Thanks. It was defo a snake. and the tail taper off more. My have been preggas.

so you would be all too aware then that QLD is home to one of the most aggressive snakes on earth, in the Coastal Taipan? One that will actually attack if you so much as come within any close proximity. My point about you not being in Aus is more about the proximity of resources. Calling out a snake catcher is not as simple as making a call and waiting 5 mins for him to arrive. Mine would be a minimum of an hour wait by which time that snake is in a nice hiding place.

I am actually a snake lover. I educate myself as much as I can about them. I have a ridiculous amount of books on the subject and in the wilderness I treat them with the respect they deserve. However, I do not love them as much as I love my children, so if a choice needs to be made between the safety of my children or that of a snake then it is a fairly easy decision to make

An extremely high % of bites are due to someone trying to kill a snake, unprovoked bites are incredibly rare.

I missunderstood that comment then. Sorry. As for the inaccessability of resources, fair enough, although the snake catcher would only feature for me when a snake is in the house or really has set up shop in the direct vicinity. Plenty of noise should mostly drive them away. Also, not having any open water sources on your property helps keep them away. My uncle noticed that the Brown snakes would come and drink out of the water bowls of their pets.

Glad to hear you keep yourself informed. I do understand the dilemma of protecting the children, but still feel in 99.9% of the cases there is a non-lethal solution.

Unfortunately with them being deaf the noise isnt an issue for them but venomous snakes especially tend to avoid areas with lots of activity, the non venomous pythons will happily settle in places with lots of activity as they arent as highly strung as the majority of venomous snakes.

I know you said that it was definitely a snake... but could it have been one of these perhaps?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egernia_major


If not, then it might be one of these. Death adder. Very unlikely though.

http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200806/r260601_1083484.jpg

I reckon it was a Common Tree Snake.

I've seen a fair few of them around the traps. However they are very thin and slender, and certainly do not get as fat as the one you described.
I was lucky to get a beautiful photo of one of these in attack mode going for me. I was at a wedding at the Hyatt in Yeppoon, when I just looked down outside the chapel and noticed about a foot of snake poking out of a drain cover. I kept my distance until I was safe in the knowledge of what type it was and then also understanding that it was stuck. It had obviously gone down there to feed on a frog or something else and had become too fat to get itself back out again.
So after a few more minutes of gauging how far out it could get, I got close enough so that I could get a good shot but not get bitten and the result was the snake trying to dart for me, but not having the reach to get me.

My favourite snake encounter was on an island off the coast of the New Caledonia mainland. There were sea snakes everywhere. You literally couldn't walk more than 10m without seeing one, and their colours and nature were amazing! Such docile and inquisitive snakes, yet extremely deadly if they need to be. One came swimming right up to me when I was in the water, no more than about a foot away from my arm before I decided that was about as close as I wanted to be and swam away

Snakes definitely prefer to stay away from humans. I have only seen one or two in my life and always lived on the edge of bushland and walk in the bush/forest quite regularly. They are around in numbers but not easily encountered contrary to popular beliefs.

The trouble starts when housing development sprawls out into snake habitat, especially in open grassland near swamps and marshes which is common on the fringe of many Australian cities. A lot of this sort of land exists on the Melbourne metro fringe and there are a lot of Copperhead snakes that sometimes cause trouble. Plenty of snake catchers around and they get called out quite a bit. Very few people get bitten.

I saw a brown coloured snake cross my path in my first year here, and I've always wondered if it was a "brown" snake. I don't think it was anywhere near as big or long as the one in the picture - do they come up smallish as well?? Other than that, in nearly ten years all I've seen is a range of dodgy spiders.

That's awesome. It's always handy to have a good camera close by.

TBH the sanke I saw was half in the undergrowth so I didn't get a really good look at the whole thing as it disappeared rather quickly. The colours match a tree snake though. We had one in the garden previously and it was thin and small, so I don't really know.

No, they start life full size It would obviously depend very much where in the country the snake was encountered, there are many species it could have been but 99% would be venomous.

Brown snakes are rarely actually brown in colour. In fact most snakes, especially those in Aus aren't really recognisable by colour, as each species will have different shades of colour. The only one that I can think that is consistent in colour is the Red-bellied Black.

http://www.snakecatchers.com.au/Snake_ID.php

There are some good photos on this site showing different versions of brown.

Ah, yes had forgotten about that. Then make lots of vibrations which they don't like.