Headlights cut through the early morning gloom; a car crunches to a stop in the loose gravel at the top of our drive.
It's Amy the possum-hunter, come to check the traps she has set in our patches of bush.
She's been at it for a couple of weeks now, arriving about 7.30 each morning, rain or shine, inspecting the sites and carrying off the unlucky possums that have fallen victim to the Timms traps she baits with apple and cinnamon.
She gets one or two a day.
And we're happy she does. There are so many possums at our place we can hardly be bothered setting traps ourselves, since when we catch anything we just have to dig holes and bury the dead animals.
(We used to bury a tree on each one but we eventually ran out of trees, and places to plant them.)
Possums hold noisy parties on top of the woolshed and wake us up with their galumphing on our roof. One even makes itself at home under the house at times. And don't tell me they look cute. Think of the Tb they spread.
They ruin our trees, as they ruin the stands of native bush. They raid the fruit, munch the roses and snap the growing tips off almost everything else. They are the vandals you get when you are too far from town to get taggers.
Of course they don't all live at our place; there's the whole of Mt Cargill up behind us, with its bush reserves and consequent possum reserves. We are just catching the overflow as the weather gets colder and there is less to eat in the bush.
I keep meaning to find out about possum skins; we must be sitting on a minor gold mine, if we could find a market for them. I hear fur is back on the catwalks of Europe.
But I'm not much good with a knife. I'd need someone to skin them for me, and there would go my profit.
But Amy the possum trapper has a use for the noxious pests already.
She is a zoology student conducting research into possum genetics and spatial ecology (or where and how far they go). It's information that can be useful to anybody trying to eliminate possums from a particular area. She has more than one site for her traps, but at the moment it seems ours is the most productive (or perhaps destructive). Go Amy, I say.