SYDNEY: A routine round of golf has taken a uniquely Australian turn with stunned players Ending a giant python wrestling with a wallaby on a fairway.

Robert Willemse was on the 17th hole at the Paradise Palms course in Cairns in north Queensland on Saturday when he heard that a four-metre (13-foot) scrub python was gorging on the native marsupial nearby.

`It had (the wallaby) in a vice-like grip and it was swallowing it,` Willemse, who regularly plays at the course, said. He snapped photos of the encounter before headingback toñnishhisround.

`I heard later on... as other golfers and staff members came out to have a look at it, that it did actually succeed in swallowing it allandthenitrolledintoa drycreeknearbyand slithered away into the bush, probably to digest its rather large meal,` he said.

`There`s a lot of wildlife in the tropical north,` Willemse added, noting that wallabies,which resemble a smaller version of kangaroos, were a common sight on the fairways, although snakes were not.

Willemse said the scrub python Australia`s largest snake which can grow to 8.5 metres long was lil(ely to have dropped onto the unsuspecting wallaby from a tree.

`The snake would never have been able to catch the wallaby in the open like where it was eating it,` he said.

`It looked like it might have dropped out of a tree, got a hold of (the wallaby), then there was a bit of a struggle and it rolled into the middle of the fairway.`-AFP