With a cloudy sky offering a reprieve from Townsville’s glaring sun, Vilis and I hopped on our bikes (called push bikes here) at 8:15 a.m. and spent two leisurely hours enjoying the Ross River Parkway. In contrast with the dawn park users, who are mostly exercise enthusiasts and cyclists en route to work or school, the Sunday morning park-goers were mostly families enjoying recreational cycling or fishing, or athletic groups practicing their skills on parkside lawns.

We paused often, once to drink in the glorious sight of rainbow bee-eaters hunting insects, the birds’ under-wings cinnamon triangles attached to bodies that resembled smooth bottles of green and blue paint. Two black-necked storks had us cruising past them slowly, with Vilis commenting that they were definitely big enough to carry babies.

However, today it was people, not nature, that captivated me and made me pull the camera from my pack. A woman and her daughter cycling and exercising a dog while a smaller dog rode in the woman’s carrier, stopped to borrow Vilis’s adjustable wrench after he had adjusted the height of my seat. Members of the Townsville Target Archers stood in a long line in the shade of trees and shot arrows at padded targets set in overgrown grass. All male, they lifted recurved or compound bows and held them in breathless stances before releasing their arrows. When arrows fell short or missed the target, a man used a metal detector to search for them, pacing back and forth in the long grass.

Junior golfers on the Townsville Golf Course practised grips and swings and hits, some missing their balls entirely, some sending them dribbling across the grass, a few achieving clean contact that sent their balls in long, smooth arcs out onto the practice area of the course.

Below Aplins Weir, fishing hopefuls lined the shores of the river, with young men braced among boulders pounded by frothing water freshly spilled over the weir. Families found spaces on the grassy shoreline downstream from the weir and boulders, and even the youngest child could cast his line well out into the water.

Again and again, my eyes sought that little boy, as though framing a photograph, but I thought the rippling water too busy for a good background, and another boy, perhaps the little one’s older brother, kept getting in the way. I gave up the idea and began to ride on, then stopped as if I was the fish that youngster was reeling in. Finally, I tried four shots from the edge of the paved path. The instant I snapped the fourth one, in which the older boy I hadn’t wanted in the picture reached gently out to the little one as he held his rod free from the water, I knew I’d caught what had captured me. It was as though those children stood on the edge of the river of life, casting a line out into it, and in them, I saw the future of this nation.