Tanya Heaslip

But the most gorgeous ones are the little wallabies, the rock wallabies that live in all the gorges and anywhere along the top of hillsides.

Just these sweet little rock wallabies and they scuttle away when they see you, but they're very curious and they rarely come out during daytime, just at dawn.

You see them when you're out walking at dawn.

Then, of course, there's the predator, the dingo, who has no natural...

predator above it.

So they're the wolves, they're the wild creatures there that the rock wallabies hide from as well.

And what are the birds there?

Because I have these images in my mind of flocks of white birds and what are they, cockatoos?

Flocks and flocks of cockatoos, wild, you know, galahs, cockies, whatever you want to call them, the farmer's curse.

There's squillions of them there, you know, packs of them squawking and screeching, crows, of course.

And we also have the red and green parrots,

are gorgeous.

I'm not quite as screechy.

We have butcher birds that sing in the morning that are just divine.

We have little babblers.

And then when it rains, we have flocks of tiny wrens, loads of them just all over the water holes.

So growing up there in the, what, the 60s and 70s, you say, what was daily routine like for your mum and dad?

Work, just non-stop work.

They were up at five to turn on the old generator to get the electricity going so mum could have a light to cook masses of meat and eggs from our chooks for breakfast for all the stockmen, for us kids.

then mum would spend all day cooking because there'd be morning smoko, afternoon smoko.