Lawn Mowing in Mooroobool

The three-bedroom separate house is Mooroobool's modal home, a bigger share of the suburb than of the Cairns council area, and the people in it are an established crowd: a median age two years above the Cairns figure, the 50 to 64 age bands above the Queensland share, and nearly one family in four a one-parent family, above the Cairns share.

A separate house usually has lawn on more than one side of it, and in a household with nobody spare that lawn is the job that waits for a free weekend, which a Cairns wet season with three months above 400mm does not hand out.

The offer is a fixed, named day every fortnight: Trisim turns up on it, guarantees the work, and does only what was quoted. Those are the two things Cairns residents say they want from a mower, a price that does not move and a visit that happens.

A standard Trisim visit is the cut, the edges, the line trim and a blow down of the paths and driveway. In a suburb where three occupied homes in four are separate houses, a lawn generally meets its own driveway and a kerb frontage, and clippings left across either are the part of the job the street sees.

The blow down is what separates a finished yard from a cut one, and it is the part most easily dropped when a round runs late, unless it is written into the visit rather than treated as an extra.

It is written in. The edges, the line trim and the blow down sit inside every standard visit, and only quoted work is done, so the finish on the tenth fortnight is the one you saw on the first.

In the middle of the estate named for flowers, Council keeps the Irene Street Flood Plain as parkland and runs Mooroobool's only registered dog off-leash area on it, on Carnation Drive, listed as not fenced. Council's flooding page records that Cairns gets flash flooding every year and that it can be localised, affecting some suburbs while others stay dry, and the 1999 Geoscience Australia assessment describes the inner suburbs' stormwater flooding as short, from intense rain over a matter of hours.

What the yards around that park share with every other yard in Mooroobool is the rain: January, February and March each average more than 400mm at Cairns Aero, with rain roughly every second day, and that is a growth rate a free weekend does not keep up with.

The answer is a fixed visit day rather than a call once the grass has got away, and mulch mowing, which cuts the clippings fine and returns them to the root zone so there is no wet pile to cart off in the rain.

On the north-western edge the suburb rises toward Lake Morris Road, the former forestry road that climbs out of Mooroobool to Copperlode Falls Dam and the Lake Morris catchment, and one Council can close at short notice after heavy weather. Geoscience Australia's 1999 assessment of Cairns treats part of Mooroobool as hill-slope ground, the kind Cairns builds on with drainage and retaining walls.

Drainage and retaining walls mean a yard in levels rather than one run of lawn, and the levels, not the grass, are what make it a different job from the flat streets below.

Trisim works graded and terraced blocks, including hand-trimming batters and embankments, rather than declining them. The rest of the visit does not change with the gradient: the cut, the edges, the line trim and the blow down, on the same day every fortnight.