Neville the Less

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  To the west, in back of Shoomba Territory, was the Duchy of Daisley which, in similar but much more focussed ways, Ralph and Enid Daisley proudly defended as one of the last bastions of ‘the Australian way of life’. Ralph’s and Enid’s combined ages may have been close to a thousand, Neville had calculated, and it appeared that every one of those thousand years had been devoted to erecting and maintaining an imposition of barriers, both physical and mental, against the rising tide of rash, unwelcome and, if truth be known, largely foreign inspired upheaval.

  “The Duke,” Shoomba had once warned Neville, all wide-eyed and finger-waggling, “don’ welcome ‘truders on any level, mate! Mob o’ boy scouts wandered into the Dooky, years back. Sellin’ biscuits’re sumethin’. Disappeared like crumbs down a plughole! Never seen ‘em again! You ever seen ‘em? Course not! He got traps in there‘ud swallow up a buffalo! He got a little Mongolovian wolf hunter comes around every so often an’ moves ‘em about - so’s ye never know where ye can step! You bet! An’ the Duke, he dusts the fence posts for fingerprints every mornin’! An’ prods the ground for tunnels! Jus’ to see if anyone’s gettin’ close, see? Yes sir! I go in an’ out as I please ‘cause him ‘n’ me are on the same page, see? Plus, I got a nose for traps. Not many do, but me? I can smell ‘em a mile off. You? You don’ wanna finish up down the wolf-hunter’s plug-hole, never seen again, you best steer clear!”

  The one thing that had escaped the Duke’s control was the mango tree, and that was only because its branches, in flagrant contravention of his non-mingling rule, had reached and intertwined with those of Home Country’s Poinciana which, the Duke had more than once sneered, was “not even an Australian tree! One more sneaky damned immigrant, that’s what that is!”

  The two trees, however, cared so little about origins that they happily colluded in being a combined refuge for any number of un-passported possums, birds, snakes and fruit bats. And together, they’d become part of the intricate web of secret places which made up Neville’s personal domain. It had never, unhappily, afforded him a glimpse of the Mongolovian wolf hunter or of any of the traps, but he wasn’t surprised at that. Obviously part of the function of a trap was to remain in the invisible world until needed. The views afforded of the visible world, however, from high up in that mango were a privilege that Neville alone enjoyed.