Where the Wild Things Really Are: encounters with Australian wildlife

 

My son is a chef, a member of an international fraternity that respects skill and stamina alone. Race, gender, religion and national identity confer no status but are fair game for the comradely vilification that seems to be the soundtrack for most restaurant kitchens.  As an Australian, his usual tag is a benign one – ‘Skip’, from Skippy the bush kangaroo who was the hero of a daggy children’s TV show back in the last century.

Generally, people are well-disposed towards Australians. We are a small, civilised Western nation inhabiting a large, wild continent. We don’t threaten anyone, but we have a reputation for being game and gutsy.  We keep public order, but have scant regard for status and authority. We’re tolerant of most faiths, but don’t take any of that stuff seriously.  We amuse people with our funny accents, ironic humour and our famous wildlife which is divided evenly between the endearing and the appalling. Some species, like the endangered Tasmanian Devil, manage both at the same time.

“Ay Skip,” his fellow kitchen slaves ask my son, “is it true about all the killer snakes in Australia? And the spiders? And what about the sharks? And those jellyfish things…?” Martin nods his head and intones mordantly, “Everything in Australia is trying to kill you.” He pauses for effect. “Even the cute things. They’re all trying to kill you. Don’t go there.”

Now that we’re travelling in the US, we cop the same wildlife questions every time someone recognises our accent. Until recently I was in the habit of laughing it off, alerting Americans to our penchant for tall tales, exaggeration and bravado. We all become bullshit artists abroad. I reassured would-be Antipodean travellers that they had nothing to fear swimming, surfing and diving in our clear cold waters. Shark attacks were very rare: you had more to fear from your rental car or your super-sized burger.

Then to make a liar of me, there followed in rapid succession five fatal shark attacks within 150 miles of my home town. One victim was a young American who had been taken by a Great White while scuba diving off Rottnest Island, so the US news networks were full of the story. Western Australia had become Shark Attack Central. A popular tourism website rated its capital city, Perth, alongside Haiti and Cairo as a safe travel destination.

Apparently the population of Great White Sharks has increased dramatically in recent years. Two factors are operating here: they are now protected rather than hunted as trophies, and their preferred prey, the massive humpback whales that make their southern migration down this coast, have proliferated since the demise of the whaling industry. Yes, the odds are incredibly slim that you will meet your maker via the jaws of an ocean predator, but our fears are always qualitative rather than quantitative; our anxieties are primal, a reminder that human dominion over all living things is a profoundly conditional thing.

Perhaps I was wrong to dismiss foreigners’ fears of Australia’s fauna. After all, these creatures had spent millions of years evolving their weaponry and deserved a little more respect. I began to reflect on my ordinary suburban Australian childhood and the extent to which this narrative was enlivened by encounters with wild things.

The first of these I can’t remember personally, but the family photo album clearly shows a young incarnation of my father holding a dead snake aloft by its tail. His arm is stretched well above his head and the snake’s snout brushes the ground. That makes it about seven feet long – a fully grown dugite (pronounced jew-gite), its fangs full of venom. Like many returned World War II veterans, my dad bought a block of land newly opened up under the War Service Loans scheme. Our block, in the beachside suburb of Doubleview, was covered in scrubby bush and Dad had started clearing it himself with an axe and a shovel. So he was, fortunately, well-armed when he encountered the resident dugite. Dad was a conservationist at heart, but this bit of bush was home to his wife and baby daughter; this was his hard-earned bit of Australia and snakes were not welcome.

Humans didn’t always beat the snakes, however. When I was a teenager I cycled around the aforementioned Rottnest Island (‘Rotto’ to the locals) with a group of mates. One had the misfortune to run his bike over a dugite and it whipped up and entwined itself in the spokes, then sunk its fangs into his bum (that’s Australian for ‘butt’).  We managed to get him back to the nursing station so he didn’t die but he was in bad shape, shaking and vomiting.  Standard procedure at the time, since discredited, was to ‘suck out the poison’, but none of us was that good a mate.

The first wild encounter that I can actually recall personally was with a bat. It was in a chicken-wire cage at the local Nature Society Show, and it was fascinating. Its tiny claws gripped the wire and I could see the tracery of veins in its translucent wings. Its eyes were like bright black beads. I was five years old, the bat was irresistibly cute and I wanted to feel its soft fur. I cooed gently, “Hello little batty,” and stuck my finger through the wire where I promptly felt its cute little fangs. A tetanus shot and a good talking to failed to teach me anything: I was bitten by a bobtail lizard at the same show the following year. Bobtails (‘bobbies’) are chunky lizards that grow to about a foot long. They are generally pretty harmless, but they have a wide threatening gape, and once they bite, they don’t let go. I have no idea how the bobtail managed to grab the soft underneath of my upper arm, but I do know that it resisted all efforts to loosen its jaws until someone lit a match under it. I came out of the ordeal with a bruise the colour of prune juice and a lifetime ban by the Nature Society.

Back to the bum thing. There are many cautionary tales about the deadly red-back spider and its tendency to nest under toilet seats. There is even a song about such an encounter by country singer Slim Dusty, one of our national treasures. Well my Aunty Joan was actually bitten on the bum by a red-back in the toilet. Her entire left buttock turned black and pustular and she spent days in hospital. The event turned our whole family into a kind of corporate spider Nemesis. Every time I enter a shed, garage or outside toilet (‘dunny’) that image of Aunty Joan’s bum won’t leave my consciousness until I’ve done a thorough reconnoitre of the likely hidey holes and destroyed any spiders bearing the tell-tale red hourglass. (What a marvellously appropriate symbol – ‘your days are numbered’!)

