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1 hour ago
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Fifteen years ago, while perched on the back deck of my 1920s tin and timber Queenslander home in Brisbane, I realised I was being watched.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and I spun around to discover a snake dangling from the lattice. Terrified, I rushed inside and locked the door. Clearly, fear is not rational, or I would have understood that serpents don’t have arms.
I adore lizards. I’ve visited Indonesia’s komodo dragons and cuddled shinglebacks in Australia’s red centre but I have always been more scared than seduced by snakes.
When I was growing up in country Queensland in the 1970s, we often encountered venomous snakes – our tiny town even had a Black Snake Creek. Running around our back yard it was common to almost trip over a deadly king brown. Parental advice: “Just freeze. Keep an eye on it. And sing out to Mum.”
Mum would shout to Dad, who was a bit of a Steve Irwin-type, and he’d grab a hessian bag, casually toss the reptile in, then escort it up to the farm shed to eat the rats.
Before living in Brisbane, I’d never encountered a python, only venomous snakes. My anxious mother understandably did a hard sell on the horrors of snake bites, lest one of her four children succumb to their fangs. This gave me the same kind of fear you’d get playing hide and seek as a kid. You love the game but there’s an element of adrenaline when found. Should I fight or flee?
Fast forward several decades and I’m living 4km from Brisbane’s city centre, with a bushy back yard which I have deliberately grown wild to encourage possums, kookaburras, water dragons and sulphur-crested cockatoos. And, it turned out, 10 years into living on the property, non-venomous eastern carpet pythons.
Overcoming my terror of these new housemates was gradual. Critics say it’s wrong to anthropomorphise an animal but watching the serene Sylvia slither from my ceiling into the cypress pine which overhangs my back deck was the first step. By naming her – I assumed it was a she from her gentle energy – and observing her I quickly learned what a beautiful and clever creature she was.
I loved how she would dislocate her jaw to yawn or when hungry. How she used her forked tongue to smell. I was fascinated when her eyes would go milky in the days before she shed her skin, a gift she would leave hanging over the deck like stockings. On hot days she would stretch her ever increasing girth along the back deck and allow me to run my hands along the curves of her spine.
Sylvia eventually grew too curvy to squeeze back into the ceiling cavity. Carpet pythons are territorial and, soon after, another arrived, then another.
Straight after Sylvia came Son of Satan, or Shitty for short. Sadly Shitty thought he was a taipan, one of the few Australian snakes which are actually aggressive, had remarkable eyesight and hearing, and would strike at my back-door glass whenever he glimpsed me inside the house.
For a brief moment my fear returned and the back deck became off limits, until I reminded myself that snakes, like humans, all have different personalities. And that this was still a wild animal. From Shitty, I learned respect.
There are snake catchers galore in south-east Queensland but many of us choose to live with our carpet pythons – even the grumpy ones. They are great for the environment as they eat bush rats, and keep noisier neighbours like possums from moving into roofs.
Shitty has now moved on and I’m left with Slinky, a scrawny juvenile who is, at this stage, a hopeless hunter. This will change and eventually Slinky will leave my ceiling too. While I’m not sure who’s lurking to move in next, I’m learning more about these incredible, quiet creatures (you should see them climb) and I look forward to the day another sanguine serpent like my beloved Sylvia graces my back deck.
