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“gave the snake an irritating nick in the ribs.  He was not too keen on this so he reared up some and gave me a good look at his head.

In North Queensland schools the Department supplied two graphically illustrated coloured charts.  One was a detailed description of the Native Loquat tree and a bunch of its very attractively coloured fruit.  The colour was a beautiful cyclamen, something so attractive yet so dangerous.  Eating the fruit was almost sure to result in blindness.  The fruit tasted as luscious as its cousin, the common yellow variety.  The plant was considered so dangerous to children that we were obliged to give a talk on it to all children in the school at appropriate intervals.

The other chart featured a venomous snake considered to be extraordinarily dangerous.  At the time no antivenene had been developed to counteract its poison and a bite from one meant death in four minutes.  So, at least, the chart informed us.  Featured was a detailed drawing of the head which was intended to make it easy for children to recognise this snake when they saw one so they could give it a wide berth.  It was called the taipan.

I wish I could say that I faced that taipan that day full of manly courage and resolve, so confident in my capacities that I had no doubt I would emerge victorious and a hero in the sight of my terrified wife and daughter.  If the reader has ever wondered what goes on in the mind of a person in a situation where he feels he faces certain death I confess to be of absolutely no help.  I cannot answer for the fighter pilot who suddenly finds an enemy plane on his tail, or a foot soldier stalking through a jungle he knows is full of enemies somewhere, or a passenger in a crippled aeroplane diving to the ground.  I can only answer for myself.  The answer is nothing.  I believe the instant recognition of the brand of snake numbed my brain completely.  I think I really expected to die that day but something in the system keeps working even though the lights have been turned off.

There we were, the snake crawling along the protecting angle, me having an ineffectual strike at him every now and again, causing him to pause, rear up and have a strike at me.  He made no attempt to actually leave his corner and come at me.  It was just jab for jab and”

*****

“Sonia began to feel ill and “woosey”, as she termed it, before passing out.  From then she was aroused now and then from a deep sleep, dreamily conscious of being naked, of feeling sandy irritation on her bare skin, of voices far in the distance not making sense, and bodies on top of her.  One voice only she could clearly recall saying, “Pull her closer to the edge – I can’t get at her,” or something of that nature.

In due course she emerged from a deep sleep. Daylight was just breaking.  She aroused herself full of alarm because she was indeed stark naked, conscious of sand over much of her body, and feeling sore around her vagina.  Sitting up she saw Sean in a deep sleep beside her on the floor of the van.  Her immediate frantic attempt to wake him met with no success whatever.  He was really out to it.  Then she noticed the three young men asleep on a canvas spread on the sand near the back of the van.  In a panic she retrieved her clothes.  There were no other campers in sight so she made her way quickly to the nearby amenities block, showered and dressed, and walked to the same seat she had rested on much earlier. To calm down and collect her thoughts, she said.

She returned to the van to find nothing had changed.  She determinedly shook Sean awake, and explained to his slowly returning consciousness what had happened.  When it finally got through to Sean, to Sonia’s horror, he grabbed the repeating rifle (my description, not hers) loaded it and shot the three men as they slept.  He then loaded the bodies into the back of the van, ordered Sonia to climb in, and took off, north at first until in a panic he changed his mind, u-turned, and headed south, through Mackay itself, out on to the Bruce Highway.

Not too far out of town Sean noticed a dirt road heading right off the main highway, screeched the van to a stop, ordered Sonia to get out and wait for him, turned right and sped away up the dirt track.  Not all that far in he came to a dry gully into which he threw the three corpses, then emptied over the bodies a container of spare petrol he found in the van and set fire to them.  Tearing back to the main road and picking up Sonia he continued on his frantic way south.

