In the lead-up to Halloween, Mr. Ballen is telling scary stories - scary true stories. Here's one about a tragic encounter between three friends and one of Australia's most frightening monsters.
Update Speaking of Australia, does this kind of thing happen often (H/T: Ace of Spades)?
Unexpected spectators.. 😂
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) October 27, 2021
🎥 Wendy Powick via @GolfAust pic.twitter.com/C3efwNuzhv
8 comments:
Oh, kangaroos and wallabies everywhere here, just show up uninvited and take over.
The big black swamp wallabies around my place are nice though - only travel in pairs and shy.
Not so many marsupials round my part of the Great South Land. We do have plenty of bin chickens, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4dYWhkSbTU
They took a particular shine to one house a few blocks away. Any time I walked past there'd be two or three pecking around on the front lawn and a couple more on the roof. Don't know where they went after that house got demolished.
Bin chickens. I learned something new today.
An excellent retelling of the Finniss River croc attack.
He tells the story well, & emphasises the scary parts.
IIRC the eventual rescue of the two lads from the tree/river was a whole lot more scary & precarious than how it is recounted in that video. A whole lot more precarious.
All the bin chickens have to do now is develop some kind of venom and they will be the perfect Australian creature.
Actually, they remind me of the ibis we encountered at DisneyWorld one year. For some reason they had decided to invade Epcot, and you couldn't eat lunch at the outdoor tables without one or two jumping up on the table to sample your fare. I don't know how Disney finally resolved the situation, but if I were you, I'd be wary of any poultry dishes served there.
In the mid Nineties I visited the RAN's Fleet Base West, on Garden Island just south of Perth/Fremantle. It is home to a large herd? Gang? Conclave? of wallabies, supposedly unique to the island. They were all over, though not so heavily collected near the piers.
And they did not GAF. I saw a group on a lawn, with one outlier right near the road, like a sentry. I walked towards him, and he stood his ground, staring right at me. About twenty feet away I stopped and we stood there, just looking at each other. I figured that was as near as I needed to come and backed away. I had a strong suspicion that if I got beat up by a wallaby I'd receive no sympathy from anybody, and would likely get in legal trouble for my pains.
Steve at the Pub: I imagine that had to have been an extremely harrowing rescue experience for all parties.
Gregory: Bin chicken is a new one to me, too. We do have lots of white ibises here in southeastern North Carolina.
Stephen S: Don't trust wallabies. Just don't.
Paco: He understates the damage from the downdraught of the chopper blades, & understates the "boat rescue"
Keep in mind this is happening in a rising flood, with no discernable river bank.
The north of Australia does not have big trees, they didn't really have anywhere to climb.
IIRC the 'tree' they'd climbed was a Paperbark (I've always known them as 'Paperbarked Tea-Tree") & the tree was also dead. It'd be liable to shed branches at the best of times.
When the helicopter came overhead, the downdraught started breaking the upper branches off. The chopper crew immediately pulled away for fear of either blowing the boys off, or of breaking the tree from under them.
The helicopter happened to have an inflatable rescue raft aboard.
They found a bare spot a few hundred yards away, an island in the river, & dropped the raft along with two of the chopper crew. Upon inflation of the raft they found there were no oars.
So they paddled into the flooded river using a frogman flipper each as a paddle.
This didn't really work, & the chopper manouvered to use the downdraught to blow the raft against the current.
Not sure if the raft was plastic/fabric bottomed, or netting, either way it was as scary as can be, flimsy almost uncontrollable raft, with the croc lurking beneath.
They then had quite a job to cajole the boys to jump into it.
In the hands of a skilled narrator, like the fellow telling the video, the rescue could be spun into an extra few enthralling edge-of-the-seat minutes to the story.
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