Maul STOL - spinning a yarn or credible story?

The plane is a Maul (short take off and landing)
Location : the edge of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia.
Forty+ years ago. There are no roads/ tracks/ waterholes, ... nothing

quote:-
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""At the prosepct, as we circled, I showed Mike the spinifex burn from
last summer's lightning storms. We
agreed three passes over the proposed landing site, the first with a
right hand wheel lightly on the surface,
the second with the left, ..and if it was okay, a final touch down.
Descending towards the the sand plain,
the dome outcrop looked much larger at low altitude and the strip
ridiculously short. During the second
pass Mike had barely grounded the left wheel when he throttled back
and we came to a perfect three point
landing, breaking hard before a quartzite outcrop.

Retracing the landing tracks about 200 metres I noticed the right
wheel had passed beside a low anthill, not
visible. A few inches to the right would have put us over the centre
of the mound and Mike agreed this
could have caused the plane to cartwheel, but, he said, a miss was as
good as a mile."

(And then there is a bit about having to clear sticks off "the
runway" (of native scrub) before he could take off again.)
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Is this a credible story? It's the bit about "breaking hard" before
the quartzite outcrop and the 'anthill' that could have tipped the
plane that worries me. And the "sticks". If there was a stick
problem to get up off the ground, there would surely have been one
coming down, ..yes?/ No?

Would a pilot, (even a cavalier 'bush' pilot) take this risk on the
edge of the great Sandy Desert for a look-see stop? (spinifex clumps,
rocks, sticks anthills)

What do pilots say?