When you live IN the wild, you live WITH the wild, particularly when you haven’t got a house and dwell in a hole in the ground – my caravan office didn’t give much protection either as it had gaps and holes, and the animals soon moved in there, as well.

The subtropical Top End (Northern Territory) of Australia has its fair share of wildlife. There are wild boar (dangerous), dingoes (dangerous), crocodiles (extremely dangerous), buffalo (dangerous), spiders (yep, deadly) and lots of snakes (you bet, dangerous). In our camp we met Whip snakes, Death Adders, Black snakes, Brown snakes, King Browns and a host of others, all deadly poisonous. Except for one type, the giants on the block – Pythons.

Pythons are actually good to have around. They prey on poisonous snakes and keep their number low, but they also grow to enormous size (much bigger than these photographs show) and prey on other animals, including small wallabies and young kangaroos. We had pets to look out for, so I learned to handle them and move them well out of camp whenever they turned up.

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As a writer, I’m surprised I didn’t put snakes into all my sci-fi stories, but I did make use of the wilderness and of modern pioneering, which we fully engaged in, and that’s one of the reasons my stories are set on wilderness planets.

Cheers everyone! 😀

Allyson