Yesterday at school, one of the kindergarten students produced a tiny turtle from his pocket and introduced me proudly to Sid Two. Sid the second bravely craned his long green neck out from beneath his shell and peered around at all the children crowding in for a better look. “Where did you find him, Sid?” I asked. “On the veranda,” came the reply.
Students Harry, Rachel and Maggie Powell on their way to school at Burren Junction, a small town in between Walgett and Wee Waa in north west NSW, where it is very, very wet. It wasn’t that it kept raining back then, although from memory I did have laundry draped all over the veranda for weeks, it was just that the overland water, water that had broken out of its banks upstream and inched slowly across this vast landscape for months in a front more than 50km wide, simply kept on coming. You see, what people find hard to understand about the land around here is that it is so flat that you can, as they say, watch your dog run away for three days.