The next morning, I zoomed over to Carol’s place as soon as I was dressed. I had to find out the rules for clearing koala trees. Uncle Malcolm couldn’t possibly be right.
‘Haven’t you got school this morning?’ asked Carol after she opened the door. She was holding a red and green lorikeet wrapped in an old towel, so she beckoned me in with her elbows. ‘What’s up?’
I followed her into the kitchen. ‘You have to help. They’re going to clear all of Smooch’s trees!’
‘Wait,’ said Carol, putting the lorikeet in a small cage perched on the bench. She latched the door shut and turned to give me her full attention. ‘Who’s going to clear all of whose trees?’
‘The developers. The ones who bought our farm. They can’t do that, can they? Isn’t it against the law?’
Carol sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and nodded gravely to the chair beside her. ‘Here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘At the moment, koalas are protected, but not their trees. If the trees at your creek haven’t been noted as “protected”, then the developers can knock them down. It’s not against the law.’
‘But what do you mean by “protected”?’
‘It’s complicated. If there’s a koala in a tree when the council checks on the property, it will be marked “protected”. That means the tree can’t be knocked down. But if there is no koala when they come out to do their inspection, the developers can go ahead.’
I breathed a big sigh of relief. ‘Well, that’s okay then. They’ll see Smooch when they come. The trees will be marked and the developers won’t be able to bulldoze them. Huh! Wait till I tell Uncle Malcolm!’ I stood up to go.
‘Mmm, well, it’s not as simple as that. There’s a lot of rules and . . . ’
‘What rules?’
‘Too many to remember. Hop on my computer and take a look.’
Carol’s computer whizzed and whirred as I typed ‘koala’ into the search engine. There was heaps of information, ranging from furry marsupial fact sheets to a rock band called The Rocking Koalas. My eyes darted to Carol’s clock. It was nearly 8.15.
I scrolled down one of the pages to a heading that said: Is There a Koala in Danger Near You? Three pictures came up across the top of the page. The first showed a bulldozer ramming a tree. A koala clung desperately to a spindly branch as the tree swayed sideways. The second picture showed a block of land totally cleared of trees and bushes. The red soil was jagged with broken branches and roots. The third showed a suburban street not unlike the new streets in our neighbourhood. It was lined with brand-new houses, smart-green lawns and plastic-looking hedges. It was all so neat and tidy. And there was not a gum tree in sight.
Icicles began to shatter inside my ice-cream heart. Was this what Uncle Malcolm meant? Would this be our farm in a few weeks’ time? I scanned down the page. Below the pictures was a heading: What Can You Do? The suggestions included writing letters to your local councillors, to the newspapers, to your local Member of Parliament and to the Minister for the Environment in your state. There was even a sample letter, which I quickly printed.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Carol when I showed it to her.
‘I think you should do it,’ she said, wiping her hands on her jeans to take the letter from me. She gave it a quick once over and handed it back. ‘Stand up for what you believe in and write to everybody, I say. Do you need some addresses?’
I began writing straight after school that afternoon. I wrote and wrote and wrote until my fingers cramped. I wrote a letter to our local councillor, one to our local Member of Parliament, to the Queensland Minister for the Environment and, just to be on the safe side, to Australia’s Environment Minister in Canberra. Carol had also given me the addresses for two local papers as well as the biggest newspaper in Brisbane. I wrote to them all. I told them about Smooch, explaining that the worst thing we could do was let developers bulldoze his trees. I told them it was no good catching Smooch and taking him somewhere else. He’d only try to get back home and end up being killed by a car or a dog along the way. I finished off the letters asking if they wanted to come and see the creek and Smooch for themselves. I knew they’d understand if they saw him. I ended by saying they’d have to hurry. The developers would be here any day. Then I signed each letter: Yours sincerely, Rose Nunn.
I snuck some envelopes and stamps from Gran’s writing bureau and raced to the red postbox at the end of our street. I held my letters up to the slot, took a deep breath and then closed my eyes. ‘Please help Smooch,’ I begged. Then I opened my eyes and shoved in the letters.
It was getting dark by the time I got back home. I threw off my school dress and tugged on my jeans and blue hoodie before racing down to the creek. I wanted to tell Smooch what I’d done. He had to know I wouldn’t let the developers cut down his trees.
My eyes swept the treetops. Smooch wasn’t in his favourite tallowwood. Or the paperbark next to it. Or the scribbly gum two trees over. I brushed past the long grasses with their sticky seed heads and swiped a couple of fallen branches out of my way. I craned my neck. Still nothing. It smelt like a deep dark forest down here. Two black crows cawed at me from the flaking paperbark trees. A noisy miner tweeted from high up in the canopy. Dad had known the call of every single bird at our creek. I bet he would’ve known where Smooch was.
I squinted harder into the canopy. It suddenly seemed eerily quiet. Mysteriously still. My feet squelched in the mud. My breath echoed in my ears.
All the trees were empty.
Smooch wasn’t in any of them.
There was something else though. Something orange – over on the far bank. I scrambled across the creek on a fallen scribbly log. My heart flipped. An ugly orange stake was wedged like a flagpole in the mud. Another one stood a few metres further along. And another. I counted eighteen orange stakes in all. They stood like an intruding army of silent soldiers in the bush.
What were they for? And where was Smooch?