This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchel with Jeremy Zackison, New South Wales.

If you have a fear of snakes, you're right, especially if you're in Australia.

The Eastern Brown Snake. Jeremy, this is a sort of nightmare that tells me mowing a lawn is a first responders risk. So what happened in the lawn mower follies?

Well, and I think if anybody's ever tried to get out of mowing the lawn, this might be the exact

excuse you're looking for. Now, this happened up in Brisbane just

this past week, where a man decided that it was finally time to get out there and mow his lawn.

It had finally got long enough and he'd put it off enough that, you know, it really had to be done.

So he went out and got his old lawnmire out, the trusty old lawnmower in the shed,

pulled it out, so I started getting

it ready when he noticed or at first heard something, heard something unusual, he heard a hiss near

his lawnmire, sort of being Queensland and having a lot of circadias around and a lot of other sort of

bugs, didn't think anything of it, but then lo and behold, he did move the lawnmire and

turned it upside down to clean out the grass

and guess what was under there?

A great eastern brown snake.

So, of course, he did what I think anybody would have done through the lawnmower down,

quickly backed up, got his cell phone out and called the local snake catcher.

Now, the most impressive part of this John was the snake catcher managed to take the call

and get to his house within 10 minutes flat. So almost the same response time as a first responder

as an ambulance would do go into any medical emergency anywhere. But sure enough, the snake catcher turns

up because the man had actually dropped his lawnmower down and actually had quite low clearance between the lawnmire and the ground,

the snake was still contained in the underside where basically the blade was.

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