The Barkley
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 5:45 pm
Connells Lagoon is a small property between Brunette Downs and Alexandria Stations on the Barkley Tablelands, I had travelled out there to to wire up three new houses we were building on a small aboriginal community. Well, an outstation really.
When the builder rang me to say they were ready for me, he said that it would pay to take some sort of bed to keep me up off the ground, there are plenty of snakes out there, and some of them are the serious type, so better not to camp on the ground. I rounded up a camp bed to stick with my other gear and headed off. I knew the camp was a pretty rough affair, a small tin shed open on two sides and nothing else,the toilet was an old cafe chair about 50m away from the camp, it had the seat removed and replaced with a toilet seat, there was nothing around it so you actually sat out in the open to do your business....it was visible from the camp!
When I arrived I wandered into the shed, to my surprise there were two swags still rolled out on the ground, the builders were off at the job site, a couple of hundred metres away so I was quite bemused by that. It is not good practice to leave a swag rolled out during the day unattended at anytime, much less when it is already known that there is a reasonable snake population in the area!
That night I said to the two blokes about the swags, one of them was a pommy bloke, he was the one who said, "nah, snakes are no worries, they won't hurt you."
"OK, what ever you say, but I think I will stick to rolling my swag up every day, and sleeping up off the ground."
I was there for a few days, we saw no snakes while I was there, but a couple of days after I left the pommy bloke had a snake in his swag, it bit him on the arm and luckily for him, the flying doctor happened to be at the homestead at Alexandria, about twenty Km from our camp. When the boys took him in, the flying doctor flew him to Tennant Creek hospital. As it turned out, the snake was either not too deadly or didn't give him a serious bite, he spent a couple of days there and was OK to go.
The snake may not have hurt him too badly, but the $400 bill from the flying doctor certainly gave him some pain!.....That was in the late nineties so $400 was a substantial amount of money!
When the builder rang me to say they were ready for me, he said that it would pay to take some sort of bed to keep me up off the ground, there are plenty of snakes out there, and some of them are the serious type, so better not to camp on the ground. I rounded up a camp bed to stick with my other gear and headed off. I knew the camp was a pretty rough affair, a small tin shed open on two sides and nothing else,the toilet was an old cafe chair about 50m away from the camp, it had the seat removed and replaced with a toilet seat, there was nothing around it so you actually sat out in the open to do your business....it was visible from the camp!
When I arrived I wandered into the shed, to my surprise there were two swags still rolled out on the ground, the builders were off at the job site, a couple of hundred metres away so I was quite bemused by that. It is not good practice to leave a swag rolled out during the day unattended at anytime, much less when it is already known that there is a reasonable snake population in the area!
That night I said to the two blokes about the swags, one of them was a pommy bloke, he was the one who said, "nah, snakes are no worries, they won't hurt you."
"OK, what ever you say, but I think I will stick to rolling my swag up every day, and sleeping up off the ground."
I was there for a few days, we saw no snakes while I was there, but a couple of days after I left the pommy bloke had a snake in his swag, it bit him on the arm and luckily for him, the flying doctor happened to be at the homestead at Alexandria, about twenty Km from our camp. When the boys took him in, the flying doctor flew him to Tennant Creek hospital. As it turned out, the snake was either not too deadly or didn't give him a serious bite, he spent a couple of days there and was OK to go.
The snake may not have hurt him too badly, but the $400 bill from the flying doctor certainly gave him some pain!.....That was in the late nineties so $400 was a substantial amount of money!