While darkness still lay thick on Townsville, I rose from sleep and began to systematically clean and tidy the entire house, like a male great bowerbird straightening his bower and rearranging its decorations or a whistling kite positioning new sticks in its nest. For hours, I worked peacefully and was reminded of a female robin I had seen shaping the mud lining of her nest in Nova Scotia by pressing her breast into the soft red mud to force it into the semblance of a bowl.

Later in the morning, the nest Vilis and I have created here in Rosslea received a very large fledgling in the form of our 19-year-old son Janis, who flew from Halifax to Townsville via New York, Los Angeles, and Brisbane. On summer break from Dalhousie University, Janis has joined us for four months to experience some of Australia and hopefully earn enough money to finance much of his next year at university. As we left the airport, his head swiveled as he took in his antipodean surroundings, after which he commented, “This is quite a change in vegetation.”

It’s four months to the day since Vilis and I left Canada; a third of our time in Australia has gone. In that time, the Townsville landscape and cityscape have become so familiar that our eyes no longer widen at the palms and Queenslanders and traffic driving on the left side of the road. In late afternoon, while Vilis and Janis attended a seminar at James Cook University, I cycled the Ross River Parkway as far as the Nathan Street bridge and thought of the fun Janis will have exploring the parkway. He’ll see the crocodile warning signs, the flocks of Australian white ibises foraging in the tidal lagoons, the rowers on the broad belly of the river above Aplin’s Weir, as well as Palmetum Park, the Krefft’s turtles in the backwater creek, and the majestic red-tailed black-cockatoos and raintrees. He’s a young man who loves quotes, and one of his favourites is from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and so on. Hopefully, his time here in Queensland will be one of those “best of times.”