Late one afternoon on Mount Moonimba
There’s much more to radio broadcasting than that which you hear. There’s red tape (R.T.), electronic mysteries (E.M.), technical difficulties (T.D.), not enough time (N.E.T.) and surprises (S!).
This is a documentary containing all of the above – R.T., E.M., T.D., N.E.T. & S!
On the afternoon of the Tuesday before the Lismore Show, I went to 88.9 FM’s transmitter shack on Mount Moonimba to run equipment checks. I should have done so a week earlier, but there was N.E.T.
I unlocked the door to a big S!
Three feet of the rear end of a Brown Snake was writhing and thrashing about the transmission equipment. It was jammed in a hole in the sheet metal lid of the special radio receiver that picks up the signal from the studio.
How much snake was inside? How long had the poor thing been stuck like this? Could it create a T.D. and put us off air?
Robyne rang WIRES and various snake experts from the studio. Perhaps they could send a snake-charmer.
No such luck. After two hours of pondering, too many phone calls, no snake-charmers and watching the sunset whilst the snake thrashed about, I rang Evans Head vet Rod Blake for advice. Could it be sedated?
I already knew the only outcome. There was no way that snake could be removed. It was a 30 mil diameter snake jammed in a 12 mil hole. It was in agony. I would have to kill it.
Rod agreed. I made a very sharp knife even sharper and in one quick action removed the back end of the snake from its other half.
Peering through the bloodied hole I could see it thrashing about inside. This will put us off-air I thought. It didn’t, but it did create some odd E.M. sounds with our transmission early the next morning.
I consulted with 88.9 FM member Ernie Rawlings. We made a plan to remove the dead half-snake, resolve the E.M. problem and then proceed with the now urgent preparations for Lismore Show.
So, off to Mount Moonimba again. We opened the transmitter shack door to a big S!
You guessed it. Another Brown Snake. Smaller, but just as deadly.
Damn! It will have to go. Robyne rushed up from the studio with our snake catcher, a length of plastic conduit with a piece of cord looped at each end.
Ernie wore sensible footwear; I didn’t, so he scored the job of catching the new snake. It slipped into a hole in the brickwork. Damn! The shack is built with cavity walls.
So……Robyne rushed back to the studio (a 20K mountain track trip each way) and returned with 3 cans of expander foam. The new plan was to prevent the snake from returning to the inside of the shack, forcing it to escape into the bush through the weep-holes in the exterior walls.
With threats of death no longer an issue, we returned to the day’s original task of removing the dead half snake, and correcting the E.M. sound effect in our transmission.
Amongst the blood, wiring and circuit boards lay the lifeless front two-foot piece of the first brown snake. We were amazed that despite its ordeal and final minutes, it had not damaged in the slightest way the $5000 apparatus.
The fault was an easily repaired bad solder joint which the poor snake had bumped apart.
With the situation normal, we departed rapidly for the Lismore Showground.
R.T. then became part of our story. The several charming, unavailable snake-charmers had left many messages berating me for killing the first snake and blocking out the second.
On of them caught me at the studio and arrogantly informed me “Eastern Brown Snakes are protected because they are an endangered species.”
To which I replied, “So are we. Brown Snakes are killers.”