“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.

Imagine, if you will, a hot sunny afternoon in Tingalpa (Brisbane). It has been boiling all day and my brother, Bill, and I have been looking forward to a nice cool dip in the spa. I go out to the spa first and notice a few magpies grubbing around in the ashes of the fire. I think the magpies are after the bruised piece of pear that I spat out onto the ashes.

“That’s funny,” I think to myself, “I thought magpies were mainly carnivorous.”

I throw the half-eaten core of the pear onto the ashes because I think the magpies might like some more of my juicy pear. They ignore it and I wish I had eaten a little more of it myself – ungrateful birds.

I say hello to Manuela, the girl (in the red and yellow spotty swimming costume) who I painted on the fence last year, and I get into the spa. Bill soon joins me and we spend a few minutes removing leaves. At last the pool is sparkling clear and Bill and I dunk ourselves low in the water (to avoid the mosquitoes) and we kick around and do a number of those little exercises one always does when one is in a spa (because you can’t actually swim, and you have to do something!). So I’m doing a bit of scissor action with my legs and I’m looking in the direction of the table, and I see that one of the magpies has picked something up in his beak – I think it is a red credit card.

“Bill,” I call out, “that magpie has something in his mouth!”(They can be very human-like.) “Is it a credit card?”

“Credit card?” Bill looks. “That’s not a credit card, that’s my cigarettes!” (He has very flat cigarettes on account of them being in his short’s back pocket.)

With that the wily magpie realises there is no time to waste and he flies off the table, straight over the Ute and down to the end of the garden where he thinks we won’t follow because we’re having such a great time in the spa. The magpie does not realise that cigarettes are almost as expensive as gold-dust in Australia these days and even three flat cigarettes are worth leaping out of a spa for. So Bill jumps out, as quick as a flash, and I follow a tad slower (well, they aren’t my cigarettes). I half hope that the cheeky magpie gets clean away over the far fence into the neighbour’s place – it could be a good time to give up! – but he becomes nervous with Bill hollering at him and he drops it under the tree on our side of the fence.

I am back in spa already (no point in two of us searching) and Bill hides the flat cigarettes under my towel before getting back in. I’m still marvelling at how those cigarettes looked like a credit card and Bill, who is keeping vigilant, sees a magpie hooking a cigarette butt from the ashes. “Crikey, he’s desperate for a smoke!” I think to myself. I reckon that Bill wishes he had never started smoking outdoors. Those magpies are very impressionable. I told you they were like humans.

No need to book – all comers welcome!

Down at Cabbage Tree Point yesterday the sailing boats sailed by, the gin palaces glided past, the little boats returned with fish, and then a small house pulled up by the beach. It was a mini houseboat; the owner designed it and built it himself over two years. And all the while a well-fed pelican looked on approvingly from his lofty perch.

The pelicans sure are friendly down at Cabbage Tree Point. I saw one waiting by the water’s edge and he let me photograph him. He soon lost interest in me and he waded into the sea to greet a party arriving in a boat. They came into shore and I spoke to a young girl.

“He seems to prefer you to me. Do you know him?”

“We have a slight advantage,” the girl smiled, “We have fish!”

Just around the corner from us here at Tingalpa of course! So much easier than catching them.

My friend, Lorelle, went off to work; Michael the Bavarian engineer (and backpacker for three months) went off to Maroochydore (my computer wants to call it “Hydrochloride”) with her; and I was left all alone. I did some hoovering and brushing up (trying to be a good guest) and considered packing up my things and heading off early, with the idea of calling in to see one of my nieces en route to Brisbane; but I remembered how those visits can seem a little rushed, and then there’s the peak traffic to contend with… so I dismissed the thought and decided not to make any arrangements that would commit me to a particular timescale. There was no need to hurry. I had all day. I was still drowsy from allergy tablets. And it was hot…

I looked out of my bedroom window onto the pool and noticed that quite a few yellow leaves had dropped in overnight. Lorelle has always emphasised (to the point of brainwashing me) the dangers of organic matter ruining the ph levels of the water and clogging up the pool filter, therefore, I hurriedly popped into my hot pink bikini with the frill (the one Lorelle “wouldn’t be seen dead in”, and set about my labour of love. It wasn’t until every leaf and groat had been removed that I allowed myself the pleasure of taking a mermaid swim.

I wondered about the omnipresent old neighbour (who may be Austrian) who used to spend much of his time working by the back fence whenever I came to stay or house-sit at Lorelle’s… I couldn’t see him through the gaps in the fence, nor did I hear him. I reasoned that it didn’t really matter if he was there or not – after all, if he had seen it all before, why become so prudish all of a sudden? Besides, mermaids are very quiet creatures and do not splash about too much or, by any means, draw attention to their presence deliberately.

And so, like a water-baby, I had the most delightful of swims on my own (my first since a year ago).

Later on I learned that, at around the same time I would have been travelling on the Bruce Highway, had I decided to visit my niece, there was a bad accident between two caravans and a car on the highway. The road had to be blocked off and the traffic was held up for hours. So glad I decided not to rush.

For those of you who love white beaches and sunshine…