Day 12 | Jarrahwood again: hanging around, just like those roos
rest day
Time for a rest day, but it should be more accurately described as a washing/drying day, with the emphasis on drying.
As sunset falls, hard to pick with the thick cloud cover, I note the massing of the roos up under the forest edge. They are smallish, probably the Euro type, and eventually there is quite a cavalcade of thumping as they progress down to the neatly trimmed lawns of the locality, clipped courtesy of the endeavours of sharp marsupial teeth.
They’ve disappeared out of sight behind the shelter, I count about 14 skulking about behind the “museum”, but soon another tranche, what is the collective noun for roo?, eschew timidity and head for the juiciest patch, just in front of the shelter.
There’s roos of all sorts, some bigger, stroppy males, mums with their offspring, springing close at hand, and a few exuberant youths also just fooling around. It’s a strange tripodulation, the tail a third leg, pointing rearwards, those two arms, sort of like a cyclist’s lesser limbs, don’t really count in comparison.
How many? Hard to say in the early gloom.
Earlier I wandered around the last remaining houses in the settlement, this was a sawmill, employing about 50 people from about 1911, with shops a post office and hospital, until 1983 when the mill was deemed uneconomic, being only able to produce about 40 cubic metres of jarrah, in a mix of railway sleepers and housing timber, on a good day. No facilities now, can’t even get mobile phone coverage.
There’s been a battle to keep the settlement alive but the leasehold tenure has finally been secured and 30 hardy souls are said to live here, but I suspect many work in Busselton and only venture up here on occasional weekends.
Ain’t so many permanents seeing out these winter months. I wonder how long it will be before those roos take over completely.