They’d thought about doing some acts themselves, but
they decided their usual party tricks like riding a bicycle with three rolls of
barbed wire and six loose melons was too ordinary. They tried to get Mick to do
a strongman act for them, but he reckoned they’d be better off with snakes,
because city folk are both scared of and fascinated by snakes.
The first thing Alice and Gertie did was to sit down
and plan the acts they could use. First up they had some adding adders, where
you would ask an easy sum, and the snakes would stick up enough heads over the
side of the container to give you the answer. It was a fake, of course, because
adders are deaf, and couldn’t hear the question, but Alice had a pup, the runt
of one of the litters sired by Mick’s dog, and it could hear all right.
So it’d listen to the question, then nose enough of
the adders, which would stick their heads up, rather than get nipped on the
tail by the pup if they didn’t do it right. But even if it was a fake, the
customers wouldn’t know it was just a dog doing the sums, and so they’d be
impressed.
The next thing they decided on was a snaky equivalent
of a lion-taming act, and for this, they decided to use a young python they
found eating scrub bulls in the back paddock. What happened was they were
looking for a horse that had gone missing, and they thought this python might
know something about it, so they reckon Alice ripped its jaws open, and Gertie
stepped inside, but all there she could see was a scrub bull that was bellowing
and roaring for all it was worth.
In truth, Smiling Annie was there as well, and she
held the snake’s tail, and the next bit was her idea. “Let’s see,” she says.
“The tent’s only got four ‘roo hides in it, so you can fit about four hundred
people, but you’ll never get all of that snake into the ring. It’d be best if
you train it to open its jaws, then you can bring the front end in, just after
you’ve fed it a bull, because snakes don’t roar, but your customers won’t know
that the roar they hear is coming from the bull, not the snake.”
Gertie being the small one, she got the job of being
the tamer of what they now called “Grendel, the world’s biggest worm”, which
was a bit of a fake, seeing as how it was really a python, and people sort of
knew that worms didn’t have two-metre teeth, but it still looked real
impressive. Mind you, they could see a problem if they had to do matinees,
because it took Grendel a full day to digest a bull, but in the end that wasn’t
a problem.
Next up, they decided, was a high-wire act. That was
easy, because they got some of the plaiting snakes. These are the only little
snakes that can stand up to the big snakes in the back paddock, and that’s
because they plait themselves together into a whip, and lash any big snake that
comes near them, and they’re highly intelligent.
Anyhow, Annie rounded some up and explained what was
on offer: a chance to see a bit of the country, free milk, plenty of frogs, and
a chance to give Grendel a free lashing at any matinee performance. Of course,
they’d need fancy uniforms, but the rest of the plaiting snakes had a
whip-around, and in no time at all, they had lashings of cash.
The thing is, Grendel wasn’t too happy about the idea,
as he’d had a few encounters with plaiting snakes, even in his young life, but
that was no problem. The girls just got Smiling Annie to come around and smile
at Grendel, and he decided that the whole idea had a lot of merit, and it was only for matinees.
Anyhow, the plaiting snakes were ideal for the high
wire, but they worked themselves into a bigger routine, where they started out
as a trapeze act, and swung back and forth, adding more snakes to the plait,
then whipping up to tie off on the other post. It was a mistake for the girls
to agree to this, because the plaiting snakes used this as an excuse to get
more of their family into the show, and that was the first element of the
disaster that was to come.
There was another problem when they tried to get some
drop bears to ride tiptail snakes. These tiptails are completely harmless
snakes, which only eat wild grapes and spinifex seeds, but when the wind gets
up, the seeds blow around pretty fast, so the tiptails need to be even faster,
and they rear up and race along on just the tip of their tail, cutting down on
friction.
Well the drop bears would ride the tiptail snakes all
right, but the first time the snakes reared up on their tails, two of the bears
went feral, and bit the snakes on the neck. And even though Mrs Greasy Smith
had filed down the bears’ teeth for them, it still hurt the tiptails.
Now I know I said the tiptails are harmless, but they
also have a very mean streak and a nasty sense of humour, especially when
something annoys them. I’ve seen more than one horse rider chased by tiptails
after taking a horse over a tiptail nursery, and there’s nothing more upsetting
than galloping full speed, and having four hissing snakes either side of you,
four more behind you, and a couple of small ones jumping over you from side to
side.
But while you can bluff a horse rider, drop bears have
no imagination at all, so what the tiptails did was to race around the practice
ring, faster and faster, and then lean out and bash the drop bears against the
poles. So given the time it took to catch a drop bear alive and file its teeth,
it just wasn’t worth it, so the tiptails were reduced to doing gymnastics and
precision high diving, but people had seen all that before.
Flash Jack reckoned they ought to get the tiptails
riding the drop bears, saying they could call it bear-back riding, but the
girls wouldn’t be in it. Anyhow, Flash Jack had been telling the girls about
hoop snakes for years, and they were never sure whether he was having a lend of
them or not. So now they put the hard word on him to deliver some, and he had
to admit that there weren’t any such animals.
That was no problem to Gertie. She had gone out and
collected four young taipans — had to kill the mother, of course, but she got
the young ones before they knew they were snakes, and brought them up with
another litter of pups, fairly bright little pups they were, too, second
cousins of Mick’s dog, and the snakes grew up thinking they were dogs.
But as cattle workers, the taipans were a dead loss,
because every time they nipped a bull in the heels, it’d die. No worries,
though, Gertie took them and trained them to hold their tails carefully in
their mouths, with the poison fangs either side of the tail. Then she helped
them get upright, and tried to get them to hoop along, but they just couldn’t
manage it, so all the girls could do in the end was run them down a ramp and
across the ring, or wheel them around the ring.
The juggling snakes were pretty good as well, and the
strong snake act was Grendel’s tail, coming in through a flap in the roof —
brought the house down once or twice until they got the cross-bracing right,
and the snakes on unicycles were brilliant. The snake charming wasn’t much good
though, as they had some of the adding snakes playing a tuba between them, two
on the mouthpiece, and one on each key with Gertie coming out of the basket,
but they forgot that all the adders were deaf, so nobody enjoyed it much,
except the snakes.
But in the end, the whole show went broke. You see,
you can’t really have a circus without clowns, and there’s just no way you can
keep a red nose on a snake, because the elastic kept slipping off. So after all
that effort, Alice and Gertie had to let the snakes go back into the bush
again, where all of the snakes, including the adders, multiplied.
Still, circus training dies hard, and even today, you
can find cooperative groups of plaiting snakes driving scrub bulls into the
mouths of a large old python in the Speewah back paddock, assisted by a couple
of taipans which sometimes seem to let out just the hint of a yelp. You’ll know
the python straight off, as he’s only got one tooth left. And you’ll find these
adders that pop their heads up over a log to look at you if you shout out a
sum, but you have to shout real loud. So I suppose the snakes got something out
of it, even if the girls didn’t.
Mick was able to use the tent, though. He turned it
over, put loops around the base, and used it as a dilly-bag to carry his spare
shears and a bit of a snack when he was heading off somewhere, and Gertie and
Alice took Greasy’s second bullock team out on the road for a spell till they
got over their disappointment. It was hard on the bullocks though, because
Greasy just said to take them out on the road, and they assumed he meant them
to carry the bullocks and the bullocks got embarrassed.
But that’s another story.
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