Ti Tree School BusThe two aboriginal boys who were passengers on my school bus had caught a goanna and couldn’t wait to get home to show their grandparents. A couple of kilometres before their camp at Aningie they spotted their grandfather’s ute parked at a creek crossing. The boys said to me, “We get off here”. I thought I had better check to see if it was OK and to make sure the ute hadn’t just been left there. I followed the excited boys along the creek bed to their grandmother, who was carrying a lump of red gum bark with bush bee honey on it. The boys made me try some of the delicious bush tucker. Then I had to try the “chewy gum on another piece of bark which had come from the same hive. That was good too but I found out much later that the chewy bit was actually from the bee’s toilet. We then found the grandfather a bit further down the creek. He took the goanna from the boys praising them in English as “good hunters”. He then took a small sharp stick, made an incision behind the goanna’s front leg and drew out the small bundle of gut, and placed the animal straight on the coals. Meanwhile the kids were poking around in a bundle of gum leaves. They unwrapped them to show me four baby Kookaburras, featherless and ugly. Their dinner! Proudly they then unwrapped another bundle of leaves to expose the charred body of a feral cat, cooked and ready to eat! So, grilled cat, goanna and kookaburras followed by bush honey; that’s the way to live! I declined the invitation to stay and share their meal saying my family would be worried if I didn’t get home soon. My family had reason to worry in the past. The old Bedford school bus I had been given to drive was a wreck. It had been put off the road once already by traffic inspectors when they found among other things the back brakes were not connected. I had just dropped the boys off one night and was headed home, when the fuel tank fell out of it. Petrol poured all over the road and as it was way over 40 degrees C., it was a wonder it didn’t burst into flames. Luckily I had made arrangements for my wife to notify the police if I was late, so after sitting in the shade of the bus for over two hours and drinking most of the emergency water supply, I was fairly pleased when Mike, the burly Ti Tree policeman, turned up to rescue me. This happened on a Friday, so by Monday I had a smaller Toyota bus to take the place of the Bedford. I thought I was made until I went to start it. Every morning I had to prime the lift pump to start the bus and then again after I had driven one kilometre. The gearbox finally flew to pieces on the way home one night so I sat on the roadside until being rescued by the police again. When I asked for a decent bus to drive I was told the company didn’t need my services any more. When I left Ti Tree I think the replacement school bus was on its third change of drivers in as many months.
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