Sinbad and Caesar found us

When we moved to Darwin in Australia's top end (the Northern Territory), my father wasn't expecting us.

Mum rented a sparsely furnished house on stilts then phoned Dad to tell him we'd landed from Sydney. When I say "we", I mean Mum, me (I was seven), my brother (4) and my sister (1).

Poor Mum had left a cosmopolitan beach house in Sydney for Darwin to support my Dad's career as a geologist. Us kids came along as part of the deal, the sacred pact of being married second time around and desperate to make it work.

Anyway, my brother and I were inseparable and quickly made friends with the other kids in the street. One day, my brother was chomping on a Vegemite sandwich, an Aussie kids' staple snack back in the 70s, when a stray dog emerged from the bush and followed us home.

He was part dingo (Australian wild dog) and very lean and hungry. Mum let us keep him and named him Sinbad. I'm not sure why she chose that name, I'll have to ask her one day.

Anyway, Sinbad became part of the family for a couple of years but he had a habit of chasing cars in the days before fenced yards and kept getting injured and costing hundreds in vet bills.

Mum didn't have a paid job and Dad was still climbing the career ladder so one day, she gathered us kids around and told her that she'd taken Sinbad to be "put to sleep" and the vet had exclaimed: "I can't put this dog down. I have spent so much time repairing him. My friend has racehorses and needs a good guard dog." Call me gullible but I only realised this was a "the dog has gone to a farm" story when I was about 45!

Still in Darwin, a few years later, we were smashed by the devastating Cyclone Tracey. Most of the populus were quickly evacuated to safe Australian cities in the aftermath but they had to leave their pets behind.

Sadly, a lot of hungry dogs were shot however cats were smarter and hid.

Dad refused to have his family be evacuated because he was one of the only people in Darwin with a CB radio in his work truck so insisting on staying to help the police and military clean-up and recovery efforts.

So that's how our generator shed became the home of a certain all-white cat with green eyes my mother named Caesar.

Unlike poor Sinbad, Caesar stayed with us pretty much for the rest of his days, through our move south to Perth and numerous "butter on the paws" operations.

We were told if we put butter on his paws, he would lick it off and therefore remove the scent of where he had lived before so would not run off.

It was maybe an urban myth but it worked. Caesar stayed with us until we made the mistake of adopting a ginger kitten called Patches.

Caesar was so appalled that we had got another cat, he moved up the street and adopted a new family.

He lived for a few more years but one day disappeared as magically as he had appeared all those years before amongst the rubble and chaos of post-cyclone Darwin.

White cats have a lot of difficulties in Australia because the UV light is so strong that many develop skin cancers on their ears and noses.

But Caesar weathered all of that. He and Sinbad were both strays and we loved them.

They found us and we cared for them as best as we could. My mother always made sure we were surrounded by animals as we grew up and this engendered in us a caring, generous and flexible nature.

Or maybe it was always there to start with.