After years of indoctrination from my native animal-loving parents, I arrived at adulthood wary of domestic pets. We didn’t have any when I was growing up. Instead, Mum would jokingly tell us to go outside and play with the skinks that sunbaked on the hot bricks or with the echidna that waddled through the garden. The native animals were not so keen on this, so I began collecting dead spiders and storing them in an old jewellery box, their limbs slowly disintegrating over time until they were nothing more than dust.
When I left home, we bought goldfish for our sharehouse, naming them after musicians we loved. Madonna was a quick-darting thing and Cyndi had bright-orange scales. They were low-maintenance pets, requiring nothing more than a pinch of food each morning and the occasional top-up of water. Even I could manage that.
