Man with Serpent

A life, a story, and a poem

In this case, the man is my Father.

The serpent is an Australian Tiger Snake.

And yes, that is indeed a cutlass my Dad is holding.

It’s an odd story and not mine to tell, but my Father is no longer here to tell it. All we have - my Sister, my Brother and I - is our memory of the story as he told it to us. That - and one reminder of Dad’s sense of humour.

It can be found on the back of the photograph, in my Dad’s own handwriting….

And I can tell you that although the dead snake is highly atypical of my Father - who had a boundless love of wildlife and the Australian bush and who taught us never to harm a snake - the sense of humour is utterly the Father I remember, and it forms the foundation of my own.

The photo is from long ago when my Father was off adventuring, but in those days when money was tight and travel expensive - and mainly for the wealthy - Dad’s adventures were about finding work in interesting places. It was the early 1950’s - I can’t be more definite than that - and Dad had made his way to Tasmania, that huge and vaguely heart shaped island off the Southern coast of Australia.

Tasmania (or Lutruwita, the beautiful original name given by the first people), was then still largely unspoilt by the later arrivals. Vast tracts of temperate rainforest drained by wild rivers in shadowy gorges; obdurate peaks of storm lashed stone rising from alpine heath lands, and countless clear lakes filling, tear like, the gouges left by long gone glaciers in the last ice age.¹

Dad was working on a Survey team, travelling by foot deep into the Central Highlands and mapping the terrain. Carrying their survey equipment and tents and some basic food, they also had a rifle and lived partly off what they could hunt - mainly kangaroos and wallabies. The sword - used for slashing at undergrowth - was the property of the Surveyor, a Dutch speaking refugee from the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), who had spent WW2 interned in a prison camp by the Japanese occupying forces.

By my Father’s account the Surveyor was haunted by that experience and plagued with inner demons. When drunk in the evenings (he smuggled hard liquor in his backpack) he would rage at his companions around the campfire and threaten them with the cutlass - on one occasion of peak mania only held at bay with the rifle and a very blunt promise that it was indeed loaded.

So a bite from a Tiger Snake, fatally venomous though they are, was probably less of a worry by comparison. Snakes - unlike people - though dangerous are neither mad nor malicious. Try not to scare them, keep your distance, and they are simply a sinuous graceful, secretive and supremely beautiful spirit of the forest, as I learned from my Father.

Which is to say, I doubt my Dad killed the snake himself, but he was a young man with a sense of fun, and a sword - with a snake - sure does make for an interesting photo…..

What strikes me though, on looking at it, is how very young my Father is, and how much he looks like my own lovely son, as if the genes just jumped a generation.

I miss my Father very badly. My Mother also. So tonight I wrote this.

Man with Serpent

It could have been biblical

but it wasn’t. You saw things

not symbols. You listened.

You let the world show you

only what it wanted, not

needing to know more.

The meaning was in the learning,

in the patience that required.

The snake, you would have said,

was beautiful but unlucky, though

not as unlucky as standing on it

would certainly have been.

Maybe this was the day

you thought of, every time

we walked together,

when I was little and you

walked always in front. Just in case.

Me. My Sister. My Brother.


The sword was just a prop.

Your wit was always sharper.

You were young, the world

was wonderful around you -

the sky, the trees, surrounded you.

The earth held you. It still does.

There in the wilderness, each day,

travelling, measuring, you were

certainly finding something -

navigating, charting, becoming

the man who became the Father -

the land, the compass, the survey.

When our Mother lay dying

years after you were gone,

I took your prismatic compass

and I laid it beside her.

We had no map. There was no guide.

You had gone first. I could not go with her.

We could only say goodbye but

your old compass, I knew

would help you find each other.

George and Kath.

1. If you want to see some of that I recommend to you the wonderful work of Kate Bown - resident of Lutruwita, who chronicles here on Substack (amongst other things) some of her own journeys into the wilds of that sumptuous island.