First Trip Since the Theft

You know it's cold when you don't have to keep putting the wine back in the fridge, it just sort of lives on the kitchen bench. Last week the VW had it's first major service in 13 months since it was stolen by the naughty boys, and I patted her big behind and said 'Let's Go' (somewhere). To our funky friends in the Hunter Valley, NSW - where they grow baby trees.

This is what happens to you when you own land. You grow trees, you plant trees, you have trees, you start to think like a tree. They planted a whole bunch just so the native animals could get down to the creek without being seen naked, in something called a 'wildlife corridor'. And you can't just dig a hole and shove in a helpless, defenceless baby tree, apparently you need to stir up the soil, dig a deep hole, put in fertiliser, water crystals, carry water from the little creek up the hill, and then pray, and it doesn't end there, you need to fence off the little blighter and give it a pretty pink ribbon to say 'you are special', 'you will one day become a big, beautiful, wanted part of nature, and we will love and nurture you and never chop you down for firewood'. Although this is coming from a man who burnt down his shed.

Nature is crazy beautiful. It's a breathe of fresh air. You fight it until you are drowning and then it's like you can suddenly breathe underwater in a dream, or a kid's movie. This Wedge Tail Eagle got caught by the wrong lens. That's what happens to you when you start to relax, you just can't be arsed getting up.

But in the country there's always something to do, apparently. You can go get firewood, or make pasta from scratch or clean that filthy kitchen window, just so to admire that glorious mountain one more time. Ever 'screw with a view?' You know what I mean.

This is a wombat hole. According to Peter Nicholson - Wombat Schoolboy of the 1960's, the definitive advisor of wombat research: "if you're going down a burrow you want to meet a wombat in the wombat burrow in the end you know, and see what happens. I was 6 foot tall but I was probably only about 9 stone, long and lean. and, you'd get down 6 or 10 feet initially.... but if you were already down 10 feet and you could see another 10 feet and there was something around the corner, it was very tempting to continue excavating. But then I learned that by digging out the floors of the burrows, you still had the structural shape of the hole and it enabled you to get even further down.'

'I was warned that wombats had a habit of squashing dogs while they were down their burrow, and so I was always very cautious that I wouldn't let a wombat get half past me and squash. 

And I also knew that they, that wombats bit. But I was never bitten, in all the time I crawled down burrows, by a wombat, or even outside the burrow.'

And this:

'I was never fearful of going down a burrow. A burrow's a sort of a friendly place. It's someone else's home, maybe, so you're cautious as you enter it. You don't know what you're going to find or whether anybody's home. But it was never a frightening place.'

Thank you ABC Australian Story for that report, just in case you've ever been tempted to travel down a wombat hole. And now in case you've never seen a wombat, here is a dog, Dr Chops to be precise, one who has possibly been down a wombat hole. He's an late rising Schnauzer with pointy ears, 10 years old and has a feisty brother called Bangers. His favourite hobbies are sequesting small titbits from toddlers and snuggling.

 

Picture of the Kombie.