18th January 2018.
Fruitful temptation
To confess can be therapeutic. Fascinated by a funnel-web happy in a roadside hole, my mate Steve admits to rousing his inner chimp, poking his bike’s padlock key at the spider to see what it would do. Mercifully I merely wanted to rediscover my inner child. So poo to the Australia versus England one-dayer at the Melbourne Cricket Ground when the Russian and Moldovan possums had the spontaneous idea for a road trip. Our destination a pip spit from Trafalgar, a blink-and-miss-it rural straggle a ton and a tad kilometres to the city’s east.
Halfway, near the sign to Mount Baw Baw, an eight-foot crimson rosella. Wow. Showy buggers, crimson rosellas. Common as muck. Yet still my heart skips with delight at the exotic. Darn’em, I thought. Sorry, Darnum. The Aborigine for ‘parrot’. Which accounts for the edge of highway Darnum hotel having a ruddy great mural of the bird on the front wall. A landmark we whooshed passed on route to the nets.
I’m not talking about the obvious ones at the Aussie Open tennis nor those at any cricket club from Armadale to Nar Nar Goon. I mean the nets, the bird frustraters, where my hand went to my mouth. For two reasons. And neither of them to pop in another yellow raspberry. “No-no-no! Oh God.”
A quick lift and a nifty double duck and the possum pair were out of bounds. The ‘DO NOT PICK HERE. Thank you’ sign flouted. Very, very naughty. As if the hugger-mugger rows of boysenberries, blackberries, Silvan, Marion and Ranul, red currants, raspberries of course, various hues, and sweet goosegogs weren’t enough.
Pick your own
Three small white plastic buckets filling with abundance. Juice splotched togs. Vermilion fingers. Itchy bites. Sweat. Lots. And entanglements. That’s what the arvo had already bestowed at Sunny Creek Organic Berry Farm.
Abundance
“If you see anybody coming warn us with something,” said the Moldovan possum giving a conspiratorial wink.
I frowned. “Cavē,” I suggested, complicit now.
“Nobody says cavē.”
I cast around for inspiration. In a brown grass field a Black Angus cow bellowed. Mournful. The day of calf separation. So ‘moo’? Nn-nn, unusually bad taste.
Brown grass fields
The Moldovan possum gave a distracting gasp. Pointing at a raspberry leaf, her expression wonderment, pulled focus on microcosm. Ah, a froglet. A berry-sized sweetie-pie. Much too small to be a pobblebonk. Name alone had that particular anuran on my bucket list. “Gribbick-gribbick.”
“Gribbick-gribbick? What? No.”
“Um… chi-chi-chi.” I said sotto voce.
“Pardon?”
“Grasshopper.”
A look of disdain.
Sod it. “KAA-KAA-KOO-KOO-KOO!”
“Kookaburra! Perfect. See ya!”
Self-conscious, I sidled back onto legal ground. From somewhere amongst the adjacent wood of gums and tree ferns a genuine specimen laughed. Secretly I hoped it didn’t confuse the miscreants.
A blueberry bush shivered. The Russian possum was quick indeed into her illicit work. A flash of freshly manicured mauve painted fingernail. A dainty paw become rake. A Moldovan gulp just as deft.
A dainty paw
Around the corner, a young girl’s voice. “Strawberries! Oh, I’m so happy!” Bless. Quite caught the kookaburra in my throat.
“Excuse me, how do we get in?” The dad, I guessed, and baffled. Maybe he wasn’t a twit, merely too much sun.
“Under the net,” I said. “Careful though, watch the ears and nose. Yet to invent the door here.”
The kid grinned. The dad didn’t.
Behind their backs netting rippled. The possums return. Pictures of innocence artfully handing their lookout booty. Fat blueberries. Five. The most I deserved though the best ever scrumped.
Job done…
… and butter wouldn’t melt.
Dollars paid at the weigh-in it was time to make a move. On cue a fuss of red and blue feathers arrived on a gatepost. A crimson rosella, what else?, come to bid goodbye.
Returned to the sofa I bore witness to the MCG empty quicker than a tin of Ferguson Plarre shortbread bickies. England didn’t often win a cricket match humpty doo. The unexpected reverse had the home skipper Steve Smith give a troubling excuse: “We lost wickets in the middle and it stopped us going as hard at the back end.” Best they rest and not attempt Mount Baw Baw just at the moment, I reflected, musing too on the pobblebonk.
Googling ‘Victoria frogs’, after ‘frogs of Trafalgar’ found xenophobic comments about 1805, the sweetie-pie turned out to be Litoria ewingi, the whistling tree frog. On the day, my antithesis, I suppose. A berry guard, by leaps and bounds it’s a top-notch pest controller. And it whistles. Why didn’t I think of that?
Confession complete. And I’ll continue to parrot it until feeling able to fully wash my hands.
Illustration © 2018 Zum Beamer/Charles Wood
Zum Beamer 