Ha!
1. They are very weird people.
2. There are billions of them in the world, like colors on the screen of your computer.
3. They will analyse conversations in layers.
4. You will spend the day assembling furniture from IKEA.
5. They drink and eat all kinds of weird shit just because they like the packaging.
6. They hate each other.
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When it comes to creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night, Australia is up there with the likes of Africa. Thank goodness for the cuddly koala or we’d be in serious trouble! While you’re not likely to see a Taipan or crocodile (or any other scary creature) while walking down the street, it can’t hurt to be clued up about Australia’s most poisonous fauna.
1. The Box Jellyfish
This squishy creature is one of the most lethal animals in the world. It dwells on the coast alongside the Great Barrier Reef and has a powerful venom. The stings are terribly painful and often fatal. Be sure to have a bottle of vinegar in your first aid kit if you’re heading to this neck of the woods.
2. The Taipan
Do you want the good news or the bad news first? The good news is Taipans usually stay away from people, but once cornered or threatened, they strike several times. The Taipan is a large, fast and highly-venomous snake found throughout Australia. It has the most toxic venom of all the species worldwide, has a dark brown colour and is often found in sugar fields where it hunts for rats.
3. Saltwater Crocodile
The Saltwater Crocodile is the stuff of nightmares – it can grow up to 5.45 metres in length and is often found in Thailand, Vietnam and Northern Australia. It’s usually well camouflaged and strikes at an amazing speed. Its most powerful attack (the ‘Death Roll’) consists of grabbing its prey and rolling with it powerfully until it dies.
4. Blue Ring Octopus
Another serious threat for those on an Aussie beach holiday is the Blue Ring Octopus – one of the most toxic sea creatures in the world found off the coast of Australia, New Guinea, Indonesia and the Philippines. Even though the octopus is only the size of a golf ball, there is no known antidote for its powerful venom. It causes motor paralysis, eventually leading to cardiac arrest.
5. Stone Fish
This creature doesn’t win any points in the looks department. Known as the most venomous fish in the world, the Stone Fish lives on the bottom of reefs, camouflaged as a rock. It lives above the Tropic of Capricorn, but can also be found in the Great Barrier Reef. Its venom causes shock, paralysis and tissue death, depending on the severity of the sting. The pain is said to be so excruciating that it can lead to amputating the affected limb. Sorry, there’s no good news to report here.
6. The Red Back Spider
The Red Back Spider is famous for all the wrong reasons – it’s Australia’s most famous deadly spider. The red striped spider’s venom induces severe pain, but thankfully, deaths are rare. Thousands of people are bitten, but only approximately 20% of the victims require treatment. Generally, the children and the elderly are the most exposed to the spider’s threat.
7. Brown Snake
Known as one of Australia’s most deadly creatures, the Brown Snake’s venom quickly kills if left untreated. Even young snakes are capable of delivering a fatal bite to humans.
8. Tiger Snake
The Tiger Snake is yet another of the many venomous snakes found in Australia, particularly in the southern regions. These striped snakes are generally not aggressive and retreat whenever they have the chance. Although anti-venom is readily available, mortality rates are around 45% if the bite is left untreated.
9. Funnel Web Spider
Here’s another one for all you arachnophobes out there. The darkly-coloured Funnel Web Spider resembles a Tarantula and has fangs that can penetrate fingernails or shoes. It can be found in the eastern coast of Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. First aid consists of applying a bandage and wrapping the bitten limb. As with other spiders, the main treatment is the anti-venom.
10. Great White Shark
We’ve saved the scariest ‘til last. This exceptionally large shark known as the ‘White Death’ is the largest predatory fish on earth. It can be found in great numbers on the southern coasts of Australia. The good news is it doesn’t target humans as prey. Phew.
– See more at: http://www.hotelclub.com/blog/the-10-most-dangerous-animals-in-australia/#sthash.SRUE2qM7.dpuf
So Jamie Neale is back from the dead – another miraculous tale of survival from the harsh Australian wilderness (in this case the Blue Mountains, a convenient 90 minutes’ drive west of the country’s largest city).
You can’t really blame Neale for picking up that mobile phone he forgot to take with him on the hike and dialling a Sydney publicity agent, as he already has done according to reports.
Collectively, we Aussies don’t exactly have a surfeit of sympathy for miracle survivors, and careful media management can mean the difference between emerging with your character stamped “good bloke/hero” or “bloody idiot”.
Back in 1991, an emaciated Ben Maloney wandered out of the Tasmanian wilderness after five weeks. Straight away he had his doubters. When Maloney disappeared, stories circulated that he had left behind a strange quasi-scientific tract about his search for “mathematical truth” and some took it as a suicide note – or had he faked the whole thing?
As with Neale, a memorial ceremony had already been held when Maloney stumbled on to a path in shorts and a shirt and told the world of eating wild mushrooms and a bit of rice to survive. In due course his gripping story meandered into controversy when he was paid a reported A$10,000 for an interview. Members of the State Emergency Service duly popped up to complain that the government should get the money – ignoring the fact that this real-life search operation provided the sort of training and experience that money can’t buy.
Stuart Diver was the lone survivor of the Thredbo landslide of 1997. Australians were glued to their TVs as Diver was pulled from the debris of the ski resort. Nineteen people had been buried when two chalet buildings slid off the hill and crumpled. We were happy with the evidence of Diver’s story that time. It all happened on telly, and all he’d done was go to bed in a ski lodge. He’d lost his wife in the disaster, too. The nation badged him a hero and good bloke.
The same goes for Todd Russell and Brant Webb, the gold miners who survived buried underground for two weeks in a metal cage after the Beaconsfield mine collapsed in April 2006. After all, when the pair surfaced, another national hero, breakfast TV host David Koch, was there with a slap-on-the-back endorsement, as was football impresario turned Channel Nine TV chief executive Eddie McGguire.
ABC television’s Media Watch programme was quick to point out that Todd and Brant had refused to be interviewed at length about their experience until McGuire showed them “the size of his chequebook”. But with the weight of the commercial TV networks behind them, the gruelling nature of their ordeal counting in their favour, and their overwhelming good-blokeyness and sense of humour having shone through via messages piped out of the mine, Todd and Brant emerged relatively unscathed.
Many will have forgotten James Scott, an Australian who in 1992 sheltered for 43 days under a rock ledge in the Himalayas with only melted snow, two chocolate bars and a caterpillar to sustain him. Eventually, deranged with hunger, thirst and isolation, he wandered out into a clearing and was spotted by a helicopter. We accept Scott’s story, because in his determination to leave a record for his loved ones, he wrote it all down. At least until his pen ran out. He got his hero badge, though there were some grumblings that if he’d come out from under the rock a bit more often he might have been spotted sooner.
But a lost Johnny Foreigner on our turf tends to earn less sympathy. There were the Lonergans, a diving couple left behind by their charter boat on the Great Barrier Reef. Despite the cause of their demise being pretty plain, conspiracy theories and “sightings” abounded, in line with the theory they had staged their own disappearance. Oh, and let’s not forget Joanne Lees, who was falsely accused by some of either helping Peter Falconio disappear or being in on his murder.
For Australians the ultimate symbol of folly in the wilderness remains Tony Bullimore, the British round-the-world yachtsman who had to be plucked from the Southern Ocean by the Australian navy after things went pear-shaped. Never mind that he had somehow lived for five days in an air pocket under the hull of his upturned yacht with one finger torn off and only a chocolate bar to eat. The bloody idiot should never have been there in the first place.
Australia Magazine 