We’re just saying our farewells to the Post Office Hotel in Chillagoe, in the outback of Far North Queensland, and I’m telling Dorothy Lawler, the hotel’s 70-year-old part-time cook, that the coleslaw she made with the steaks we had the other night was the crunchiest and most delicious I’d ever eaten. (It’s a great place, Chillagoe. Go there!)
Dorothy says she’s off tomorrow to visit her 103-year-old mother for Mother’s Day. ‘Wow, that’s amazing. How many great-grandchildren does she have?’ I ask. Dorothy tries working it out by counting the number of brothers and sisters she has and what became of them: ‘…and there was Alan. He died of snakebite. Then there’s….’ ‘Wait. Alan died of snakebite? How old was he?’ ‘Fifteen,’ says Dorothy.
It happened in 1951. Dorothy’s father was a woodsman and had so much work to do that weekend that he didn’t have time to run into town to collect some groceries in his truck. Alan went to fetch them on his bicycle.
On the way back, in the half darkness, he saw what he thought was a newspaper blowing across the road. Except it wasn’t a paper, he discovered, as he ran into it. It was a hawk in battle with a snake. The snake got caught in the spokes of his bicycle and Alan — who seems not to have known much about global snake species distribution — said he thought it was a rattlesnake. Perhaps, people surmised afterwards, it was because of the mental association he’d made with the flapping noise of the bird’s wings.
Anyway, the snake bit him and Alan thought he knew what to do. He went immediately to the barbed-wire fence by the road and used the barbs to open the flesh where the snake had bit him.
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