by Susan Berran
Which they definitely ARE NOT!
The schools only got about thirty kids and most of them have never been out of Agnath. For maths they go outside and count the legs in a herd of cows. They get really confused if a cow moves. For literacy they read the instruction books for drenching and worming, but once a year the school gets to go on some really lame little excursion for a couple of days.
Yeah they’re HUGE all right.
One year they camped out at Itchy Mitch’s farm and learnt how to shear the sheep. Itchy reckons his dad saved a fortune on shearers, but spent a heap on sheep bandages that year. Another time they went to Mad Magda’s place where they learnt how to dig a dam. Woo hoo! But last year they camped at RATTY HARRY'S and learnt all about how to move rocks and pull out the paddock weeds that cattle don’t like to eat.
WOW! Moving rocks and pulling thistles by hand from an entire hill all weekend just so the stupid cows don’t trip over. That must have been sooooo exciting . . . NOT!
Gee me and Jared can’t wait to see where we’ll be going this year. Maybe we could learn how to dig a well using plastic teaspoons. . . yeah that would be FUN, or find out how to remove blood sucking parasites from around a cow’s butt using buttered chopsticks, oooooh how educational.
Mum reckons this year’s excursion will be AWESOME, but then again, she thinks weed-ing the veggie patch, or taking out the garbage is ‘awesome’.
The principal, Mrs Duckson, is really big and muscley. Her neck is like a concrete watermelon with veins that stick out like worms wandering all over her throat, just beneath her skin. She wears these big, black, army-type boots and skin-tight tracky dacks, she looks totally dorky. The only other teacher, Miss Croonarc, is like an annoying big sister. She looks about eighteen and is straight out of Teachers’ College. No-one really knows her age though, because every time we have a holiday Miss Croonarc comes back with a smaller nose, smaller butt or bigger chest. Mum reckons she has way too much plastic surgery and that if she has her face ‘lifted’ just once more, then she really will have eyes in the back of her head! Jared’s brothers, DUFAS and DORKY, are all ‘lovey dovey’ over her. They’re always drooling and sucking up massively to her . . .
“Can we carry your books Miss?”
“Can we clean the whiteboard Miss?”
“Can we pound on a few kids for you Miss?” . . .
suck, suck, drool, drool. Crabby Abbey follows her around everywhere too. She’s like the biggest school snot nose to ever live and she’s always trying to get me and Jared into trouble. We know that she’s only sucking up to Miss Croonarc so that she can dob on us all the time.
“The boys are throwing dead bats into the girls’ toilets Miss Croonarc.”
“The boys are sitting in the wrong spot Miss Croonarc.”
“The boys didn’t wash their hands after they went to the toilet Miss Croonarc”
How does she even know that!? I mean, it’s true . . . but how does she always know?
She’ll say anything to get us into trouble. Just because one time we ‘accidentally’ dropped slugs into her hair and another time ‘somebody’ put tadpoles into her cordial. She didn’t realize until the end of the day when she found three of them swimming around in there.
We didn’t tell her that there should have been eleven.
We’ve tried hangín’ out with some of the local guys, but they’re soooooo slow. Talking to Booga Boris is pointless, we can never understand a word he says, because he’s always stuffing his face with chocolates and any other food he can lay his huge mitts on. When he does talk, he spits food all over everyone. One time Miss Croonarc asked him a question and when he answered he SPAT a piece of chicken straight into her mouth like a rocket. She went soooooo green and was spinning around desperately trying to huck it up, but it was TOO LATE, she’d swallowed it all the way down. She ended up having to run out of the classroom for a while. Me and Jared reckon she went to the toilet to chuck. So now no-one is allowed to have any food inside, but Booga still does, we’ve seen him sneaking stuff into his mouth under his desk.
How dumb is Miss Croonarc? Booga ‘accidentally’ drops his pen every five seconds . . . but he’s actually stuffing his face secretly under his desk.
