Welcome to Australia - (Don't be scared)

Nice bit written in today's Courier Mail

THE mad bat of the Town of 1770 was the tipping point. Until then I had been successful in reassuring my brother-in-law that he would not be sent back to England's green and pleasant land in a coffin, the victim of an unfortunate encounter with Australia's wildlife.
A lot of foreigners think Australia is a deadly place because of a perception that every living thing here has the capability of inflicting upon the unwary an agonising and messy death.
Sure, that may be true of Brunswick St at 3am but, by comparison to other continents, our wildlife is pretty tame.
But that's not the general wisdom.
Popular travel writer Bill Bryson summed up why visitors from overseas think that their first steps outside the international terminal could be their last in his book Down Under: "It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's 10 most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures – the funnel-web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick and stonefish – are the most lethal of their type in the world.
"This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip; where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. Pick up an innocuous cone shell from a Queensland beach, as innocent tourists are all too wont to do, and you will discover that the little fellow inside is not just astoundingly swift and testy, but exceedingly venomous.
"If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking Outback. It's a tough place."
All right Bill, all right. Don't go on about it.
The English don't have much wildlife – a few badgers, the odd rabbit – so they are fascinated by ours. Except when it is within cooee of them.
My Pommy in-laws have just been visiting for three weeks over Christmas/New Year, and for two of those weeks we were ensconced in a house adjacent to a national park and near the beach in northern New South Wales.
The first sign of nerves emerged when a local woman told Scotty, a big, boofy rugby player from the Home Counties, that the kangaroos feeding on our back lawn had been known to become aggressive, and to keep an eye on his two-year-old and four-year-old when they were around. There were some big, muscular male eastern greys among them and they would have done some serious damage to a kid if they got antsy, so that was the end of the morning walks with the toddlers to see the roos feeding.
We bought Scotty a three-day learn-to-surf course for his Christmas present and afterwards he would join his Aussie nephews for a dawn surf at what is a reasonably isolated beach. Certainly there are no lifeguards and you can't see any buildings.
He was very interested in sharks (out of self-preservation, not scientific curiosity), so we told him all the available lore we knew – early morning and late afternoon most dangerous times to be in water, don't surf alone, stay clear of river mouths, avoid murky water, etc – but assured him shark attacks were very rare.
Except that that week a shark attacked a diver on the Barrier Reef, mauling his hand and forearm. "It was just an inquiry nip," the diver, John Pengelly, blithely declared.
Quite right John, nothing to worry about except that it put the fear into our Englishman. A couple of days later a fisherman caught a large bull shark in little more than a gutter 15km upstream from Noosa, and it was all over the news. The next morning we had the beach to ourselves, it was drizzling, overcast, a bit foggy. Perfect shark attack conditions.
"Why are we the only ones here?" a worried Scotty asked, lying on his board with his legs in the air.
"Just lucky, I reckon," I replied. I much prefer shark rage to surf rage.
As scared as he was of sharks, he was terrified of spiders, a real arachnophobe. So, as if on script one morning a large redback crawled out of my wetsuit as I was about to put it on.
It must have sought shelter there from the incessant rain while it was hanging on the line.
Scotty's eyes made him look like ET as he took in the black body with the blood-red slash on its bum.
"What will we do with it? Kill it?"' he inquired as I looked around the carpark.
He was horrified when I found what I was looking for – a car with NSW number plates – and put the spider on it. I had to explain about State of Origin.
You wouldn't believe it, but on the front page of the next day's Clarence Valley Daily Examiner was a photo of a small but venomous snake that had been killed by a redback after it was caught in its web.
Scotty, by this time fearful about leaving his room, had also had to come to terms with what a box jellyfish was and the fact that one had nearly killed a young girl 20km from the sea in a central Queensland river. It took a lot to convince him that they didn't travel as far south as Yamba.
The several drownings that made the news over this period, while obviously tragic, were almost reassuring in that the victims did not die by fang or claw.
But it was the mad bat of the Town of 1770 that bit three people in unrelated attacks, and the description of it crawling down a tree branch with its glittering eyes fixed on its victims, that convinced Scotty that Australia was indeed a hellhole.Back in Brisbane, having a drink on the veranda, we watched the wonderful sight of the fruit bat colony at Enoggera take off for the evening feed, flying in their thousands over our house.Close to our house.......
The look on Scotty's face was priceless, his mind clearly mulling over the possibility that one of them would swoop for his jugular.
He and his family left soon after, sprinting for the plane with what I believe was uncalled-for haste.
I hope they don't go spreading any misconceptions about our wildlife.