A snaky welcome to southerners

EACH year a city slicking Sydneysider attends the Woodford Folk Festival before heading to Toowoomba for a week to stay with friends.

This time the annual trek came with an amusing tale of this visitor’s pure admiration for the Queensland spirit.

After taking a nice drive through the countryside around Esk, our man and a friend pulled up to look at the beautiful surrounds.

Shortly after pulling over, a sudden torrential downpour came through, so they made their way back to the car.

Unfortunately, they weren’t the only ones.

Upon arriving back at the car they found a snake had also decided it looked like a good place to shelter.

They conferred in the pouring rain, cracked out their phones for identification purposes and decided it looked like one of the venomous kind.

The slithering invader made its way along the window before disappearing under the bonnet.

After gingerly inspecting the area, they came to the conclusion that it had disappeared and likely made for home.

They jumped in and set off for civilisation again.

The only problem was partway through the trip our legless friend decided to make a rather sudden appearance on the windscreen, eliciting exactly the reaction you might suspect (we don’t even want to know the bill for cleaning those seat covers).

They continued towards town, hoping to Heaven the snake didn’t find a way through the car’s firewall and onto their feet.

Arriving in town, they stopped in a supermarket car park, knees knocking together in fright and wondering what they were going to do.

But moments later a bloke who rather looked like some kind of Queenslander caricature strolled by with a plastic shopping bag in hand, grasped the snake by the tail and shoved it in the bag without so much as a by-your-leave.

The shocked city slickers asked him if it was actually just some kind of non-venomous snake, to which our Queensland hero replied excitedly, “Dunno mate but I’m gonna take it and show me kids!”

Apologetic Santa

TOOWOOMBA woman was in California during the Christmas break and visited a tourist attraction in regional California where Santa and Mrs Claus just happened to be on site.

She tells Whispers: “As there were no small children in sight, Santa had a chat to me and identified I was a visitor from Australia.

“Santa, sitting in his Santa chair, put his head in his hands and started shaking it in despair and continued with the apologies on behalf of the nation and its people for the embarrassment their leader is causing in the eyes of the world.”

In the spirit of the ANZUS Alliance, our lass comforted Santa by informing him that Australia had its own collection of political embarrassments.

Takes the cake

HOSPITAL staff farewelling a popular urologist this week had an appropriately shaped cake made for the farewell festivities.

As this is a family column, Whispers will simply leave it up to the reader’s imagination as to what form the cake took.