While Vilis and I drove to the Rental Managers to put a deposit down for the house we found yesterday, I noticed that Townsville looked so much more refreshed and attractive than it had on our arrival in this country two weeks ago, before the Wet brought nourishing moisture. Lawns were vivid green, and the shrubs, herbaceous plantings, and palms occupying street medians looked lush and vigorous. The grey, desiccated grasses on the slopes of Mount Stuart were tinged with new green that embodied all the promise of the Wet.

I also noticed a two-story building on Charters Towers Road emblazoned with huge white  letters stating Skin Alert, SKIN CANCER CLINIC, and a medical centre on the opposite side of the road that also advertised skin cancer care. This is the dark side of living in a state that advertises itself on vehicle licence plates as Queensland, The Sunshine State, or Queensland, Eternal Summer. Australia as a whole has the world’s worst record concerning skin cancer.¹ Two out of three Aussies will develop skin cancer before they turn 70.¹ In 2006, Queensland, which may suffer the highest per capita incidence of skin cancer in the country, recorded 133,000 cases of skin cancer (excluding melanomas), which represented 36% of the country’s total even though Queensland is home to only 19% of Australia’s population.² So, Queensland has a fifth of the country’s people and two-fifths of it skin cancer cases. That is not a comforting thought, even to a temporary Queensland resident.

When Vilis and I exited the car at the Rental Managers at 9 a.m., the sun beat down on us. Heat bounced off the city’s concrete, making it almost painful to be out of doors. We completed our task and other chores and retreated to Richard’s, where a surprise awaited us.

In the kitchen, tiny brown ants trekked across one long wall, maneouvred down and then along a second wall, crossed a counter, climbed onto the stove and then streamed into the plastic garbage bag we’d hung on a burner knob. Inside the bag, ants swarmed over bits of apple core I had thoughtlessly tossed into the bag after breakfast instead of adding them to our freezer store of vegetable refuse. Vilis followed the ant train backwards through the kitchen and along the entire length of the entry hallway to a slim gap between wood and paint created by a paint blister. He estimated the total length of the ant train as  15 metres. Each of those ants was about 2 millimetres long, and although the train had occasional gaps and places where the ants moved in single file, for much of that distance, the ants were two, three, and sometimes even four abreast. I did the math and calculated that, if the train had no gaps and the ants moved in single file, at any given moment about 6,858 ants crawled across that hallway and kitchen. A less conservative and more accurate estimate would have been at least 8,000 ants. After Vilis photographed the train, I disposed of the garbage and he wiped up all the ants, which was not as onerous a task as it sounds.

During the afternoon and evening, I hid from the sun in the shaded, air-conditioned guestroom or dining/living room. Each time I left one of those sanctuaries, the heat in the kitchen hit me like a furnace blast.

References:

1. Emma Gregg. The Rough Guide to East Coast Australia.2008. Rough Guides, New York, p. 45.

2. Cancer Council Queensland. Fact Sheet: Cancer incidence, mortality, survival and prevalence rates. Updated Mar-2009. Accessed 23-Feb-2010. http://www.cancerqld.org.au/icms_docs/54023_Cancer_incidence_and_mortality_in_Queensland_and_Australia.pdf