Fifteen years ago, while sitting on the back deck of my 1920s tin and timber Queenslander in Brisbane, I realised I was being watched. Spinning around, I discovered a snake dangling from the lattice. Terrified, I rushed inside and locked the door. Fear is not rational, or I would have understood that serpents don’t have arms.
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 was to freeze, keep an eye on it, and call out to Mum. Dad, a bit of a Steve Irwin-type, would grab a hessian bag, casually toss the reptile in, and escort it up to the farm shed to eat the rats.
Fast forward several decades and I’m living 4km from Brisbane’s city centre, with a bushy back yard deliberately grown wild to encourage wildlife. Ten years into living on the property, I discovered non-venomous eastern carpet pythons. Overcoming my terror was gradual. By naming one Sylvia and observing her, I quickly learned what a beautiful and clever creature she was. I loved how she would dislocate her jaw to yawn, use her forked tongue to smell, and how her eyes would go milky before she shed her skin.
Sylvia eventually grew too curvy to squeeze back into the ceiling cavity. Soon after, another arrived, then another. One, nicknamed Son of Satan or Shitty, was aggressive and would strike at my back-door glass. For a brief moment my fear returned, but I reminded myself that snakes, like humans, have different personalities. 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. 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 a hopeless hunter for now. I look forward to the day another serene serpent like Sylvia graces my back deck.
