The Death That Saved Lives: Remembering Kevin Budden
Written by Chris Williams
On 28 July 1950, Kevin Budden, a 20 year old amateur snake collector from Randwick in Sydney, died in Cairns Base Hospital the day after he was bitten by a coastal taipan he had caught for scientific research. The snake was flown to Melbourne, where its venom became the starting point for Australia's first taipan antivenom.
Budden was also one of the founding members of the club that became the Australian Herpetological Society. His story is part of the history of Australian snakebite treatment, and part of the history of the AHS.
This article draws on two main sources: the account of the Budden case pieced together by Dr David Williams, the toxinologist who later led the Australian Venom Research Unit, from newspaper reports, family memories and the treating doctor's published notes; and Gerry Swan's history of the society's first decade, "In the Beginning, Decade One: 1949 to 1958", published in the AHS newsletter, the Red Bellied Courier.
A Sydney collector
Kevin Clifford Budden was not a scientist or a museum professional. He was a young amateur collector, part of a small Sydney community of enthusiasts who caught, kept and studied reptiles at a time when very little was known about Australia's dangerous snakes, and when there was little in the way of training, equipment or antivenom to fall back on.
That community, working alongside the museums, zoos and the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, did much of the early fieldwork on Australian snakes. In 1949 a group of them decided to form a club.
Kevin Budden. This photo was taken days before his death after the Taipan bite.
The Australian Reptile Club
The first meeting of what was then called the Australian Reptile Club was held in April 1949 at 17 Wellington Street, Newtown, the home of Roy Mackay's parents. Mackay had been encouraged to start the club by Alex "Rusty" Holmes. According to Gerry Swan, those present at that first meeting probably included Mackay, Holmes, Kevin Budden, Wal Lorking, Bill and Dennis Hosmer, Neville Goddard and Horrie Rowe.
The name was chosen over the alternative, the Australian Reptile Society, partly because of what its initials would have spelt. Members would meet at the Newtown bridge and walk to the house together. On one occasion a group of five or six was broken up by police.
Hal Cogger, who went on to become one of Australia's most respected herpetologists and the author of Reptiles and Amphibians of Australia, made his first contact with the club as a schoolboy in late 1949 or early 1950. His parents would not let him travel alone to the foundation meeting.
Roy Mackay was the club's first president and secretary, and was president for nine of its first ten years, with Alex Holmes taking the role in 1954 and 1955. Meetings were held at the Mackay family home until about 1953. Each one combined general business with a talk, usually illustrated with live snakes.
Field trips and the search for a taipan
The club's first annual field trip was held on Anzac Day, 25 April 1950, with 19 members and guests. A photograph from that day shows Kevin Budden alongside Hal Cogger, Ken Smith, Shirley Collins, Alex Holmes and his wife, Dennis and Bill Hosmer, Muriel Scott-Sim, Barry Salkilld, Roy Mackay, Alan Steele, Neville Goddard and Fred Fricke. It was three months before his death.
The most ambitious goal for the club's members was a live taipan. In 1950 the coastal taipan was one of the most feared snakes in Australia. There was no specific antivenom, and almost nobody bitten by one survived. To make an antivenom, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories needed venom from live snakes, and the little taipan venom available had come from dead snakes collected in the 1920s.
In April 1949 Budden travelled to Coen on Cape York with Roy Mackay and Neville Goddard, both foundation members of the club, to search for taipans. A photograph from the trip, courtesy of David Williams, shows Budden and Goddard at their camp at Peach Creek in central Cape York. They had two encounters with what they believed were taipans, including one that shot between Goddard's bare legs, but caught neither.
In June 1950 Budden went north again. Over about four weeks around Atherton and Millaa Millaa he collected 27 snakes, including pythons and tree snakes, for museums, zoos and traders, while staying at the Cairns Museum.
The capture
On the morning of 27 July 1950, Budden went looking for snakes near the oil tanks at Edge Hill, at the base of Mount Whitfield in Cairns. By around ten o'clock he had found little more than cane toads, small lizards and a harmless water snake, and was about to give up when he heard a squeal from a pile of rubbish. Under a discarded sheet of fibro was a large snake eating a bush rat.
He pinned the snake with his boot across its neck, and it regurgitated the rat. Keeping his boot in place, he took hold of it behind the head. His collecting bag was on the ground and out of reach, so he carried the snake to the Edge Hill road, reaching it shortly before 10.30 am. A passing truck driver, Jim Harris, stopped and reversed back to him. Harris recoiled when he saw what Budden was holding, but agreed to drive him to the home of S.E. Stephens, a local naturalist with experience of snakes. Stephens confirmed it was a taipan and sent his wife for a bag. Harris later described Budden as "as cool as they come".
As Budden lowered the snake into the bag, his grip failed. Harris recalled that Budden's hand was coated in saliva. The taipan struck twice, biting him on the left hand. Budden dropped it, caught it again, and this time it was bagged safely.
Stephens telephoned for an ambulance. Harris urged a ligature and cutting of the wound, both standard practice at the time. Budden applied a rope ligature to his own arm but refused to have the wound cut, saying fright was more of a problem than venom. He would not let the snake be killed, and Harris promised not to harm it. On the way to hospital they met the ambulance, whose bearers applied further first aid. Budden asked Harris to look after the snake and make sure it reached the researchers in the south. Harris kept it locked in his truck until the following day.
In hospital
Budden reached Cairns Base Hospital at about 11 am, where he was treated by Dr Keith Benn, who later published an account of the case in the Medical Journal of Australia. With no taipan antivenom available, Benn gave tiger snake antivenom, a total of 12,000 units, without any visible improvement.
