Paddy and the boys loved it. Sometimes they spent days on end riding horses, miles away from home and camping at night under a sky so vast and filled with stars.
The grey-brown land was full of life. Kangaroos in flocks of thousands streamed leaping through the trees, taking fences with ease, lovely in their grace and freedom and numbers; emus built their nests in the middle of the grassy plain and walked like giants about their territorial boundaries, taking fright at anything strange and running fleeter than horses away from their dark-green, football-sized eggs; termites built rusty towers like miniature skyscrapers; huge ants with a savage bite poured in rivers down holes in the ground.
The bird life was so rich and varied there seemed no end to new kinds, and they lived not in ones and twos but in thousands upon thousands: tiny green-and-yellow parakeets Fee used to call lovebirds, but which the locals called budgerigars; scarlet-and-blue smallish parrots called rosellas; big pale-grey parrots with brilliant purplish-pink breasts, underwings and heads, called galahs; and the great pure white birds with cheeky yellow combs called sulphur-crested cockatoos. The strong brown kingfishers called kookaburras laughed joyfully or dived for snakes, their favourite food. They were almost human, all these birds, and completely without fear, sitting in hundreds in the trees looking about with bright intelligent eyes, screaming, talking, laughing, imitating anything that produced a sound.
Fearsome lizards five or six feet long pounded over the ground and leaped easily for high tree branches, as at home off the earth as on it; they were goannas. And there were many other lizards, smaller but some no less frightening, with swollen, bright-blue tongues. Of snakes the variety was almost endless, and the Clearys learned that the biggest and most dangerous-looking were often the least dangerous, while a little creature a foot long might be a death adder; carpet snakes, copper snakes, tree snakes, red-bellied black snakes, brown snakes, lethal tiger snakes.
And insects! Grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, bees, flies of all sizes and sorts, cicadas, gnats, dragonflies, giant moths and so many butterflies! The spiders were terrible, huge hairy things inches across, or small but deadly black things hiding in the toilet; some lived in vast wheeling webs hanging between trees, some rocked inside webs in the grass, others dived into little holes in the ground complete with lids which shut after them.
This, thought the boys excitedly, was life.