RATTY told Jared and me how they don’t have a dining table at Booga’s place. Apparently he eats faster than his mum can serve it, so they have a conveyor belt! His mum just unlocks the fridge door at meal times and starts chucking food onto it while Booga stands at the other end shovelling down his throat. They used to have a pet hamster, but RATTY reckons that one day it made the mistake of wandering onto the conveyor belt at meal time . . . it was never seen again, so every time Booga belches, me or Jared do a little ‘squeak’ just to freak him out.
Most of the other kids are just sooooo boring.
In class they can barely stay awake. Some of them spend so much time sleeping I reckon they don’t answer the teacher because they can’t remember their own name.
TOFFEE THOMAS is the school turkey, dork, nerd . . . you know, every school has one, and he’s like the gold medal winner champion turkey of turkeys. We call his big sister Tia Tantrum because she’s always chucking a sooky and whingeing over absolutely anything and everything just to get attention from the teachers. She spends so much time squealing . . . “eeeee, a blowfly landed on my nose” . . . “eeeee, that branch is pointing at me” . . . “eeeee, the leaves are jumping off the trees and attacking me”. So now whenever the teachers hear her squeal, they quickly go inside and pretend they haven’t heard her. Mum reckons whingeing kids are usually from whingeing parents and everyone around Agnath knows that TOFFY and Tantrums’ parents are the biggest whingers in town, but they have to live in Agnath to get a free dirt hill. A couple of great grandfathers ago they bought a heap of land around here. I think they grow rocks on it because that’s all there seems to be. Giant hills with giant piles of dirt, giant piles of boulders and giant piles of cow manure!
Me and Jared go sneaking onto their property all the time. We go exploring for hours, even whole weekends. We’ve found a heap of bones and old mining stuff laying around amongst the giant boulders high in the hills. Most of the BONES are really big so Jared reckons they could be from dinosaurs. Yeah, Agnathasaurus . . . extinct because it died of BOREDOM.
We’ve also overheard some of the kids at school saying that bush-rangers used to hide out in the caves somewhere in the hills around there too.
We did find one small cave only a few weeks ago and we know there has to be more, but with all the boulders and the masses of head high prickly weeds and wild blackberry bushes almost completely covering them, they’re really hard to find . . . BUT WE WILL.
After happily helping Mum with my adorable little sister, Very Merry Melly each morning, I then skip off to school merrily for a very full day of happy social skills building and fun educational development. Then with every spare moment of the day, after school and of course on the weekends I submerse myself willingly and thoroughly in the everlasting quest for knowledge and personal growth through education and social interaction.
What a load of ###!!!
On a good day I can squeeze in forty five minutes of cartoons while shovelling a bowl full of sugar-stuffed, chocolate-coated cereal down my throat and still manage to scribble down a bit of home-work to make it look like I’m reeeally trying hard. All the while, Mum’s in the kitchen feeding Miss ‘I’m so sooky in the morning’ Melly. But the real trick is getting out of the house without being stuck with extra ‘Poopy Pants’ duty.
“Sam!! Can you just change Melly before you . . . Mum suddenly pierced the air.
“Gotta go . . . late . . . seeya!”
“Well can you mind Melly after sch . . .”
“Test tomorrow . . . big test . . . have to study at Jared’s . . . bye!”
And that’s how it’s done!
Ok . . . where were we? Oh yeah.
You see, about a gazillion years ago Agnath was some poxy little gold
mining town, but Mum reckons the only thing they ever found around here was this strange dark red crappy dirt, but absolutely nothing else worth a cracker. Whenever there’s even the smallest bit of wind about you can actually see the red dust floating and hovering all around the town like some weird ghostly red cloud.
Back then the people from around Agnath got all weird and superstitious, saying that it symbolised the blood of ‘Mother Nature’ because their mining was killing the earth, but looking around this place I reckon Agnath was pretty DEAD already.
So it went from a ‘GOLD TOWN’ to a ‘GHOST TOWN’ pretty much overnight. They reckon no-one ever found a thing. NO gold, NO silver, NO diamonds, NO lost jewellery, NO lost teeth . . . not even a tap-dancing elephant that had escaped from the circus . . . NOTHING! And even if anything worth money had have been found, the bushrangers that were around Agnath at the time would have very quickly gotten hold of it for themselves.
