By Phil Jarratt
This is the story of what happened when a little piece of heaven in Noosa suddenly turned into hell on an otherwise peaceful start to the second day of 2023.
Sunshine Beach dog groomer Amanda Taylor arrived at Dog Beach (also known as Doggie Beach) in Noosa Woods just before 7am with a trio of well-groomed canines – her own slightly demented Pomeranian Rusty, her daughter’s frisky two-year-old Pom called Ferrari (or Rari for short) and her neighbours’ big, beautiful Bull Arab, Rajah.
As she’d done a thousand times before, Amanda set her towel down at the edge of the sand, still wet from the early high tide, and walked to the water’s edge with the dogs following, all ready for a swim and frolic in the calm waters of the inlet just inside the Noosa Bar.
Although Dog Beach is certainly on the tourist radar, it is one of the few swimming holes where locals usually outnumber visitors, even the day after New Year, and there were already 20 or 30 of them, many with dogs, setting up their cabanas as the tide receded or walking the sections of beach that eroded trees haven’t cut off, and a few lolling on anchored boats off the adjacent sand bar.
It was a dreamy morning in a dreamy place, until suddenly it wasn’t.
Hearing the unmistakeable screaming of a small dog, Amanda looked down at her feet in time to see a blur of fur heading in the other direction.
She turned and saw Rari’s torso and tail protruding from a thick knot of patterned flesh. “It took a second or two to register, and then I thought, shit, it’s a snake!” she recalled.
“I could see it had bitten into him and was curling tighter around his head. Then I saw the tail getting shorter as the snake kept curling around Rari.”
Reflecting on these terrifying moments a few days later with husband Paul at their comfortable Sunshine Beach home, Amanda said: “There were a lot of thought processes involved when I look back on it.
“I knew the snake was a python and if it bit me it wouldn’t kill me.
“I knew I had to stop my dog being strangled. The snake was crushing his head so much it burst a blood vessel in his eye.
“What came next was just a gut reaction.
“I grabbed the tail and started banging the other end on the ground in the hope that it would uncoil.
“I thought I was quietly dealing with the situation but apparently I was screaming my head off. There was a boat sitting right in front of me with people quietly sitting on it. When I looked up again they were treading water and just looking at me.”
Noosa locals, the Mount family, had been enjoying the morning serenity from the bow of their boat when the python struck.
As Angela Mount later posted on social media in response to Amanda’s story: “We heard your screams from our boat and turned to see it unfold. My husband’s very impressed with your snake wrangling skills. It was a big one!”
Indeed it was, estimated at between three and three-and-a-half metres long, the python was at the high end of specimens often seen on Dog Beach, although usually at the more eroded end near the sand berms.
“I have accidentally come across multiple pythons when fishing this area, more so at night and early mornings, they hang from branches and yes, tuck under the overarches of the river bank,” fisherman Dave Simpson posted.
Oblivious to the mounting reaction to her screams, Amanda just kept bravely focused on the job at hand, freeing her brave little dog.
She says: “So I just kept banging it [the python] on the ground until it unravelled and the dog came flying out of its mouth. They were travelling in the same direction but separated now, which made it easy to wind it up and just chuck the snake as far into the water as I could.
“It went a long way.
“Rajah had gone running off so I went after him and when I got back to the water’s edge everyone was just standing, watching.
“While I walked Rajah to the water to keep an eye on the snake, I asked if anyone could help me grab my little dog because he’d been bitten by a snake.
“Most of them hadn’t realised what had happened, thinking I’d been throwing a big stick.
“So Rajah is up to his chest in the shallows and the snake is right in front of him, swimming like a cobra with his head out of the water just keeping an eye on Rajah.
“That freaked me out, but then the whole thing freaked me out. I was so surprised that Rajah just kept watch, that he didn’t attack the snake.”
With Rajah on snake watch, Amanda turned her attention back to Rari, who had come running back to her.
“I picked him up while a woman grabbed my towel and came over, and I realised I had blood all over me from his head wound.” she said.
“Together we wrapped him up in the towel and stood there in a state of shock. I called Rajah back from the water and a woman told me that the moment I did that the snake just zoomed out of the water and up the sand and under the tree roots again.”
Angela Mount confirmed this from the boat.
“Glad your dog is OK. Snake slid back to its spot under the tree roots after the swim.”
Fifteen seconds of hell, by Amanda’s reckoning, and it was all over.
In a sense.
One of the women who helped her slipped a business card into her hand and told to call if she needed to. A clinical psychologist, this kind soul talked Amanda through her times of trauma this past week.
Amanda says: “I’d been waking up in the night with that vision of the little dog being crushed, but it’s getting better, and yesterday I took the small dogs back to the beach for the first time.
“It was really hard, I just kept picking them up. It’s a shame because it’s my version of paradise down there. And it will be again.”
Meanwhile, Ferrari was pretty frisky when Noosa Today called in on the Taylors at the end of a tough week, healing well from two punctures to the ear and head and severe bruising to his head and eye.
Rajah, who came over from the neighbours’ to be in the photo, just looked pretty pleased with himself, as well he might.
