Open Writing

Susan and I moved to Melbourne in March, 1999, from New Zealand, and coming from a country where one is pretty safe from animal nasties, we both have a long standing fear of snakes, particularly the exceptionally virulent models resident in Australia. We had visited Australia and Melbourne many times before moving over here, and had seen about three harmless snakes, at a safe distance, during these trips.

We have an on-site caravan at Lakes Entrance, SE Gippsland, and this is our base for many enjoyable boating weekends out on the Gippsland Lakes. We stayed there again, and cruised down to one of our favourite landing spots, a white sand beach on the Fraser Island end of Flanagan Island in the Reeve Channel. Our normal practice is to let our West Highland White Terrier Lucky wander around off the leash while we lie in the sun and have a read. However, on this particular day in late January, 2002, there were too many other people there so we decided to move further down Flanagan Island towards Metung and try one of the small white sand beaches along there.

We landed about half way along the island, laid out our picnic rug down on the narrow sand beach and let Lucky loose. At this location, the beach is only about 12-15ft wide and then there's about a 20-30ft wide strip of grass and low manuka scrub before fenced property. We'd been there about a half hour and Lucky was running up and down, fossicking about in the shortish grass, no doubt looking for badgers and ferrets to hassle, as Westies do.

Being mindful of snakes, we kept looking up to check on Lucky every 10 minutes or so, and suddenly Susan saw her jinking and feinting as they do when they are confronting something. I immediately realised it would be a snake, although I couldn't see it at this point. Lucky was in a line between us and the fence, about 10m away, and I leapt up yelling SNAKE! SNAKE! shouting at Lucky to come away. As I stood up I could see the darned thing coming straight towards us, a Tiger snake about 1.5m long, and hey, was it moving fast! I pushed Susan away from the picnic rug to the right while I leapt away to the left at the same time screaming at the dog to keep her away from it. Susan fell over, but then managed to regain her footing and race away. (Afterwards she said her legs turned to jelly and she didn't think she'd be able to get up). The snake kept coming, right over our picnic rug and veered towards me. I had visions of trying to race this bloody reptile down the beach, hoping I had more stamina than it did!

Suddenly it swerved into the water, and for a few moments I could see it swimming parallel to the shore just under the surface, then I lost sight of it. It got a bit tense then, as we didn't know where it would reappear, so we frantically threw Lucky into the boat, grabbed our belongings off the beach - keeping one eye on the water - leapt into the boat, pushed off and headed hell for leather back to Lakes Entrance. The problem was, we didn't know whether or not Lucky had been bitten. By the time we got back to the Caravan Park half an hour later, Lucky still seemed to be OK. To cut a longer story short, we did race her off to a Vet at Metung for a blood coagulation test, but he declared that if she'd been bitten by a Tiger, it would have been obvious by that time (one hour later).

That was my 4th encounter with a snake in the wild since we moved here, and it was certainly the most traumatic encounter up to that time. After a lot more research into the habits and behaviour of these creatures, we realise now that the snake was probably only desperate to get away from Lucky's unwelcome attentions, and we just happened to be lying on the most direct escape route for the snake.

© Shayne Doyle