So me and Jared decided to do a bit of homework of our own . . . just not the boring school homework that we were supposed to be doing.
Why would Agnath still be called a ‘GOLD MINING TOWN’ if no-one ever found any gold or anything and if there was no gold to ever pinch from any of the locals, then why would there have been any bushrangers hanging around?
We reckon that it’s all a huge scam, because whenever we’ve made a wisecrack about the town sign and said that they should change it from ‘GOLD MINING TOWN’ to ‘GOLD MINUS TOWN’, the locals get all crappy and weird about it.
Yep! We’ve figured out that the town is definitely hiding a secret. Nowhere could be this dull and boring all day every day. It had to be a COVER-UP.
For ages, me and Jared just thought of Agnath as the slimey green booga of the country, the butt-crack of the world, but with absolutely nothing else to do around here, we’d spent all of our spare time building totally wicked and awesome bike tracks and skate ramps for ourselves.
We‘re practising for a career in travelling the world as SUPER awesome and incredibly wicked, trick bike riders. We figured that way, we could work towards getting out of Agnath before we sucked in too much of that toxic red dust that’s always floating about the place.
We’re sure that’s actually what’s wrong with all the locals around here.
Just like on TV when they want to show you something again, they play it back in slow motion. You know, everyone moves . . . really . . . really . . . s l o w l y . . . and . . . talks . . . really . . . really . . . s l o w l y . Well, me and Jared have figured out that it seems that the more generations that are born in Agnath . . . the ‘s l o w e r’ they become. So we reckon it has to be either the weird red dust that’s ‘UN-EVOLVING’ their brains, or it’s all a huge act to fool anyone who visits Agnath.
So you see it just makes sense, that whatever the townspeople are hiding, it HAS to be worth an absolute fortune, because they’d purposely made the town look soooo crappy and made the locals appear soooo slow, just so that other people wouldn’t want to stay and live in Agnath.
Obviously the locals didn’t want to share whatever the secret fortune was, but what they didn’t count on was Jared and me turning up.
We looked up a heap of history on Agnath, from back before the town got its name. Way back then it was known as ‘DEAD ROCK’, but then suddenly the town name was changed to Agnath and ‘GOLD MINING’ was added. So derr . . . there must have been a couple of gold finds around here to give the town its title and they had to be pretty big ones too, because what else would have brought in the bushrangers? But after the first few finds . . . NOTHING. That’s probably all there ever was, otherwise this place would be huge by now. From what we read, the gold and the couple of people who’d found it, were all gone in a F L A S H . No-one had hung around to continue digging and almost everyone had left the area practically overnight.
Of course the few families that were left ended up being the FOREFATHERS of the locals that are around Agnath today. They just hung around to pick up the land really ¢heap because no-one else wanted it. Then they just chucked a few goats and cows on it and stuck around.
BUT WHY?
The animals pretty much had to feed on rocks and dirt because there was nothing else around to eat. So they must’ve stayed in town for another reason. They had to know something that those who’d left didn’t . . . maybe all of the gold hadn’t made it out of Agnath after all. Maybe they knew there was still gold somewhere around on the land, or maybe they knew the bushrangers had stolen it and hidden it somewhere in the deep, dark caves scattered throughout the hills.
Maybe that’s why the locals stayed. Maybe that’s what the locals are searching for!
YEAH! Some bushranger’s treasure that he’d stolen, hidden and never got to come back for!
Probably because he was hung at the gallows without telling a single soul where he’d hidden the gold, or he’d died some other way before getting to come back and retrieve any of his loot.
