Of Skinks, Skunks and Doing a Bunk

It was a beautiful spring day, such as to make one almost glad to be alive, and my wife and I walked up to the top of The Rock, a 330-foot sandstone bluff above the river which runs through our town. Amazingly in these accident-conscious times, when safety is next to godliness, if not the whole of godliness itself, there were no railings and no warnings that falling from such a height was not good for the health.

Whenever I go up there, I think of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Of course, the English countryside is very tame by comparison with the Australian, and the sense of space is very different. On this occasion, reaching the top, we found two youths drinking beer from cans and playing rap music loud enough to drown out the song of the spring-awakened birds. How much I would have preferred to find the muslin-clad girls of Picnic, or even Miss McCraw, the angular teacher of mathematics who, like the three girls, went missing on the St Valentine’s Day expedition to Hanging Rock…