An Australian Outback pub patron bitten on the leg by a snake while urinating outside has been driven to safety and treated by paramedics on the back of a ute.
While that may sound too quintessentially Aussie to be true, it's what unfolded late on Wednesday in Queensland's northwest.
Gary Peters, 53, was enjoying some cold beers at the Gregory Downs Hotel, where he also works, roughly 300km north of Mount Isa, when he walked outside to 'take a leak' in some bushes. But, instead, he got a nasty surprise. "He came back in with a tea towel wrapped around his leg and then told everyone he'd been bitten by a snake," fellow pub worker Peta Warden said.
Following the strike, believed to be from a poisonous mulga, quick-thinking mates fashioned a splint and began bandaging. "It was hard to tell just how he was, he'd had a bit to drink, so it was a mixture of alcohol and venom," Warden said. But when Peters started to fall in and out of consciousness, friends hoisted him onto the back of a ute and drove 2km to the nearest airstrip where he was treated by paramedics and flown to Mt Isa Hospital. He is in a stable condition.
It was Peters' second unfortunate encounter with a snake, after also being bitten in Proserpine last year.
