Choking Horror

I've just spent the morning clearing an invasive foreign weed from the place where I'm staying right now. My feet are stinging and bloody with nettles and leeches, but I don't mind. Those two will clean my blood for me after the horrid sugar I consumed over Easter.

But I am worried about the European privet that was thoughtlessly introduced to make hedges by the invaders. Our native lilly pilly makes a better hedge, with edible fruit too, but they cleared that and put in this green alien monster instead.

There are billions of the horrid things, all through the local creeks like chewing gum in a kid's hair. The creek should be teeming with turtles, eels and crayfish, but instead it has become a watery desert. The sole organisms that are thriving in there are the toad tadpoles, the animal equivalent of the privet menace, only poisonous as well.

The only thing that stops me crawling off into the bush to die in despair is the big oldman platypus who is still hanging on downstream a bit. He's a rogue freak as long as my arm, and he's not going anywhere, despite the strangling horror that is destroying his home. When I grow up I want to be just like him.