The children were bursting with energy on this walk. Full of excitement and attentiveness, they seemed as enlivened as their fecund surrounds. They were quick to notice that the rabbits were looking very fat after feasting on the lush green grass, and that the grasslands spreading down to the lake had turned into a carpet of wildflowers, harbouring the occasional poppy. Spring has finally sprung!
We stayed a little longer than usual at the Ngaraka Shrine to the Lost Koori. As well as remembering those who came before us, the children were fast to resume their ritual tapping and rubbing of the kangaroo bones on the steel frame, re-evoking pasts in the present. The tolling sounds seemed particularly alive too. They were richer and more resonant than the slightly duller tones of saturated bones on metal made on previous wet weather walks.
As we approached the still-swollen lake, someone asked if it was a river. Perhaps they had recently seen the nearby Murrumbidgee River in flood and recognised something similar about the spreading water? This led to a conversation about the difference between lakes and rivers.
The children quickly noticed an unusually large scattering of rubbish and debris along the lake’s edge. They could see that it had been swept in from the lake: ‘The rain made the lake come up and the rubbish floated to the shore and got left behind.’
We talked about how some of this rubbish might have started off on the streets of the town, and been washed down drains and into the lake – it took some pondering to think about the journey that a piece of rubbish from so far away might have taken only to emerge from the water where we now stood.
A small moth flying past distracted the children from the rubbish, and they were soon off following the fluttering trails of several moths and butterflies, eagerly looking for another as soon as one disappeared from view. 
These meanderings led the children an ants’ nest that they had not visited for a while and that had seen little ant activity over the colder months.
There was much talk about the return of the ants and wondering at the comings and goings of the ant colony. As they watched the ants drag food down the hole, the children mused on where it could be going: ‘maybe they are taking it to the queen ant’, ‘the queen looks after the eggs’ and ‘she would need lots of food to lay all those ants’!
There was also puzzlement about how the ants navigated their way through the complex nest. One child asked: ‘how do they know which hole to go down?’ while another asked ‘do ants dig?’ The children’s attention turned to the ways the ants went about making their nests, watching as they carried up small stones from underground: ‘one ant is carrying a rock’.
Nearby was the first of the fallen trees that the children had enjoyed playing on. We asked them if they noticed anything different about the tree. They immediately remembered that it was ‘the big storm that knocked it down’. On closer inspection, however, they could see that one of the main trunks was now sprouting new shoots. It was regenerating despite that fact that it had almost been fully uprooted. The children soon realized the significance of this: ‘I think it’s going to make a new one’ and then ‘we can climb on it again’.
They were eager then to see if the second fallen tree that had crashed to the ground in the recent storm was still there, or if the ranger had already sawn it up and taken it away. This was the tree that the ranger had declared unsafe and they weren’t allowed to play on.
It was still there – cordoned off with plastic warning tape. A sculpture student from the nearby ANU School of Art was doing something with the smaller broken branches and the children gathered around him to watch. He was sharpening the ends with a small axe, making stakes out of the branches.
He was more than happy to talk to the children about his project. He told them that he wanted to re-purpose some of the tree’s damaged timber for an art installation that he plans to locate in the lake. The stakes will support his sculpture. The tree will then become a part of a new structure, rather than simply being sawn up and turned into mulch. He explained that this was his way of expressing something about the connections between people and the environment. We were invited to come along next week to see him working on the next stage of the project.
As we climbed the last hill to the centre, a couple of the children carried with them their own sticks they had retrieved from near the fallen tree. ‘I’m going to make a sculpture out of this’ one declared.
Uncannily, this walk, with its unfolding theme of (tree and rabbit) loss, remains and remembrance, was intermittently marked by the sounds of the Long Tan Vietnam memorial event, being held at the nearby Australian War Memorial. It started early in the walk, with the arresting distant boom of repetitive cannon fire. By the time the children had become rabbits in the grass, their play was accompanied by the reverberating sonic roar of a large formation of vintage war planes circuiting the city. The planes did several laps and were quite deafening as they zoomed directly overhead. For the children being rabbits under the weeping acacia, this reinforced the need to further retreat into their bushy hide-away:
For instance, as a group of his friends ran through the leaves, one child spotted a small caterpillar on a leaf and gently lifted it out of the way to a safer place.What was it about the unassuming presence of this small creature, in midst of such activity and commotion, that first drew his attention?
They commented on the various colours of the bark and the texture of moss on the rocks; with one child finding a moss-covered rock that ‘looks like a dinosaur’.
This time, they adopted a new method for enticing the ants to come a little closer. Picking up a nearby stick, the children laid it gently on the nest, entreating the ants to crawl on to it and towards their hands. Occasionally, if the ants were not quite active enough for their satisfaction, the children would bang the nest with the stick to get a reaction, before reminding each other that it might be best to keep the stick still.
Along the bank was a series of wild (human) creations including combinations of feather and pine cones, grass woven into the forks of trees, a canoe-shaped formation of sticks and a tangled mass of netting hung high in the branches overhead.
They became aware that underneath them was a network of tunnels where the rabbits lived: ‘I’m on the top of the rabbit hole’ exclaimed one child as he stood on a rock, while others called out ‘I can see another rabbit hole’ and ‘there’s so many’.
At our first stop, ‘Ngaraka: Shrine for the lost Koori’, the kangaroo bones immediately recaptured and held the children’s attention. Instead of tentatively inspecting the bones and wondering about their origins and volume, as they had on the first visit, this time they got straight into closely examining them. They focussed upon the different types of bones, identifying them with confidence as they picked them up: ‘this is a leg’, ‘this is a nose’ or ‘an arm’. Finding a piece of jawbone with several teeth intact was of particular interest.
We ventured a bit further down to the lakeside. The children spotted a pair of black swans swimming nearby. They watched intently as the swans changed direction and swam directly towards us. It appeared that the swans were as interested in us as we were in them. As they glided over to the water’s edge right in front of us, the children’s curiosity intensified.
children also moved forward to greet them. One child exclaimed: ‘They’re coming close. I love them coming closer’. Other less confident children drew back. Up close, the vibrant red colour of the swans’ beaks and their extraordinary necks drew comment. One child noted that the shining red beaks looked like lollies. Other children commented on the differential scales of bodies, comparing the swans’ long necks to our short ones, and to the even longer necks of giraffes. One or two children interacted directly with the swans, asking them questions like: ‘have you got a baby?‘ This was a special meeting. There was an intimacy to it. The children seemed to be moved by this mutually curious encounter with intelligent wildlife so radically different to themselves.
Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times 