Me and Jared headed for the school computer to see what else we could find out, but surprise, surprise, Agnath was barely mentioned anywhere at all, even when it was a gold mining town. The only times we found Agnath in a story was to warn people on how to go AROUND it so they wouldn’t waste their time going THROUGH it and the only bushrangers that got a mention for hanging around these hills were a pair of real losers. They were brothers that didn’t even have a reward out for them. Apparently every time they tried to do something illegal they totally stuffed it up! There was no mention of either of them being executed either. They reckon one of the brothers had died just like he lived . . . A LOSER. He was out riding his horse when he saw two possums fighting over the last apple on a tree . . . the apple dropped and smacked a koala right on the head, causing it to bite its tongue and spit out the gum leaves that it was chewing on . . . which splatted straight into the eyes of an emu that was running past and blinded him, which caused him to trip over and fall face first into the river . . . instantly waking up a nervous crocodile who snapped his huge mouth as he leapt from the water and nipped the tail of a snake that was just passing by . . . who sprung like a coiled-up spring and flew through the air to land in the pouch of a wandering kangaroo. . . causing it to flip itself high into the air and do a triple-backwards somersault with a twist before slamming into the ground . . . which made the bushranger laugh so hard that he wasn’t watching where he was going and he smacked straight into a low, overhanging branch . . . and WHAM!
DEAD! Just like that.
We never found out anything else about Agnath, or the other bushranger brother, but that was the biggest clue of all. There was no way that a gold mining place could have nothing interesting happen. . . ever. There had to be some interesting stuff somewhere. Me and Jared reckon someone must’ve removed everything that there was about Agnath from the computer and the stuff that couldn’t be deleted, they must’ve changed. Yep, whoever it was had obviously changed the only good stuff there was on the internet about Agnath to cRAPPY stuff, making everyone go around it, only telling people how utterly boring and CRAPPY Agnath was.
It was pretty obvious that they were trying to keep outsiders away . . . and now we knew WHY.
Yeah, me and Jared were onto them. We figured the whole town couldn’t be that dopey. It was obviously all just an act. That way the locals can all search for the missing treasure in privacy.
The whole town has probably been searching for years, decades, centuries even. Generation after generation, being sworn to secrecy, knowing that they would have to be born, live, stay and die in Agnath if they ever expected to get their fair share of the ‘LOST GOLD’ fortune. Every local searching their allocated patch of dirt and then searching it again and again, year after year, generation after generation. Forever having to act like ‘yocals’ so that no outsiders would hang around long enough to stumble onto their little secret.
But every now and then a new family did move in . . . and stay. Like Jared’s and mine. That must annoy the crap out of everyone. So the
n they all have to work extra hard at being soooo annoying and try to be extra ‘s l o w’ to try and get us to pack up and leave town.
Well, me and Jared are way too smart to fall for these overacting yocals and if we couldn’t find what we needed on the internet, then we’d find it some other way.
We were going TREASURE HUNTING!
At school me and Jared started to work out our secret plans. The first thing we needed to do was to find out the other kids’ weaknesses. That way we could hopefully manage to get the information from them that we were after and the best place for getting information is always behind the school dunnies. That’s where we found out that there was a new principal on the way weeks before it happened, because it seems that Mr Penniless was falling apart. We overheard Miss Croonarc telling someone on her mobile that he was so STRESSED that all of his hair was falling out . . . and not just off his head. It was like he was being shorn by an invisible shearer. The hair was just dropping out of his head, legs, eyebrows, armpits . . . THE LOT! And she reckoned that the new principal is a black belt in TAE KWON DO, a CHAMPION KICKBOXER and built like a CONCRETE RHINOCEROS on pep pills. We figured that would just give me and Jared a bigger target to aim at with some of our inventions. Mr Penniless was so thin that when he turned sideways he just about disappeared. Unless a breeze came along, then his gut billowed out like a boat sail and flapped about in the wind. Sending him flying across the playground like a kite in a tornado.
We missed Mr Penniless, he could make some of the strangest faces and go some of the weirdest colours. Like one time when Jared and me decided to breed giant cockroaches. There was absolutely no way our mums were going to let us keep them at home and we figured there was just no point in keeping them in a shoebox, they’d be growing out of that way too fast. So we found a nice warm broom closet next to Mr Penniless’ office at school. We figured that we’d be doing the school and the town a huge favour if we could breed up the cockroach’s until we bred one enormous ‘SUPER ROACH’ big enough to pull a cart, we’d put Agnath on the map! After all, they’re fast, don’t make much mess and they eat garbage.
