This morning, I cycled Townsville’s Ross River Parkway as though gathering memories to last a lifetime.  The paved path was damp from overnight rain, its green verges irregularly peppered with small, avian bodies – brown mynas, soft grey doves, dramatic black and white magpie-larks. A heavy-bodied pied imperial-pigeon flapped from a golf course tree to a palm across the street, drawing my attention to a crested pigeon basking in the sun on an overhead wire. I heard the rasping trumpet calls of red-tailed black-cockatoos and yearned toward them, the calls smiting my heart with a strange nostalgia, as if I were leaving this country tomorrow, rather than ten months from now.

Past the Bowen Road bridge, Vilis blasted by me on his way to work. I paused often, photographing the parkway, shielding the camera when rain spit down onto me at one of the street entrances to the park.

Beyond Aplins Weir, paperbarks edged the path and river, and carpets of water hyacinth floated on the water, the aquatic plants’ lavender-blue blossoms touched with yellow hearts and held above twisted, emerald leaf-cups. Two comb-crested jacanas fed among the hyacinths, their super-long toes spread wide to support the birds’ body weight on the plants. White water lilies bloomed among the hyacinths, and broad lotus-lily leaves tossed in the wind.

I cycled on into shaded Riverside Gardens and then into Douglas Park, where turtles basking on a floating log slid into the water, and outside of which carefully-tended, beautiful homes lined the streets.

Hours slipped past, until at last the heat and hunger drove me homeward. I pedaled fast past Palmetum Park, with its palms spreading fans of luscious green against a backdrop of rainforest trees, over what Vilis calls Turtle Creek, and beneath the vast, spreading canopies of rain trees that stood like guardians watching over the path. Each patch of shade was a refreshing kiss, its moist pavement radiating a cool, sweet touch. I had come to the parkway as though collecting memories, and I had found them.