Luck can sometimes result in the perfect crime.  In Sean’s case he was right out of it.  Handy to the dry gully lived in a bush hut an elderly character of the area who earned something of a living cutting timber from further into the bush and delivering it on an ancient timber truck to a local sawmill.  He was awakened by the unaccustomed fuss of a strange vehicle careering along his normally sedate roadway and could hardly believe he was witnessing someone dragging three bodies one by one from the back of a van and setting fire to them in his private gully.  Obviously Sean was far too frantic to notice anything beyond a ten metre circle.  Our senior citizen recovered sufficiently in due course to start up his vehicle and high-tail it as fast as it would go into Mackay to arouse police to report what he had seen.  It was still very early in the morning.

In the mean time Sean gathered his wits sufficiently to relate to”

*****

“The building was deserted as I had hoped by the time I arrived.  As I made my way along the passage on the second floor towards Bleakley’s room I made sure I made enough noise so as not to burst upon the gunman suddenly and startle him into doing something stupid.  I found him as Jan had described, sitting at the table with the gun pointing to his Adam’s apple with the bolt in the loaded, ready to fire position.  Spread out on the table in front of him were the scattered contents of a packet of bullets and a couple of half crumpled up sheets of news paper.  I assumed at once that he had carried the gun to the office wrapped in the paper, probably disassembled to some extent.  He could easily then have put the gun together in one of the male toilets on the ground floor before making his way upstairs.

As I settled into the officer’s chair opposite O.S. I opened the conversation with something like,

“Well, old chap, what seems to be the problem?”

The problem was that his sweetheart had left him the night before, leaving a note to say it was all over but no forwarding address.  In spite of a frantic search on his part he had not been able to locate her.  She had been in the habit of accompanying him on his probation reporting dates and taken to visiting Bleakley at other times on her own account to discuss her own problems.  O.S. was convinced that somewhere in Bleakley’s file on him there might exist a clue as to her whereabouts and was taking this action in an attempt to force us to reveal what we might know.

I judged he was really suffering a fairly severe grief reaction and was on the point of doing something pretty stupid any moment.  I took him nice and steady.

“Well Owen, let’s examine exactly where we stand at the moment.  So far you haven’t done anything too serious.  You brought the firearm here wrapped in newspaper I gather. Therefore you didn’t exactly go armed in public so as to cause fear.  If I was feeling fear at the moment, which I’m not, then you would be committing an assault.  If you point the gun at me, then you are seriously in breach of probation and you would have to shoot me to stop me from proceeding against you for breach of probation.  So that’s your legal position right now.  OK?”  He nodded.  I went on,”

*****

“What alarmed me was to find the Philippine Airways plane that was to fly us to Sydney was a DC10, a plane that had become famous in the news in those times for shedding in mid air tail assemblies and other bits and pieces essential to maintaining flight.

True to form, we had barely reached cruising height and noticed the disappearance of the “fasten set-belts” sign, and were settling back to enjoy the journey home, when the plane gave a pronounced shudder and a shake and dropped fifty feet at least in the air.  The stunned silence was broken by the “click” of the intercom.

“This is the captain speaking.  We have just lost all oil pressure in number two engine, so we will be returning to Manila.  Please fasten your seat belts.”

The plane was roughly half way through its banking to the left when it gave a duplicate shudder and shake and dropped another fifty feet sideways.  This time the captain left us to work it out for ourselves since he did not come back with a second explanation.  I, however, began counting engines.  Two down, one to go.  By this time Carol’s fingernails were inflicting a handful of serious indentations in my upper arm and the very garrulous Philippino occupying the seat on my right had succumbed to a green-faced silence.

I began patting Carol’s hand that was still threatening to cut off the circulation in my left arm for all time offering the explanation, “The shudder etc happened just after the captain had announced that we had reached thirty thousand feet, cruising height.  So all we have to do is turn round and cruise back down the same flight path to the air-strip at Manila.  We may have lost another engine but we still have one left and that is plenty to take us back down.  During the war many’s the plane that got back to base on one engine, half their wings shot away and bits hanging off them and flapping everywhere.  So let me just listen to the engine we have left.  It sounds OK so far, so just steady down.  We’ll be all right.  Don’t worry.”  So says I with fingers, toes, and perhaps even eyes crossed.”

*****