Snakes in the Grass

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 785, 6 August 1954, Page 9

Snakes in the Grass

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SUNDOWNER

JULY 17

cc E still have a fortnight," the experts said. "If rain comes this week or next, Queensland is safe. If the drought continues there will be a major calamity." The rain did come. It came an hour or two after I read that report, and it is still falling two days later. The hurricane flac is fiving. the radio is issuing

cyclone warnings, the fishermen in harbour

are securing their boats. The centre

of the storm is reported to be 50 or 60 miles north, and 100 east, and I am conscious of a little suppressed excitement as it moves rapidly south-west. In the meantime I am listening to the reactions of the farmers, who are behaving as farmers have always behaved since Abraham. Wheat = _ growers, who have not yet sown half their crop-they say "planted" here — are jubilant. They will now get the other half sown, and save the 300,000 acres already in seed. In short, it is a heavenly storm on the Darling Downs, where the rainfall is about 20 inches in summer and ten in winter, and this winter

so far has been about three inches. But even on the Downs farmers are not all shouting Hallelujah. Dairy farmers say that if frost follows the rain, or a week or two of raw weather, they will be where they would have been if the rain had not come-30 or 40 per cent behind their output at this time last year. Dairy farmers in other districts, and cattle

men generally, are saying that the rain will "sour" the grass the drought has not destroyed. What they mean I don’t know-if they mean anything more than farmers usually mean when luck comes their way, and’ they growl to prevent others from thinking that it is better luck than it is. There is certainly a great deal of grass in Queensland as far as I have yet penetrated-from the coast inland for about 500 miles. It must. be grass because it is not rushes or bushes or scrub (what we mean in New Zealand by scrub). It is a growth a foot or more high, and seems to be as strong in the bush as in the open, But it is the colour of straw, the feel of coarse twitch, and as palatable, I imagine, as nassella tussock. If I were a dairy farmer I don’t think. I would lie awake worrying because this stuff was being flattened by heavy rain; though I might if I were a Queensland dairy farmer with 20 years of experience behind me instead of 50 years: of ignorance of Queensland conditions. If I were not sure that I must be wrong I would think that a little softening and fermentation is precisely what this pasture needs to make it edible; but I have never seen what seven inches of rain can do in winter in the Tropics with the thermometer at 70 and likely to stay there, Nor have they. in fact, often seen it in Queensland. This is the first July cyclone for 19 years, and even the experts were about as ready for it as our expe-ts were for the flood in the Tangiwai River on Christmas Eve. st Bs Bs

JULY 21

‘TO most New Zealanders the trouble with Australia is snakes. To most Australians the trouble with New Zealand is earthquakes. Though one is

about as dangerous as the other I walk carefully in long grass and avoid sitting on dry logs. But the capture of a live

taipan last week within 100 miles of Brisbane makes nonsense, but not

unexpected nonsense, of the idea that snakes here hibernate in winter and are as harmless then as dead leaves. Why should a snake or anything else hibernate in Queensland, where I watched crows making a nest on July 4, and on July 1 lay on the sand in hot sunshine watching people bathing in the open sea, only my sagging waist-line preventing me from joining them. I have certainly not seen the kitchen frogs the last two or three days, or the big tarantula that watches me from the ceiling of the living room. But the mosquitoes still fly, and still bite, when the sun goes down; the lizards still run up the wall; the two-inch cockroaches scurry into shelter when I switch on the light in the laundry; my bedroom window is visited every afternoon by a brilliantly coloured two-inch wasp who is building a clay house on the edge of one of the panes, and in a week has added seven chambers, each (as I can see from the reverse side of the glass) with a wriggling grub inside. Six-inch tomato plants put in three weeks ago are now more than a foot high. Potatoes are growing faster than ours grow in November. Gums and wattles are breaking into bloom in the bush. If this is winter, it will interest me to see what developments come with spring. But that captured taipan. seven feet two inches long, aggressive, and so venomous that recovery from its bite is extremely rare, knew better than to accept the hibernating superstition. % % %

JULY 24

‘THE snakés I imagine I see in the bush are always silent and still. But that does not make them all dead sticks. The living taipan lay so still that the farmer who discovered it was able to withdraw quietly and telephone a collector 150 miles away, who raced up in his car and caught it four hours later

as it was escaping into a hollow gum tree. How long it would have slept

if it had not been disturbed I don't know. As long as the sun lasted, I suppose. But I gather from a discussion in a back number of Walkabout that.a taipan "would probably press a man hard if it pursued him"; and that it sometimes does pursue mem Snakes have apparently not been timed in Australia -or anywhere else under conditions acceptable to sciencebut the flashes of speed vouched for by Walkabout’s contributors covered as a rule only five or six feet. They were thus not running speeds but rather muscular spasms lasting for a second or less. Dr. Donald F. Thomson, the naturalist who invited the discussion, gave it as his personal opinion that, although most snakes could not overtake a man, a taipan, even if a man saw it coming, would make him "run fast to escape a quick rush." Most snakes fortunately rush only for their hideouts, and when they seem to be coming at us are heading for shelter in a direct line beyond us. It is a comforting thought, but not comforting enough, I imagine, to keep one’s pulse steady while the rush is under way. (To be continued)