Snakes and spiders are an obvious threat, rather banal, to be honest, in the scary species stakes. You need to get wet to feel the full measure of danger on our continent – just watch where you put your feet. Don’t put them anywhere near a live cone shell, for example. That’s right, even the sea-shells you collect as you stroll along a dazzling white, deserted beach are trying to kill you. The marine snail that occupies these attractive mottled shells has a tiny high-speed dart at one end, which it uses to pierce, inject and paralyse prey and predators alike.

It’s also wise to avoid poking around in holes in the reef, or picking up any bottles or cans that you might encounter in the water. On one snorkelling excursion, I noticed something shiny on the sandy bottom, and dived down to retrieve a set of barbecue tongs. I flung them casually onto the deck of our boat, then kicked off to continue exploring the reef. I returned to the boat to find its occupants in a state of panic, squealing and fighting for elevated spaces, as an octopus the size of a quarter squished its way around the deck. The Blue-ringed Octopus injects a powerful neurotoxin through its bite, and victims have reported horrifying experiences of being both fully conscious and completely paralysed – so they can actually see and hear their rescuers deciding to abandon resuscitation efforts, or themselves pronounced dead. This little blue-ring had been rudely uprooted from his silvery home on the sea floor, and he was not happy. Iridescent blue rings were flashing all over his body signalling high displeasure. Fortunately the tongs doubled as a handy octopus removal tool and he was gently plopped back over the side.

In Australia’s tropical waters, tourists are often disappointed to see ‘NO SWIMMING’ signs fronting the glorious beaches at certain times of the year. The culprit is the box jellyfish or sea-wasp, another creature that defends itself with a deadly paralytic venom. The transparent box jelly drifts apparently aimlessly, polluting the warm waters of the north and providing more grim stories of sudden death. If that isn’t bad enough, researchers have only recently discovered the irukandji jelly – smaller and deadlier, named for the Aboriginal tribe who were the original victims of the syndrome whose cause was a medical mystery for years. Crocodiles, stonefish, cobbler, lionfish, scorpion fish, even a sea urchin than can stop you breathing. Never a dull moment in the oceans of Australia.

But surely these fearsome killers are balanced out by the cuteness of our mammals, the furry pouched marsupials and bizarre monotremes that are almost unique to the continent? Tell it to people who have been eviscerated by the hind claws of the male red kangaroo, who props himself up on his powerful tail and lashes out at rivals or enemies with his massive, muscular hind legs (ay Skip?) Or those (admittedly few – the animal is rare and reclusive) who know first-hand that the platypus is equipped with a toxic spur on its back legs. Or those who, like my husband, have spent a night in the ER after a bloody encounter with a possum.  

We lay claim to eight of the world’s top ten venomous snakes (with the dreaded taipan heading the list); the world’s most dangerous bird, the aggressive cassowary whose forbidding appearance confirms the links between birds and dinosaurs; and the smallest multi-cellular animal capable of killing a human, that nasty little irukandji jelly.

So why are we Australians so inordinately proud of our strange and frightening wildlife? Perhaps it makes us vicariously interesting, helping us to maintain the delusion that we are somehow edgy and special because we occupy the same land mass as the rest of the world’s nightmares.  The danger seems to confer status: we imagine ourselves rugged frontierspeople when in reality we are a mob of flabby suburbanites like every other western nation. When you watch Crocodile Dundee or reruns of Steve Irwin’s TV show (did I mention stingrays?) it pays to remember that they are projections of the way we want to see ourselves and be seen by the rest of the world. The scary critters are definitely out there for the intrepid few who want to venture forth, but most of us prefer to experience them on the screen where they belong.

My last Australian wild encounter was many years ago now. I had been diving at Bunkers Bay, a fairly remote location in the far south-west of the country. Having drifted some distance from the beach where we entered the water, I decided to head back on foot, rather than swimming against the current. Rock-hopping between large flat granite boulders would not normally have been all that challenging, but a full scuba kit changed all that. The extra weight made every forward move a big effort. I was making pretty good progress when something stopped me on the brink of one rock. Tanks and weight belt followed the laws of motion and wanted to keep their forward momentum. I teetered on the edge, and saw with horror the fat coiled form of a snake on the rock below my foot. A tiger snake, red-brown, the colour of the warm rock, with dark tiger stripes and an indented diamond-shaped head. One of the top ten, aggressive and deadly. Somehow I managed to shift my trajectory sideways, smashing my left hand, dropping the fins I was carrying and clanging the empty tank on my back against the rocks. The snake roused itself, reared up to check me out, opened its jaws to expose two warning fangs and took off. I sat there for a while, bleeding a bit and trying to breathe. A close one. Even closer by the time I limped back to the others, pumped up and ready to share my story.

Thirty years on that tiger snake has a permanent place amongst the varied cast of my personal narrative. I drag them out from time to time to remind people that I wasn’t always a dreary, sagging retiree. I used to be tough as a big red kangaroo, tenacious as a bobtail lizard and dangerous as an angry tiger snake. I was a real Australian too.