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Uncle Bruce raised an eyebrow.
I crossed my arms. “They are muscle machines designed to dig, push, shove and bite. Tractors with teeth and a fur coat.”
“You still got that wombat under the shearers’ quarters, Tombatus?” Benji asked.
I rolled my eyes and groaned again. “Yes, the blasted thing has made his burrow even deeper. Had to restump a part of the quarters a fortnight ago.”
“Awwww, he missed you while you were away at uni,” said someone up the back.
Sniggers rippled around the room.
Uncle Bruce grunted for silence. “Usually, they live under granite boulders, but they’re notorious for digging around and under fence posts”—he paused and looked at me—“and stumps apparently, and pushing fences over, sometimes for kilometres.”
I leant back against the shed wall as Uncle Bruce went on about wombats, the crew appearing reasonably disinterested. I’d missed most of the training for the last two years, but wombats were something my family knew well.
Since moving into the shearers’ quarters three weeks ago, every morning I discovered my boots were full of gravel from his digging efforts to expand his home.
“Now, I know most of you remember Hades on the national park border?” Uncle Bruce pointed to the large map tacked to the wall.
Everyone nodded, and chatter broke out.
“She chewed my helmet when I was on a break!”
“She knocked off the esky lid and stole our lunches when we were doing the fire break!”
“She broke my bloody big toe when she ran past us one day at the firebreak,” Benji called out. “Never did heal properly.”
Hades the wombat had been the size of a small bear—a metre long and as high as the seat of a dining chair—and had lived in an extensive burrow on our property boundary with the national park.
Hades had got her name because of her burrow: a particular granite boulder on our fence line with slashes of quartz above the massive entrance where the burrow disappeared sharply down into the dark. The god of the underworld seemed a good name for the lord of that wombat burrow.
We’d thought Hades was a dude, but it turned out Hades was a lady, but the name had stuck.
The day after the bushfire that ripped through the property ten years ago, we lost Hades. Rather than being burnt, she’d been hit by a car, probably fleeing the fire, and died on the side of the highway, several kilometres from her burrow. Her pouch was inspected and a joey was found, promptly christening him ‘Son of Hades’.
Despite Son of Hades going to a wildlife carer and being later released in the national park, he ended up at Turner’s Creek, digging his burrow under our shearers’ quarters. Numerous attempts were made to move Son of Hades into the protected boundaries of the national park and away from our boots, dogs and veggie path, but each time, Son of Hades came back and dug more into his burrow.
I pushed off the wall and walked over to Ryan, sitting at the end of a row. “Have you done a boundary check lately on the fences?”
I’ve re-fenced our boundary so many times because of wombats digging out our fence posts and toppling the fence. Once a fence is down, sheep wander away. We lose sheep, we lose money.
“Nah, haven’t had a chance.” He scrubbed his face as the crew kept sharing stories about Hades. “And we should. Else the national park has our sheep.”
“Great, okay.”
I sighed and returned to the trestle table with Uncle Bruce’s resources.
“Right, so, the next item for tonight,” Uncle Bruce drawled, “are wombat burrows.”
Everyone shifted in their chairs, shooting glances at me and the drone I had beside me on the table. Everyone started talking at once, all throwing questions at Uncle Bruce.
“Why are we talking wombats? I thought tonight was about bushfire survival techniques, like if we are caught in the bush during a fire.”
“And I thought we were going to play with a drone over the footy field.”
“Yeah, and I thought Stacey and Ash were going to be here.”
“Someone say my name?”
