Matthew Flinders' Cat Read Online Free PDF Page A

media folk. In the end the rich got everything worthwhile while the poor were moved along. With the Olympic Games coming to Sydney in four years, the state government would want the poor tucked away out of sight.
    Instead, he would have had to take the lad to Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street where the police sergeant had suggested he go for his leg. It wasn’t more than a hundred and fifty metres from the library. For a moment Billy imagined himself turning up with the boy, but now doubted that he would have gone. In his day, kids didn’t like being called ‘four eyes’ and it would still be the same. Glasses weren’t tough and such a boy would need to think of himself as tough.
    One thing led to another and Billy began to think how he might have told the story of Trim if the boy hadn’t left. Would the boy enjoy a history lesson? Probably not. He’d have to keep things light. How light? He stopped, looking skywards, and watched as the latecomers among the fruit bats continued coming in, wheeling above him, their wings shaped like nomad tents flapping lazily, dark silhouettes against the pale-blue sky.
    Perhaps he could start by telling the boy the story of the fruit bats, how they were the only remaining colony of a rare species now threatened with extinction. He would tell him how they had found refuge in the Botanic Gardens slap-bang in the middle of a large city when tree-felling on the north coast had destroyed their natural habitat. But now the fruit bats were damaging the trees they chose to roost in and it had become a matter of nature versus nature, with the authorities scratching their heads for a solution where both the trees and the fruit bats might be saved. Billy loved trees, but he also cared about the fruit bats and he thought how typically the dilemma was of our own making. Would the boy be interested in or care about the fruit bats or the trees? Probably not.
    Billy continued on his way down to the Quay, thinking now how it was that humans seemed to destroy almost everything they touched in nature. He knew this wasn’t an original thought and whoever had first come up with it, probably Charles Darwin, would soon enough have realised that it was one that had little or no power to change things. Humans, like all creatures, put themselves first. The only difference was that, unlike other species, they had the power to alter the balance of nature, and it was this that made them so dangerous. History was all about greed. Enough is never quite enough.
    Billy had momentarily forgotten about the boy but soon found himself thinking about him again. He told himself that his mind was like a sieve and if he couldn’t get the street brat out of his head, he’d have to think him out of the way. He’d get on with the story about Matthew Flinders and his cat and try to make it sound like a story and not a history lesson. It would have to entertain or, at the very least, amuse the boy. Having told him the story, if only in his head, the child would become less of a distraction.
    He accepted the challenge that this was the age of television, where pictures were the true language and the spoken word was merely the frame that gave them focus. In the cartoon world in which Billy assumed the boy’s vocabulary largely existed, the cat would take on a far more important role than the great navigator himself. The lad had ignored the statue of Matthew Flinders, only glancing at it briefly. His sole interest was in the cat. Trim would tell his story in a way natural to a cat without wanting to alter everything to suit himself the way humans do. It would be history seen from a cat’s point of view.
    Billy started to imagine . . .

    As it turned out, one of the world’s most famous loners, Matthew Flinders, the great navigator who first mapped the coastline of a large and mysterious landmass he would eventually name Australia, was never quite alone, because, you see, he had as his constant companion and fellow explorer a