There were two creeks running through my grandparents' property in the Adelaide hills. The bigger of the two had its source on a neighbouring property across the Lenswood road and the smaller one fed into it.

The smaller one originated in what was known as The Spring Paddock and the source was a permanent pool from which, during the summer, water was pumped up to my parents' house to fill the large rainwater tanks which were the sole supply for the house. This creek flowed along the edge of the paddock, under a plank bridge over the lane from the stables (see Dinah) and then meandered through the bottom of my grandfather's garden where there was a small park of English trees which flaunted magnificent autumn colours and a levelled off area where we used to have picnics in summer.

My grandfather was a very keen gardener and the gardens around my grandparents' house were stunning. He especially favoured dahlias and hydrangeas. The hydrangeas had to be blue and a great deal of care went into ensuring that none ever dared to produce pink flowers. He had a 44 gallon drum with a tap near its base, upended on a stand, and into this drum went cow pats from the paddock where the dairy cows resided. (see Bess) The drum was kept topped up with water and the subsequent liquid manure was drained off from the tap and sprayed liberally around the garden which responded with a wonderful display of colour all year round.

The pool in the spring paddock contained leeches - big black ones with two red stripes running the length of their backs. Leeches still give me the cold grues and I was always terrified that they would latch onto my skin. They were great swimmers and would home in on the smell of blood.

The other inhabitants of the pool, and the reason that we braved the leeches, was an abundance of yabbies. These are now a delicacy sold at great expense in fancy restaurants but for us they were there for the taking and going yabbying was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. Firstly we had to organise the nets to catch the yabbies. These were made from chicken wire attached to a frame of heavier wire which was attacked to a long stick. Chunks of raw meat were used as bait and they were tied onto long strings for dangling into the water.

We would assemble as many of these baits as my grandmother could spare the meat for and the strings were tied to anything ready to hand around the pool with the meat dangled, hopefully, near the yabby holes in the banks. A tug on the string heralded interest from a yabby which would try to drag the meat into its hole. The string was lifted very carefully - a sudden jerk and the yabby would let go of the meat - and the net was manoeuvred under the yabby and the meat, lifted from the pool, where the yabby was detached from the bait and put into a bucket of water, to be taken home and eaten. The bait went back into the water for another try.

The leeches could also be caught this way and I once took a very large one back to boarding school with me in a glass jar. To give it more room to swim I released it into one of the hand basins in the school toilets where, for some reason, it disappeared, never to be seen again. We were not allowed to keep pets at school.

There were yabbies in the main creek but they were far more elusive and it was seldom worth the bother of trying to catch them. However, there were no leeches there and in the summer we used to occasionally swim in a pool under the shade of a stand of willow trees. The roots of the trees created a clean, defined but rather fibrous base to this pool but as I could not see the bottom very clearly I never liked standing up in the icy water so I used to swim up and down very fast and then get out quickly.

In winter the creek used to flood right across the flood plain and I used to don my gum boots and try to reach the bridge in the middle of the 'flat'. Thinking back, it was rather dangerous but no-one ever tried to stop me and, despite many near misses, the creek never managed to wash me away.

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