Georgie Burgess, Tasmania’s history with snakes a gruesome tale of giants, bounties and mass killings, ABC Radio Hobart, 15 October 2023
When Europeans settled in Tasmania they developed a profound fear of snakes, despite bringing with them an abundant food source that allowed the reptiles to grow into giants.
A bounty on snakes in the 1830s led to mass killings of the venomous reptiles, but it did nothing to curb a burgeoning population feasting on the rabbits introduced by settlers.
Snakebites were blasted with gunpowder, bitten fingers and toes were amputated, and charlatans cashed in on the hysteria by selling herbal treatments — using dangerous theatrics that ultimately cost them their lives.
“Tasmania has enormous densities of snakes, so it would not have been possible in those days for anyone doing anything anywhere to avoid them,” said Simon Fearn, a collections officer at Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG).
“Snakes would have been constantly coming into your yard, constantly coming into your outbuildings, and constantly coming into your houses.”
Snake encounters frequent
Mr Fearn has studied snakes for 40 years and extensively researched their impact during the early days of Tasmania’s colonial settlement.
Almost every snake bite or death was reported in newspapers, and there were celebratory headlines when snakes were killed — no matter how big or small.
Interactions with the island’s three species of snakes were frequent because the bush was never far away from settlements and most tasks involved manual labour and collecting kindling for fires.
“These people had come from grossly overpopulated urban centres in the UK [United Kingdom] and were arriving in an extremely natural habitat full of wildlife,” Mr Fearn said.
He said attitudes towards snakes were influenced by biblical prejudices and superstitions and, coupled with ignorance about snake ecology, the colony developed an ingrained and obsessive fear of snakes.
Given the lack of adequate treatment for bites, Mr Fearn said he could understand those fears.
“If you got a decent bite from a tiger snake in those days, chances are you were going to die,” he said.
Colonists try to kill them all
Grain production attracted mice and rats, which in turn attracted hungry snakes to settlements.
“It created the perfect storm of huge numbers of snakes and relatively small numbers of people who were really, really scared in this new environment,” Mr Fearn said.
The response from colonists was to try to wipe the reptiles out.
“There are lots of accounts of people foolishly trying to kill snakes and getting bitten,” Mr Fearn said.
He said the culls did nothing to reduce the population because millions of baby snakes were still being born every year.
“You just leave a gap for a juvenile snake, which would normally have died, just to come in and fill the gap,” Mr Fearn said.
Lady Franklin offers bounty
Lady Jane Franklin, wife of governor John Franklin, had a profound fear of snakes and came up with a bounty system.
“She forked out 600 pounds of her own money, which back then in the 1830s was a fantastic amount of money,” Mr Fearn said.
“And it made no impact on the snake population in any way, shape or form.”
The scheme did not last long, but led to 12,000 snakes being killed and was reportedly a problem with convicts leaving their posts to try to make a quick shilling.
Mr Fearn said bounty schemes and poisons were a standard approach to get rid of anything that interfered with the colony’s way of life.
“When you read about the attempts made to destroy the wildlife here it truly amazes me that we’ve got anything left,” he said
Fake remedies and gruesome first aid
With no antivenom, Mr Fearn said people dreamt up all sorts of homemade herbal remedies they believed could cure snakebites.
“This led to a whole host of charlatans who used to mix up fern fronds with tea and they would bottle it up as a snake antidote,” he said.
The sellers freely handled snakes and would travel around conducting exhibitions and let the snakes bite them, and then take the antidote to prove it worked.
“Many of these characters had had multiple bites over quite a long period of time so they built up antibodies in their blood,” Mr Fearn said.
He said they all eventually became unstuck and died because it would only work if they were constantly exposed to venom.
“People were willing to pay for anything that they thought might have saved them from a snake bite because it was a constant threat,” Mr Fearn said.
Other treatments were gruesome and led to permanent mutilation.
“No-one understood how snake venom worked, so the first thought was just to get rid of the bitten area,” Mr Fearn said.
“They would explode gunpowder on the bite site, use firearms, axes, and knives to blow away the digit or portion of flesh.”
In the 1930s antivenom became freely available and snake deaths all but disappeared. Since 1948, only three people have died from snakebites in Tasmania.
Rabbits a perfect food source
In 1827, the first feral populations of rabbits were recorded in southern Tasmania and spread rapidly.
For a century the state grappled with eye-watering numbers of rabbits.
By 1923, the state exported 68 million rabbit skins in only eight years.
While farmers struggled, local predators cashed in — including the snakes.
“They would have just been gorging themselves on baby rabbits,” Mr Fearn said.
He said while there was no baseline data collected, it led to snake populations exploding and tiger snakes growing to enormous sizes.
“There are some photos from that period of these huge tiger snakes [almost 2 metres long] and enormously thick,” Mr Fearn said.
“There are no tiger snakes in the wild today anywhere near the size of the ones that were there up until 1954, and that’s when myxomatosis came in.”
Myxomatosis wiped out the rabbit problem almost overnight, and Mr Fearn said the average snake size went down.
Rabbit hunting was a common cause of death by snake because people put their hands into holes that were occupied by snakes.
Mr Fearn, who has been bitten nine times during his career, said most snakes did not actually inject venom when they bit.
“Most of the bites that I’ve read about where the person died was where the snake was actually grabbed hold of or put in a situation where it was trying to defend itself,” he said.
Researching Aboriginal interactions
Mr Fearn said he had tried to research how Tasmania’s Aboriginal people lived with snakes but said little had been recorded.
Snake sightings were mentioned in George Augustus Robinson’s journals, but he did not mention Indigenous attitudes towards them.
“No doubt, 40,000 years of living with snakes, they would have been very aware of them and would have known all their habits,” Mr Fearn said.
“They would have been so expert in dealing with the local fauna that they probably rarely got bitten, and would burn campsites to keep ground clear.”
All three of Tasmania’s snakes — tiger, lowland copperhead, white-lipped — are now protected by law in all state reserves.
