The colours of sleepy, mysterious Atherton

 For the first couple of months in Atherton, Gina Rose and I walked the criss-cross of streets behind the CBD daily. I considered this area the heart of the town.  Gina Rose's waistline vanished in Cairns and in it's place was the equivalent of a B-Double tyre! My walking expeditions were two-fold;  exercise for a fat Jack Russell (she was not happy) and a chance to discover my new home in a slow and personal way. 

     
     I was enchanted by the old Queenslanders, some renovated, some dilapidated.  The deserted streets were wide and sleepy and each had a middle verge dominated by towering raintrees, jacarandas, figs and flames-of-the-forest.   Time seemed to have stopped, the residents nowhere to be seen. Once I passed three children, that was it. A tire hanging from a Jacaranda tree in the middle verge was always childless.  There was a strange absence of dogs pacing fence-lines and cats curled upon wooden porches. 
     Even traffic avoided the the four streets that bordered this little piece of last century, Main and Louise running north-south and Robert and Cook running east-west.  The almost eerie ambience buzzed with the cicadas in the warm early evenings.  

     Only after dark did life resume; the drone of the ABC news, the clink of cutlery against plates, the cry of a tired child, a dog yapping or the mellow tones of Jazz drifting on the spring evenings.  
     

I wandered and wondered about the lives and stories woven through the tongue and groove walls, the rusted corrugated roofing and the peeling paint on the picket fences in this oldest part of town.  The hands that crafted some of these dwellings and others that tended the hearth, clashes between the white settlers and traditional owners (Butcher's Creek wasn't named for a purveyor of fresh meet), the Chinese clearing plots for market gardens, husbands and sons going to war, the panic of parents when epidemics of whooping cough and measles took hold, prayers for rain to nourish crops and pastures. I was mesmerised by the architecture, the quaint English rose beds, wild backyard vegetable gardens with tomatoes vines spilling over wooden fencing, the charcoal ruins of a massive Queenslander, apparently home to squatters.  My interest in Atherton's heart bordered on the obsessive as I plotted a dark novel.    I looked forward to our late afternoon ritual with macabre fascination.  I needed another focus, especially since Gina Rose's truck tyre was bogged around her middle.  
     I abandoned our sunset ambling for something more aerobic and less morbid.  If Gina Rose resented our gentile strolling, she was about to despise me for dragging her vertically along the bush track of Mt Widow Maker.