The wallaby fence

The forest here is overseen by a tattered clan of wallabies. White-chinned, ginger-tummied, they pause still as stumps when I walk through the bush, watching to see if I’m trouble.

They come through my block daily, munching, paws-down, on the deep grass near the pond, or nibbling my Elderberry bush on their way past the living room.

What they love best, though, is my orchard.

The original apple tree, self-seeded, not in the orchard

For four long years I’ve tried to grow fruit trees, and for four years the wallabies have feasted every spring and summer on lush green-tipped sapwood.

At this point, wallabies stop being cute and start being expensive. They’ve caused the demise of plenty of trees, including, last year, an olive and a barely-leafing quince. Christ almighty, they love that quince.

So this spring, I decided to properly fence the orchard. It started with scraps of fence filched from friends, and bought strandwire and pickets. I made it over a weekend in a race against time as buds began to swell on the boughs, and was pleased enough with the results.

This, I told myself, running my gaze down the taught silver lines, is a fence.

The wallabies disagreed. They skipped lithely over it, in the beginning not even for the trees, but for the kangaroo grass that grows between them. Over a series of weeks I added strandwire above, slowly growing the fence higher like a coddled plant drunk on the spring cocktail of sunshine and rain.

“More wire,” I’d instruct the man at the hardware.

“Well, if you’re doing your own fencing, you’re doing alright,” he replied on the first afternoon.

“Ha,” I laughed mirthlessly. “You haven’t seen it.”

On later visits he began regaling me with stories of eight-foot wallaby fences, made at exorbitant cost.

This week, after spotting a wallaby tenderly nuzzling the pink limbs of my apricot tree, I added the final strand. Now my pickets have wire to their very tops. There’s nowhere left to go. The fence has reached its limit, and so have I.

My plan B? Try to outgrow the munching with manuring. Plan C is sacrificial decoy trees. Plan D is electrified razor wire, and sentinels with searchlights.

It pays to think creatively when it comes to wallabies.