From about 3 pm, Budden developed blurred vision, vomiting and drooping eyelids. The paralysis spread to his tongue, face and the muscles between his ribs, until he could no longer breathe properly. He was placed in an iron lung and treated with a range of drugs, none of which halted the paralysis.
Benn recorded his death at 1.30 pm on 28 July 1950, about 27 hours after the bite. Harris remembered it differently, insisting Budden had died at 1.30 am. Benn later suggested that the slow onset of symptoms pointed to a relatively small dose of venom, and that the first aid ideas of the time may have affected the outcome.
Kevin Budden is buried in Cairns Cemetery.
The venom
The taipan was flown to Melbourne and held at the National Museum. On 1 August 1950, naturalist David Fleay milked it for the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, assisted by the laboratories' director, Dr F.C. Morgan, and Roy Goodisson. It was probably the first time venom had been taken from a live taipan. Fleay recorded the snake at six feet five inches, about 1.96 metres, and the milking produced about 128 milligrams of dried venom.
The snake died several weeks later. Its preserved body remains in the Melbourne museum collection.
From venom to antivenom
Budden's taipan provided the venom for the first stage of antivenom research, but more was needed. In 1952, Edward Ramsamy, a railway fettler from Mackay, began sending taipan venom to the laboratories, and Eric Worrell led an expedition north to collect more taipans. The venom was used to immunise horses, whose antibodies formed the basis of the antivenom.
In 1955, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories released Australia's first taipan antivenom. Before the end of that year, it saved the life of Bruce Stringer, an 11 year old Cairns schoolboy bitten by a taipan, the first person known to survive a taipan bite with its help.
The club after Budden
Gerry Swan describes Budden's death as the single most significant event for the club in its early years. It drew wide media attention. Yet no surviving club publication mentions it.
The club kept growing. In 1952 members appeared in Strange Fascination, a short film by Journal Films showing them catching snakes and demonstrating snakebite treatment. By about 1953 meetings had moved from the Mackay home to Room H at the YMCA, on the third Wednesday of each month. The club's first newsletter, Reptilia, appeared in 1954, edited by Alex Holmes with Wal Lorking as assistant. In November 1954 a meeting was held at the All Nations Club in Kings Cross, before members adjourned to the Little Dutch Inn on Park Street.
Safety became a theme of its own. In May 1954, Reptilia reported a serious address from the president to the junior members about handling dangerous snakes as little as possible. A junior section was formed, and the club stopped taking new members under 18. The surviving records do not link that decision to Budden, but it is hard to read it without thinking of him.
The name Australian Herpetological Society first appeared in 1951, on badges worn by John and Ken Dwyer and Bill Hosmer on their own taipan expedition to Queensland. It was not formally adopted until about 1955 or 1956, and not every member agreed with the change. By December 1956, David McPhee was recorded as secretary of the Australian Herpetological Society. The society's journal, Herpetofauna, followed in 1963.
The AHS today
I joined the AHS in 1985, and my second term as president began in 2014. Over that time the society has changed in many of the same ways snake work has. Safety comes first. Members learn safe handling, and much of the society's work is education: helping the public understand reptiles, telling fact from myth, and knowing what to do after a snakebite.
The AHS is also working to record its own history and the history of Australian herpetology more broadly, including biographies of pioneers such as Gerard Krefft, J.R. Kinghorn and Eric Worrell. Gerry Swan's account of the first decade is part of that work, and Kevin Budden's story belongs in it. It shows how dangerous snake work was before modern first aid and antivenom, and how much was learned the hard way.
On 17 August 2018, the AHS and the Australian Venom Research Unit held a joint public screening in Sydney of Minutes to Die, a documentary about the global snakebite crisis, followed by a panel discussion that included Dr David Williams, whose research into the Budden story underpins this article. The problem Budden died trying to help solve is far from solved in much of the world.
What has changed since 1950
Snakebite treatment in Australia has changed enormously since Budden's death.
First aid. Ligatures, tourniquets and cutting the wound are no longer recommended. In 1979, Professor Struan Sutherland at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories introduced pressure immobilisation, which slows the movement of venom without cutting off blood supply to the limb. It remains the standard first aid in Australia today.
Antivenom. Antivenoms now exist for all of Australia's dangerous land snakes, including a polyvalent antivenom that covers them all when the snake involved is unknown.
Hospital care. Patients can now be supported through paralysis on modern ventilators while antivenom and time do their work.
Coastal taipan bites, once almost always fatal, are now treatable, and deaths from them are rare.
None of that began with Kevin Budden alone. But his taipan provided the venom that started the work towards the first taipan antivenom, at the cost of his own life.
If you or someone with you is bitten by a snake, call 000, keep still and apply a pressure immobilisation bandage. For full first aid steps, visit snakebitefirstaid.com.au.
Sources and further reading
Gerry Swan: In the Beginning, Decade One: 1949 to 1958, reproduced in 10 Years of the Red Bellied Courier, Australian Herpetological Society, 2023
David Williams: Kevin Budden, kingsnake.com, https://www.kingsnake.com/aho/species/extras/budden.html
Benn, 1951: account of the Budden case, Medical Journal of Australia, 27 January 1951
Mirtschin, 2006: The pioneers of venom production for Australian antivenoms, Toxicon
Sutherland, Coulter and Harris, 1979: Rationalisation of first aid measures for elapid snakebite, The Lancet
For advice or safe reptile relocation anywhere in Sydney, contact Chris Williams at Urban Reptile Removal on 0418 633 474.
