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He was a little monster,” Bob said, laughing, about Steve as a child. The main difficulty wasn’t unruly behavior. It was Steve’s insatiable curiosity about the bush and the wildlife in it.
“For the first few months, when he was a baby, I could put Steve down and he would stay where I put him,” Lyn told me. “But after he started to get around on his own, it was all over. I would find him either on the roof or up in some tree.”
When the family headed off on a trip, usually to North Queensland on wildlife jaunts, Steve could always be counted on to be elsewhere when they were ready to go. They would find him next to the nearest stream, snagging yabbies or turning over bits of wood to see what was hidden underneath.
“He was never where we wanted him to be,” Lyn recalled with a laugh.
Steve’s childhood was “family, wildlife, and sport,” he told me. He played rugby league for the Caloundra Sharks in high school and was picked to play rugby for the Queensland Schoolboys and represent the state, but he chose to go on a field trip with his dad to catch reptiles instead.
Sometimes sport and wildlife mixed in unexpected ways. Both was an expert badminton player, and a preteen Steve decided to layout a badminton court in the family’s backyard one day. He had a brolga as a friend, a large bird that he called Brolly. Brolly objected to Steve rearranging her territory. She waited until his back was turned and then attacked. Wham! A brolga’s beak is a fearsome weapon, and Brolly’s slammed into the back of little Stevo’s head.
His bird friend knocked him out cold.
“Go ahead, feel it,” Steve said after regaling me with this story. He bent his head. I could still feel a knot of scar tissue, a souvenir of the brolga attack years earlier.
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