AustLit

'It is a simple story about a drover's wife, left alone with her four children for months on end while her husband is droving.

'Her only protection is her stout spirit and her cattle dog, Alligator.

'The story opens when, late one day, she sees a venomous snake disappear under the hut's bedroom floor. She goes into the kitchen, where there is a dirt floor–the bedroom has a slab floor with cracks a snake could slide through.

'The wife beds the children down on the table, builds up the fire in the stove, and with Alligator, a snake-killing cattle dog, keeps vigil through the night, waiting for the snake.

'As she sits by the fire she thinks, in filmed flashbacks, of what her life has been since she married.

'Eventually, in the early morning, the snake appears, she kills it, and life goes on again without drama.'

Source:

'Killing a Snake with Conviction', Australian Women's Weekly, 18 September 1968