Like most Australian blokes Gordon L was prepared to go the extra yard for the institutions he held dearest. Now we’re not talking surf clubs, scout groups or even local government. Gordon, like many of us, loved his local and would do anything for the boys and their home away from home.
After one heavy session Gordon and a mate were driving along a road about 100 kilometres south of Darwin when they saw a snake. It was clearly too early to have the DTs so the lads knew this crawling creepy was the real thing.
Remembering that the boys back at the pub dearly wanted a python for the fish tank — don’t even ask what happened to the fish — Gordon decided to take matters in hand.
He stumbled out onto the road and with his best beer goggles on attempted to grab what was clearly a harmless boa constrictor.
Course it ish!
Well, almost harmless and almost a python; unfortunately, Gordon had set his muddled sights on a 2.8-metre deadly king brown snake with a head the size of a fist.
‘I made the mistake of grabbing it with my left hand because I was holding a beer in my right,’ he said later.
You can see from our intrepid bushman’s comments that he was perhaps a little more devoted to his beer than his health and things were clearly going to get a little sticky.
‘I had its head in my hand, but it got loose and grabbed the web of my left hand. Its fangs were that big it ripped my hand open,’ Gordon said.
Still gripping the beer, he wrestled the snake into a sack, never spilling a drop in the process.
Gordon, like most of us who’ve woken with a hangover only to go back and fight the good fight next Friday night, was not a man who was once bitten twice shy. Angry, confused, and perhaps not thinking as clearly as he should have, he stuck his hand back in the bag.
Maybe he was making sure it really was a biting snake.
‘I stuck my hand back in the bag and it must have smelled blood,’ Gordon said. ‘It bit me another eight times.’
Upset by the snake’s hostility, Gordon withdrew and started to lose consciousness, but luckily for him he had a friend who cared.
‘My mate was trying to keep me awake by whacking me in the head and pouring beer on me,’ Gordon recalls.
His good friend decided to drive him to Darwin, but only got as far as the Noonamah Hotel, about fifty kilometres from the city, where the bar manager called an ambulance.
Sensible bloke that.
Gordon was in a coma for six weeks and had continuous blood transfusions because the venom prevented clotting and caused internal bleeding.
Up at the Darwin hospital they don’t muck around and they decided to lop off the poor bloke’s arm. His heart stopped three times during the amputation — probably shocked that it would be going through life with one less drinking apparatus.
The doctors said that Gordon was the sickest man ever to survive a snake bite, although you probably didn’t need a medical degree to figure that out.
‘I still can’t believe my arm’s been chopped off,’ Gordon said later.
Gordon’s sister reckoned her brother was accident-prone.
‘He’s like a cat, but this time he has used up his ninth life,’ she said.
Gordon once spent three months in hospital after his car hit a buffalo and was crushed when a truck reversed and pinned him to a pile of bricks.
‘I still have my life and I guess that’s the most important thing,’ Gordon said later.
Yeah, pal, but what about the bloody boys at the pub? What about the fish tank? Talk about self-centred!