Snake bites walker
18Mar06
A CANADIAN tourist was bitten on the back of her left calf by a 50cm yellow-faced whip snake yesterday while on her first bushwalk in Australia near O'Reilly's Guesthouse.
Cherry Robinson, 60, from Toronto, was in a stable condition in the Gold Coast Hospital last night after being airlifted from O'Reillys by the RACQ CareFlight helicopter late yesterday morning.
She was given antivenene and admitted as a precaution.
Ms Robinson said she was returning from the bushwalk with her sister Sheila yesterday morning.
"I was on the trail when I suddenly felt something brush my leg and I looked down and there was this snake coiled on the ground beside me," said Ms Robinson, who began her guesthouse stay on Thursday.
"I pulled my leg away quickly and the snake jumped up and bit me on the back of my left leg. I know I screamed.
"It quickly moved off the path. It seemed angry and was moving around a lot.
"It had been a lovely walk. The birds out there are fantastic and so are the snakes I guess, so long as they are not close to you.
"But I'll be back it was very beautiful. I also want to thank the CareFlight guys. They have been wonderful."
The yellow-faced whip snake is only weakly venomous. It is rare for them to attack unless someone was trying to pick them up.
O'Reilly's managing director Shane O'Reilly said the whip snake was fidgety and usually fairly harmless.
"We used to play with them when we were kids and they would only pretend to have a go at us," he said.
"We are lucky that the snakes we have here are mostly not aggressive."
Mr O'Reilly said he drove Ms Robinson's sister to the Gold Coast Hospital to see how Cherry was fairing.
"On the way down Sheila told me she tried to suck the blood and venom out of her sister's wound and would have cut the area if she had a knife, because she had read in Canada years ago that this was the right thing to do," he said.
"I told her that no one had used that method in Australia for about 40 years. Fortunately, she's OK too."
Gold Coast snake catcher Tony Harrison, who has been bitten by a yellow-faced whip snake, said the reptile's bite was 'unbelievably painful'.
"It is like slowly immersing your arm in boiling water and not being able to remove it," he said.
It was the second snake-bite case at O'Reillys this year.
