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was to blame.
My drive was a long and lonely one through the Australia that is
more typical than what we show on television: flat, hot, featureless,
the colour of vomit. Dust storms blow up in your face, mummifying
you in sand, and then when it settles you re over-run by flies. And
then it ll rain so hard the roads will become impassable within two
hours. The heat is so rugged you could fry an egg on your head yet
the nights can be cold enough to kill you. For most visitors this is
a f.ing dismal country. Which is why I love it so much. The rest of
the world doesn t get to see the boredom, the numbing spaces in
between the great outback attractions, because we who make the
images don t show it to them. They think it s Disneyland out here.
I prefer the boredom of the flat spaces, the badlands, I guess
because they re mine. While I was driving the last few hundred
miles to Sharpie s, I saw two cars. Two cars in one day. That s pretty
darn good.
Setting the old ute on a straight line through miles of featureless
scrub, I let my mind wander to the past, and to the future. I was
pretty rocked about the news from Dr Proctor. That morning I d
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told Sheena I needed to go to Brisbane to start arranging our plans
to take Rod to America. I d have to stay overnight. It was a pretty
flimsy excuse to get out of the house, and wouldn t have stood up
to much questioning. What could I do in Brisbane that I couldn t
do by phone from home? Why did I need to stay overnight? Where
was I going to get the money? What, exactly, was the plan?
But Sheena was in no mood for interrogation. She was distracted
by her new efficiency as a mother looking after Rosie, getting to the
shops to buy a treat for Rod, organising child care for the little one
while she kept up her vigil at the hospital. She only knew extremes,
Sheena. One minute a raging pothead, the next Mother of the Year.
That s how it s always been. She s a slave to her enthusiasms.
She just let me go.
Beyond, or beneath, this was an understanding grown between
us since we d learnt of Rod s illness. In the complex and fuddled
yet somehow quicksilver workings of Sheena s mind, I had done
away with Glenn Mellon and Steve Heath in some kind of prescient
vision of what was happening to Rod. I d killed them to save our
family. I had a plan, or at least in Sheena s head I did. It must have
been planted there by that journo. Who s killing the great nature
presenters of Australia? Well, if a journo s asking the question, then
there must be an answer. There must be a who. And in Sheena s
dazed and confused state, that who was me. Which would have been
simple enough to dispel if it had shocked her and she d confronted
me with it. But the problem was, she liked it. She was turned on by
the notion that I was knocking them all off. So now, if I was concoct-
ing some kind of BS story about going to Brisbane, it was because
I had more of this kind of work to do for the family. Sheena, God
help her, held me in a new kind of awed respect which I hadn t
felt since our very first days together. I had a kind of masculine
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father husband mystique about me. That was okay. I didn t argue
too hard. Let her believe what she wanted, if that was what d get
her through.
I d dropped in at the Kangazoo s veterinary surgery I had
my own key and picked up a couple of things. I paused while
I was there, just a moment in the formaldehyde smell, to reflect
on our achievement. Once a pineapple storage shed, this hospital
now fixed up more than five thousand native-animal cases a year,
from frogs with broken legs to kangaroos with lockjaw. Kangazoo
animals were the best looked after on this earth thanks to our ten-
million-dollar vet hospital. It s something to be proud of. Over and
above all the other stuff.
Anyway. With the ute packed, I d set out from the zoo, not
towards Brisbane but in the opposite direction, north-west, towards
Sharpie Phelps.
Nobody, not even Sharpie, knew I was coming. This one I had to
do secretly. I d been lucky with Steve Heath, who, due to his own
paranoia, had kept my presence at Silvercap to himself. Bluey Angell
could be trusted. Revealing that Steve had needed a rigger would,
in our naturalists world, be like speaking ill of the dead. Steve s
funeral had been a couple of days ago, and as part of the myth-
making they had to keep all of his little helpers in the shadows.
Scotty Pascoe, the real keeper of Steve s secrets, was cooped up in
hospital, and I wasn t invited. That was fine. That suited me.
But I couldn t rely on being invisible every time. Even now, if
someone got wind that I d been with Steve Heath when he died,
and put that together with my work on Glenn Mellon s cage, they
might see a pattern begin to emerge. Sheena already had. Others
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would follow. They only had to start looking. So I couldn t afford
to be seen around Sharpie Phelps tonight. There was already one
Who s Killing the Great Nature Presenters of Australia? story out
there, and it was only going to get bigger. I didn t need to be linked
to any of the Big Five. People might think they had an answer to
what was a pretty stupid question.
See? Already I was thinking like I d had something to do with
Glenn s death, and Steve s. I hadn t, had I? But the thing is, present
intentions can work backwards. I even started to wonder if in some
way telepathy? I could be linked with Mick s death too.
As I drove out to Jalanjuk Downs, though, there wasn t much
doubt. I was going there with a certain plan. Was it a plan, or just
something I d fallen into? It didn t matter now. From here on, I
could see my mark and how I was going to hit it.
There was only one nature presenter who was fit to take over the
Kiss franchise. Yours truly: Brian Frosty Westlake. It had taken me
a few weeks to admit that to myself to accept my destiny. It ran
against my grain to push myself to the fore like this. But now there
was no doubting it. Rod s illness had been sent as a message from
above, to get me off my a. I needed to look after my family, and I
needed to look after the wildlife of Australia. I was a wilderness
warrior and there were certain distasteful things a warrior had to
do for the good of his tribe. My tribe were Sheena, Rod and Rosie,
and behind them the worried ranks of Australia s thousands of
native species. They needed care. They needed to tell the world
that they would no longer be menaced by these TV cowboys, these
stuntmen, these pin-up boys. The joke about Sharpie Phelps was
that he d say, Here I am in front of a thorny devil s burrow, which
you can t see because I m standing in front of it. The fauna of Aus-
tralia didn t need that. They could survive well enough on their
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