Not All Beer and Skittles

My husband Ron and I fly to Australia every winter to visit family and friends. Our first stop is always Woolla, a five thousand acre cattle property a long way from anywhere, owned by Ron’s best mate Peter.

Ron and Pete hike every day, and I usually tag along and listen to the old friends talk. The scenery is stunning and always takes me back in time to my first experience of the Australian bush…

I was married for the first and only time in June 1976 and moved to Australia in November 1977. After all these years, the countryside around Woolla hasn’t changed.

Australia’s native flora, like its fauna, bear very little resemblance to anything in Europe or the USA—or anywhere else, for that matter. I found the trees, with stringy bark hanging off bald-looking trunks and tortured, fire-scalded limbs, frankly spooky. 

Shortly after moving to Sydney, Ron and I went camping in the Blue Mountains with Peter and his wife Robyn. Our first stop was in Springwood, at the house and gallery of the late Australian painter Norman Lindsay.  You may remember him from the 1994 film Sirens, starring Elle McPherson. 

The house sits on acres of manicured lawn crisscrossed with brooks and old stone walls. It’s an idyllic scene that has stayed with me for more than forty years.

On the day of our visit, however, those walls and brooks were home to more than a few large red-bellied black snakes. When I say large, I mean five to six feet long and thicker around than my husband’s forearm.

Red-bellied blacks are not aggressive and only moderately venomous. If I stepped on one, it probably wouldn’t bite me. If it did, I probably wouldn’t die. But I’m from New York.  We don’t have snakes like that in Central Park. 

There were probably only three or four sunning themselves in Norman’s garden that day, but it seemed like everywhere I looked, there was another very large snake. It was the stuff of nightmares.

We left Norman Lindsey and his snakes behind, and drove farther up the mountains to Carlin’s Farm, where we rented horses for a trail ride. We were late dropping the horses back, and missed our chance for a campsite on the Cox’s River. We had to set up a dry campsite in the bush. 

I’m a city girl and didn’t understand the implications of making camp without water nearby. At that point, I didn’t understand Australia at all, except that the trees looked weird and smelled like cough drops.

We pitched our tents and built a campfire. I don’t remember what we cooked that night, probably charred sausages and steak as tough as tree bark. I sulked on my side of the fire, feeling ignored, out of place, and hungry.

The longer I sat, the more uneasy I felt. Something in the trees was looking at me. I could feel its eyes drilling into my back. 

Then I felt a stabbing pain just above my riding boot. 

I screamed. 

An inch-long ant had stung me through the fabric of my pants and was hanging off my knee. 

“A bull ant,” said Ron, inspecting the enormous insect with respect. “They can really pack a punch.”

He walked across the campsite to drop the ant into the fire, then stopped, bent down, and said something I couldn’t understand in a voice I’d never heard before. That’s when I found out how dangerous it can be to set up camp in the dark.

After tea, which is what Australians call supper, Pete had filled a billy with water from our gallon jug and put it on the fire. When the billy boiled, he threw in a handful of tea leaves and set it aside to steep.

Firelight compromised Ron’s night vision. He stepped right into the billy, and it collapsed around his foot.

So picture this: We’re at a place called Kanangra Walls, too many miles from anywhere, and my husband’s foot is trapped in a repurposed coffee can with a wire-hanger handle. It’s full of tea, just off the boil.

Pete struggled to prise the can off Ron’s foot, without even a potholder to grip the hot crumpled metal. When he finally got the foot free, Ron’s sock came with it. So did all the skin on the top of his foot.

All burns are painful, but a second-degree scald like this one hurts even more when exposed to air. We needed to cover that foot.

Robyn pulled a clean T-shirt from a backpack, but the scalded area was oozing serum. What if the fabric stuck to the foot?  The obvious thing to do was soak the shirt with clean water to help with the pain and protect the wound.  

Sometimes the obvious choice isn’t the right one. 

It was summer in the Australian bush, when fires are an ever-present threat. We had a campfire burning and less than three-quarters of a gallon of water. Should we soak the T-shirt or use the water to put out the fire?

If you’ve ever experienced a bushfire, you’d know this wasn’t an idle question. If you haven’t, check out “Tom the Wonder Horse Sounds the Alarm” in the HORSE section of stories by judith on this website.

While we debated what to do, Ron quietly announced that he was going into shock. We draped a sleeping bag over his shoulders, soaked the T-shirt, and wrapped his foot. With what water was left, we doused the campfire and scooped dirt over the smoldering remains. No bushfires were reported in the area in the area over the next few days, so I guess we made the right choice.

We settled Ron in the back seat of Peter’s 4-wheel drive, tucked the sleeping bag around him, and drove as fast as we could to the nearest hospital. It was in Oberon, two very long hours away.

Emergency room doctors see their share of nasty cases, but ours turned a little green when he saw Ron’s foot.  

We left Oberon early the next morning, with orders to visit a hospital burn unit as soon as we got home. 

St. Vincent’s Hospital became a kind of second home. Every third day for more than two weeks, the scald had to be unwrapped, examined, debrided, medicated, and rewrapped in gauze to protect Ron’s still skinless foot. Amazingly, it healed completely and didn’t even leave a scar. 

Four decades later we returned to Norman Lindsay’s house. We walked around the same lawns and gardens, with the same creeks and mossy stone walls. Everything was just as we remembered, but we didn’t see a single snake.

I told our story to a couple of women who had worked at the house since God was a pup. Neither one had ever seen or heard of a black snake on the grounds. I guess our snakes (and Ron says they were the biggest black snakes he had ever seen) were just Australia’s way of saying Welcome Home.