to thinking that maybe he fancied a shepherd’s pie for dinner. The steak could wait for another day. If Bill fancied shepherd’s pie I would make one for him, minus any tomato (because my nephew hates tomatoes), and I would have just a small portion for myself (because the smell of mince cooking usually turns me off and makes me want to go vegetarian).

The huge pie was on the table. William came in from work and said he wasn’t very hungry and I took a serving no bigger than a dessert-spoonful. Funnily enough, we all went back for seconds (it didn’t taste so meaty with the browned potato and melted cheese on top!).

“That was nice,” Bill said.

“I thought you must have bought the mince because you fancied a shepherd’s pie,” I responded.

“To tell you the truth, Sally,” Bill smiled, “I thought I would give you a break from cooking for a change and I was going to cook the dinner tonight. I knew I could cook mince and I knew I could cook potatoes, so that is why I bought mince.”

It tickled me to think of my macho older brother planning to cook for me and William. I was so glad that used his mince. In fact it wasn’t a bad pie at all. We enjoyed the other half just as much tonight, especially as nobody had to cook.

“The chooks aren’t laying as many as they used to,” said Bill ominously as he brought in three eggs yesterday morning.

What did he mean? Well, I understood the words but I wondered what the penalty would be if the chooks continued to produce short rations. Now my brother is a kind man, surely he would keep the hens on in old age? Surely he wouldn’t have the heart to do away with them when they outlive their usefulness. No, Bill wouldn’t – but one of his friends might!

This morning I thought I would be helpful and feed the chooks for Bill…

So I opened the chicken house door and I can see that the chooks have the heebie-jeebies about something because all five of them want to rush out at once. I prevent them from escaping by shooing them back in with my feet. From the corner of one eye I notice the plastic water receptacle and I think to myself:

“That’s funny! How did an avocado get into the water basin?”

But I don’t dwell on it for long because, from the corner of my other eye, I see five beautiful brown eggs in one of the nesting boxes.

“These chooks are very perspicacious,” I think to myself again, and feel happy for their foreseeable future.

I throw in the scraps (including lots of lovely mango skins – from Bill’s mangoes) and then I go to the other shed to fill the scoop with grain. When I come back in my eyes are drawn to the water basin because something dark, and awfully like an avocado, moves in the water. I bend down to take a better look and I can see his legs kicking away.

My first instinct is very similar to that of the chooks – I want to run out raving (like a headless chicken) – but I have the dear hens to consider. I have to remove him without letting him jump on me (or I might get warts).

“Oh Bill, there’s a cane toad in the chooks’ water,” I say futilely (because Bill is at the other end of the garden, and even if he wasn’t, his hearing isn’t the best).

Luckily, I have with me the old carrier bag which held the scraps so I stretch the bag over the basin, covering everything except one corner that the toad is drawn towards because he fears being asphyxiated, obviously. Little does he know there is an even worse fate awaiting him – well, we Aussies know that the poisonous cane toads are the scourge of Queensland, and now the Northern Territory too.

I carry the chooks’ water basin carefully up the garden, plonk it down in front of Bill, and show him the toad. I don’t mind dispatching baby toads under my thonged feet but a bigger toad, even a small adult, is quite another matter. Bill tests me.

“You can deal with it – can’t you Sally?”

“What do you do?” I ask.

“Hit it on the head with a spade and bury it,” he answers.

“Too big,” I say.

Bill understands and he does it while I watch with interest from a distance. The chooks are safe; that’s the main thing. I feel happy that their futures seem quite secure one way or another.

I’m feeling so pleased for them that later on I go down to check on them to see if they are okay. As soon as I open the door ten inches all the chooks run out like crazy and go charging down to the compost bins. I guess I could have pushed them back with my feet if I had really wanted to… I look over at Bill up by the shed and I call out:

“The chooks got out – is that alright?”

“I let them out sometimes,” Bill says with a nod and a smile.

I had been waiting a long time… I had changed spots several times, stood on rocks and sat on rocks, cast from the left (for good luck) and cast from the right (when the left cast wasn’t good luck). The tide went out and the tide came in. According to my expectations, I used small pieces of bait, medium pieces and even whole squid (albeit tiny ones).

From time to time boats would pass under the bridge and each time the wake would dislodge my lead-weight and hook and send it under a rock so that I had to break the line and re-hook and find another weight. We soon ran out of little weights and the bigger they got, the more likely they were to snag each time a boat passed under the bridge – and they were pretty easy to snarl up in the first place.

The first bite, long awaited, was nevertheless a fairly unexciting event; it felt like a slow motion gulp. In fact it wasn’t a bite at all, just a wandering length of old rope (with a few marine growths on it) that decided to hitch a ride in order to see the light of day in the open air.

Thousands of jellyfish swam like an army on a mission, all going out to sea in their serried ranks, but often the ones closest to the sides of the bridge seemed to sense us and lingered awhile, perhaps in wonder at the strangeness of the people on the rocks.

At last the big (and only) bite came… It was real, a sure thing, a whopper – perhaps the biggest fish I had ever encountered at the end of my line. It might even have been a whale swimming underwater. Unfortunately I shall never know exactly what it was because he took my whole squid, a brand new shark hook and a 100 gramme weight, and he would not budge! I had to break the line again.

“I’ve had enough fishing for today,” said Bill.

My niece, Loretta, and I did not wheedle for an extra cast out – I was already thinking about the spa at home.

“Does this track go anywhere?” I called out to Bill, who was on his green mountain bike ahead of of me.

A trickle of sweat ran down my cheek and collected on my jawbone until the droplet was too heavy to hang on. The temperature was thirty degrees and it wasn’t even eight in the morning. We had been cycling for half an hour. We had left the metalled roads, pavements and cycle-paths in favour of the bush routes. A little earlier we saw a flock of white cranes take off as we crossed the creek – I wasn’t quick enough to catch them with my mobile camera but I managed to take shots of two black cranes unable to fly off because they were drying their outstretched wings high up on the bough of a gum tree.

My brother did not answer – he’s a bit deaf – and I just followed his lead anyway. It didn’t really matter where the track went. Not knowing made it all the more exciting. All the same, it was a horrible path – very soft sand littered with sharp grey stones; the sand opened up as we rode through it and the wheels of our bikes threatened not to stay upright, whilst the rocks either  jarred us or slipped away with the sand.

The path petered out onto a floodplain with deep spongy grass that was dry now but you could imagine it sodden; as the grass became longer and thicker we gave up and walked our bikes through. At its thickest, the grass enveloped our wheels beyond the axles. The grass gave way to bush and behind the bush was another creek and a bridge.

“This is the creek in one of your paintings, Sally,” said Bill.

“Really?”

“Yes, but from other side,” he continued.

Bill was right. We were nearly back at his place and it was the same creek that I had found so picturesque after the rains several years ago. I remembered when I was painting it, how I wondered where the bush came out – now I know.