It’s a no brainer that workshops are generally not the safest of places and OH&S principles need to be taken seriously. However sometimes there are things which simply can’t be pre-empted, like visiting wildlife! Working in the country certainly has some quirky moments and Graham was close to having his yearly quota in a short span of a week.Our workshop is located on a 75 acre property in the Adelaide Hills. A gorgeous spot overlooking the Torrens Valley. We run a half dozen cows and their calves which graze down the worst of the grass and also provide us with meat. Call it sustainability if you like. An unseasonably warm spring brought a number of critters out of the ‘bush’ this year.
We were alerted to the first, one evening when an odd sound echoed off the back hill. Not quite ‘sick cow’ but definitely a grunt of sorts, so Andrew went for a walk behind the workshop to investigate. Just up from the workshop he discovered a rather large koala. Harmless enough but geez, talk about noisy and distracting!
The following few days were warm, in the 30C’s. Graham was quietly working away one afternoon when Andrew started up his power hammer, a big thumper of a machine, to do some blacksmithing. Graham needed to cut some steel, a rather mundane job which is pretty standard so it’s easy to zone out at the end of the day, in such unseasonably warm weather. The band saw sits next to the shed wall and as Graham started up the machine and began to cut a length of steel something caught his eye. Only a few centimetres away, slithering down the wall from the rail was a brown tail. Needless to say Graham was pretty close to having a panic attack whilst trying to manage the steel and machinery. It seems a brown snake must have been hiding in the power hammer and had taken fright, only to then inflict the same fear (if not more) into poor unsuspecting Graham. The brown was followed around and ‘directed’ out of the workshop.
Later that week, after Graham had knocked off and was filling in his time sheet, something caught his eye again. This time it was a large red belly black slithering past the doorway. For anyone not familiar with Australian snakes … yes, both are highly venomous. Graham definitely wasn’t having a good run. Seems our OH&S manual might need to be updated! Any suggestions as to what we should include?