A platypus lives in the creek at the bottom of the hill. I bet when I say that, you are thinking “natural watercourse”. Well, it’s not – although the local Landcare group is on the case.

I see the platypus when I go walking early in the morning. It’s on my route down to the beach. The first time I saw the platypus, I thought it had to be a water rat or a duck. It took a few trips of sneaking down and quietly spying to convince myself it was actually a platypus. Now I know that if I’m the first on the path in the morning, he’ll be there going about his business. He lives under the second footbridge from our house. There’s a bit of a pool there – it extends about ten metres, which is bisected midway by a five metre footbridge.

I’ve no idea how deep the pool is, because you can’t see the bottom through the murky water. A couple of feet at a guess. The grass is periodically mowed down to the water, and the creek on either side of the pool narrows to what can trickle through the dense bulrushes.

The catchment of the creek includes local suburbia, parks, and arterial roads. The creek is also a bit of a rubbish catchment for the associated population of school children, litter-bugs, and general suburban pollution. When it hasn’t rained for a long time, the pool stinks. Bits of rubbish and God-knows-what collect, and oil pools on the surface. I can’t imagine how the platypus can stand it.

When it rains, water floods and gushes through the pool taking everything with it. Heaps of debris – natural and unnatural – rip and gouge the sides of the pool. I can’t imagine how the platypus can stand that either.

Every once in a while, a council worker comes down to clear the debris that collects under the bridge. They have no idea there’s a pool resident. They stomp around and rip everything out indiscriminately, without any apparent thought as to whether the integrity of pool banks might be important.

However, between these extreme events, the pool is quiet and pretty pleasant. Obviously the priority of keeping the green corridor in which the pool is sited is growing as the suburb consolidates: the Landcare group is active, a walking school bus now operates along it, and a few benches have been put in to stimulate an atmosphere of relaxation.

People walk their dogs along the path, and I acquaint myself with them through ‘hellos’, ‘good mornings’, and smiles that come with stepping to one side to let others traverse the pool bridge. They seem good, nice people, innocently going about their daily lives. They don’t know about the platypus, and I don’t tell them: platypus don’t like noise, and they don’t like dogs.

There’s a homeless alcoholic who hangs out at the creek. He’s pretty shy and mostly keeps to himself: he, his prosthetic leg, and his paper-bagged bottle camouflaged in the Landcare shrubbery. I guess if people knew he lived there, assumptions about the source of local rubbish would be made, and efforts taken to ‘move him along’. But he and I are bound by each other’s knowledge of the platypus, and through this, we’ve silently sized each other up over the last couple of years. He’s earned my respect as the resident ‘home owner’ of the site, and in return he shows a little confidence in me. (Actually the way he keeps himself to himself reminds me a bit of the platypus.)

We don’t really talk, but once in a while circumstance finds us standing together on the bridge, and then we exchange curt, non-committal observations about the platypus and its pool.

We know the platypus is not alone in the pool. We’ve both seen eels – their long, ribbon bodies gliding in between the murky water at the roots of the bulrushes. Those things have sharp teeth and alien eyes. I’m scared of them because they’re not scared of me.

About five weeks ago, we noticed a possum lying drowned in the pool. It was lying, floating, face-down in the water. We hoped it would get washed away, or somehow magically disappear. It didn’t. It bloated quickly. It seemed quite at home in the pool: periodically floating on either side of the bridge.

Blackberries grow in abundance a little way downstream of the pool. The water security ensures the fruit is abundant and superb. It’s blackberry season at the moment, so rather than go walking early in the morning, I’ve been heading out with some containers to fill while the kids are at school. And as a result, over the past few weeks the decay of the possum has taken precedence over the platypus as part of my daily observations. Macabre maybe, but part of my loyalty to the platypus and the creek man is to keep a mental record of changing ecological details of their world. And this is what I’ve seen:

First the fur that was above the water fell out. Flies laid maggots on the skin, and the little body was brimming with life as it floated dead in the water. It had a nauseating, rotting stench. A rather horrible, vaguely sweet smell – not dissimilar in description to the stale smell of alcoholic body odor.

The site of exposed flesh expanded as the maggots ate the rotting skin and meat. After a few days the vertebrate of the backbone appeared. The possum sank lower into the water. Maggots can’t live underwater, so an equilibrium was met where there was no flesh above the water, but the body below the water was still intact.

It’s stopped smelling now, but it’s still there: a semi-submerged balloon of skin, fur, and water-logged flesh, holding the vertebrate aloft in the air like little trophies. The eels don’t seem to be interested in coming to the party. Who knows what the platypus thinks.

I saw the creek man yesterday for the first time since the possum appeared. As expected, he also has been observing its decay. We stood together on the bridge over the pool and wondered how long it would stay in its current state, and how its presence had influenced the pool inhabitants.

There was something different about my fellow ecological researcher: his hair was combed and he was holding the most beautiful bunch of bulrushes –all carefully cut from the pool.

He was taking them to his sister’s funeral.

I was out for my walk at first light this morning. There was the platypus, the ripples on the pool reflecting the movement of his body as his bill worked away at the mud around the bulrush roots. He started when I approached, then vanished with a trail of bubbles.