Further along the drive, deeper in the trees opposite the herbarium, is a young man standing alone, peering into the shrubbery. Bat-girl doesn't know him. All sorts of people turn up here in the dark, she says. To watch the bats come home, to see if their dead bodies are being quietly carried off, to see if anyone really will go over the fence to avenge the bats on death row by ring-barking trees. Bat-girl reckons the avengers are bluffing.
Nobody really talks.
There's a lot of paranoia about. When I wander along to talk to the feral lad, he moves off. Soon after I spot a couple of elderly women in tea-cosy hats huddled on a spot just up from the Domain Road intersection. Just here to see the bats come in, they say. Been watching their dawn return for a couple of years.