No More Rubbish

• Ian See, Grade 1, Branxton Public School
• Short Story
• 2014

Excellence Award in the 'The Text Generation 2014' competition

I am a Meerkat. My name is Bob, I live at Taronga Park Zoo. My favourite food is cockroaches. My mob was found in 1776, now I am a Great-Great-Great-Great not so great uncle. I'm a Great-Great-Great-Great not so great Uncle because only 2 Meerkats in our mob are allowed to have babies! In our mob there are 320-odd Meerkats, but only 19 live with me in the Zoo.
My favourite visitor is Ian. Ian is a boy, he is 7 years old and he comes to visit me about every year with his brother and sister, He is my favourite visitor because he always spends lots of time looking at us, then says, “We can go home now”.
When the Zoo keeper comes into our enclosure, we all steal meal-worms from his pocket and then run away to eat them. When the Zoo keepers leave our enclosure, I dig a hole that is almost deep enough to reach China, then come back around midnight.
I will live to about 10 years old. That might not sound like long, but it is...for a Meerkat. My best defence is being very, very alert. Whenever I see a shadow, I run and hide.
One day there were some new animals that moved into the Zoo,They are mischievous troublemakers. They had long strong tails and some had little pockets on the fronts of their tummies, Some of them sit back on their tails, and kick their legs at each other, while the ones with pockets, seem to carry little versions of themselves in there. They have big eyes and blunt teeth, that they use to grind up their food. I thought that someone said they were called “Kanwoos”, and someone else called them “Kangoaroos”. I didn't know what was happening, because there were even planks of wood laying around, until one particular day when the keepers made a sign out of the planks, saying, “Free Range Kangaroos”. They weren't 'Kanwoos' or 'Kangoaroos', they were 'Kangaroos'.
Once I had made friends with the kangaroos, we all decided to throw a party after the Zookeepers had gone home for the day. We danced to music and stuffed our faces with the lollies that all the kids had left throughout the park, during the day. After we did this, we all got sick because Meerkats and kangaroos are not supposed to eat lollies.
The next day, we all stayed in our beds, because we felt too sick to go outside and see the people. Sam, the Zoo keeper, felt stressed because no-one was able to see the Meerkats or the kangaroos that day. Sam made an announcement to the crowd, “When you have finished your food or when you aren't hungry any more, please put all your rubbish in the bins, so that the animals won’t eat your scraps”.
After Sam’s announcement, all of the people started to pick up their rubbish, so that’s why you don’t see much litter around the Meerkat and Kangaroo enclosures now.