An NT Woman Lit A Fire To Scare A Snake, Burned Down Her Caravan Instead


In the media game, there’s certain holy grails of stories. The kinds of which you lie in bed at night and dream about. The big prestigious stories that’ll bring you acclaim, awards, recognition and respect. Career makers. Legacy builders. The all-important upper rung on the ladder to journalistic greatness.

And then there’s stories like these that you couldn’t even envisage a scenario where you’d come up with something even half as good, and it’s the absolute best.
The Northern Territory continues to be that wonderful microcosm of condensed ‘Straya, managing to encompass all that is odd and bizarre and truly wonderful about our national attitude in highly concentrated doses.
Case in point, this woman who was living in a caravan park in Berry Springs – about a 40 minute drive south of Darwin.
Our intrepid hero found herself in something of a quandary yesterday, when what she claims was a large brown snake apparently decided to take up residence underneath her caravan. Despite making a call to the proper authorities, visiting snake catchers who responded to the call simply couldn’t find any trace of the slithering suspect, and left her be.
Not content to simply accept that the snake might have just left, the woman mulled it over for a while, had a few drinks to aid the creative juices, and by nightfall had come up with a winning solution.
Light a fire underneath the caravan. That’ll do enough to chase the snake away, right?
Right?
WRONG.
In fact all she managed to achieve through this clearly ingenious plan was to completely burn her caravan – and the shed it was in – to the ground.
NT Police Duty Superintendent Del Jones details the scene thusly.

She appears to have had a bit of a think about it and few cold drinks and decided that setting a fire under the caravan might be a way to get rid of this snake. However, it just resulted in the caravan being incinerated.

There is not a damned thing about that plan that I do not adore. The ingenuity. The bullishness. The flawed logic. The total tunnel vision and lack of consequential awareness. It’s how we got this far as a species – not by being cautious and thinking things through, but by diving right the fuck in and dealing with the results later.

This is the Australia that I love. The land of never making any decision without at least three tinnies under the belt – call it searching for a little tinspo. It’s simple. It’s inelegant. Damn it, it’s bloody beautiful.
And it’s made all the better for this following quote from Superintendent Jones.

Well, we don’t know what happened to the snake.

‘STRAYA! *beats chest*

Middle image via NT Police.

Story via ABC News.

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