He and his friends thought they were luring a possum out of a hollow log when a snake sprung out, biting Blake on the extremity.   

Worried the venom would spread, he first tried to blow the digit off with his shotgun. When that failed, he asked his friend to sever his finger with an axe they found at a nearby farmhouse. 

“You certainly have to admire the persistence and the courage of the early selectors,” Alan McLean, the author of a new history of the Moora, Gobarup and Wanalta townships, said.

“For Europeans coming to Australia, scratching around for gold, taking up land and doing some farming, the presence the snakes would've been quiet a challenge.”

The grizzly tale from settler life, first told in the Waranga Chronicle, is one of many snake-related yarns the central Victorian man includes in his book, Grass-seeds and Thistles.  

But what might seem grim or even trivial anecdotes were, in fact, a reflection of the people’s life and times, stories that deserved preservation, Mr McLean said.  

“I reckon all local history is important because if it is not recorded, it is lost forever,” he explained. 

“These tiny, tiny farming districts, if these are not recorded, what are our grandchildren going to know?

“What are their grandchildren going to know going to know?”

While national and international histories were taught in schools, the experiences of people living in rural areas were not passed on through the education system, he said.

But Mr McLean believed even those students who showed no interest in the subject at school became taken in later life by local history.  

“I think its an age thing, it’s an interest in being connected to local area.”

The 61-year-old man’s fascination with the past began as a young man living in Moora and it was an interest that eventually saw him teach history to high school students.

He has already published a collection of century-old mysteries that occurred in Rushworth.  

But the past is not all doom and gloom, Mr McLean promised, with stories of Sunday school picnics and weekend sporting events reminding readers of a simpler, more enviable time. 

“Fancy loading up a horse and cart, and 20 footballers, in July and August, being wrapped in blankets and a tarpaulin, all to play on a muddy paddock,” he said.

“The reaction from people who read the book is one of remark: how much more difficult, but how simpler and how much more enjoyable, would some of those sporting events have been 120 years ago?”

Grass-seeds and Thistles is available from the Colbinabbin General Store and Rushworth Gift and Variety.