The Possum House

Peter Boyle

Living next to the bush as we do, having possums in the roof is an ongoing hazard. The previous owners of our house, after moving the possums out and sealing up the roof cavity entrances, built a possum house in a nearby tree. When we moved in, possums lived there. In the day we sometimes saw them through binoculars, and at night we'd occasionally find one on our back veranda. Several times we observed stand-offs between gangs of noisy miners surrounding the house and the possums inside. Invariably through the power of inertia the possums stayed on.

For a few years the possum house seemed empty until a family of kookaburras took it over as their nest. This was in the last weeks of my partner's life, the Australian anthropologist and eco-philosopher Deborah Bird Rose. On the morning of her funeral the two remaining baby kookaburras finally took flight. One landed under the house, began climbing the stairs to the veranda just as the possum used to do, then successfully flew off.

Now the possums are back in the possum house. Last week my daughter surprised one on the veranda just outside the kitchen door, its head buried in a bag of Bokashi maze, probably not ideal food for possums. I went outside to have a chat and encourage it to return to the bush. When it noticed me it pulled its head out of the plastic bag, looked around and quickly made its way down the stairs—I can only assume, on its way back to the possum house.