Paradise
©M. Pattie 2013
When Captain Cook sailed through the reef, he accidently struck it,
and legend says the first words that he uttered then were . . . “Ooopsie”
And what eventuated after that you could call karma,
when Jimmy Venture Mulligan found gold out on the Palmer.
And now today it’s still the frontier country that brings forth
a special kind of breed who choose to live up in The North.
Cos there’s kangaroos that live in trees and big birds on the ground,
with glossy feathers, deadly toes and boney casquet-crowned.
There’s ticks that cause paralysis and tiny scrub-itch mites
and giant plate-sized killing spiders come out in the nights.
There’s hairy-legged soldier crabs and giant centrepedes,
there’s Gympie-Gympie stinging trees and carnivorous weeds.
There’s howling sou-east trade winds that they jokingly call breezes,
and foetid swamps with crocodiles and mozzie-borne diseases.
There’s flying termites after rain, by thousands in they swarm,
with grounding forks of deadly lightning in each nightly storm.
There’s pythons who eat wallabies and spiders that eat birds,
and massive green tree frogs that do these massive tree frog turds.
There’s scorpians and taipan snakes and giant white-tailed rats,
and fluffy little hanging, shitting hendra-virus bats.
There’s lost tribes of Fikarwi in the long Fikarwi grass,
and anal-dwelling long-drop flies that crawl right up your arse.
There’s strangler figs and cyclones and there’s parasitic leeches,
and a soupy tepid Coral Sea that laps upon the beaches,
with Irukandji jelly fish and hungry tiger sharks,
and rampant roaming big wild pigs all through the National Parks.
There’s stone fish in the rivers and there’s green ants in the trees,
there’s flesh flies and there’s bullrouts and there’s wasps and native bees.
There’s sapping high humidity and heat that’s guaranteed,
and REALLY LOUD cicadas that will make your ear drums bleeed.
But ask us do we love it, and why do we pay the price?
Because we live in FNQ – it’s bloody paradise!
