I have always been grateful that here on my farm in Southern Ontario there isn’t a single poisonous creature that wants to kill me. Sure, there are nasty wasps lurking on the underside of every metal surface in August. Skunks turn up in the most startling places, like between my feet at the workbench. And there is the odd patch of poison ivy in the fencerows. That’s about it.
Australia has at least 30 of the world’s most dangerous animals, including snakes and spiders that infest every farm from Sydney to Perth. Another dozen species lurk in the water, including the cute little duckbill platypus that has a hook on its hind foot that can put you in hospital.
I spent a year there in 1970, working on dairy farms and sheep stations, when the most popular tune on the radio was “The Redback Spider on the Toilet Seat” by Slim Newton. All the farms I worked on still had outhouses and I was warned to give the seat a good bang before I sat down. Fatalities from spider bites even then were fairly rare, but country people were always watchful.
One day, while building a large stack of square bales out in the open, I felt a burning on my ankle and whipped off my boot. A green spider the size of a quarter jumped out and disappeared down a crack between the bales. My boss pointed out the two neat little puncture wounds on my ankle and sent me in to the house to let Gramma have a look.
Gramma examined the wound carefully and quizzed me on the colour of the spider. “A green one, was it?” she drawled. I nodded.
“Well, Danny...you moight get sick,” she said. “But you wouldn’t doy.” She advised me to keep my pants rolled down over my boots and sent me back out to work. I never had another close encounter with a spider of any variety, or any snake for that matter. Eventually, my nervousness about poisonous creatures subsided. But a few months later I was travelling up the coastal highway of Queensland and a farmer invited me to join his crew cutting a field of sugar cane. The work required me to stick my head in the canopy and slash at the roots of the cane plants with a machete, then slice off the tops and throw big armfuls up on the wagon. The ground underfoot was covered with black ashes. During the smoke break, I asked my employer if there had been a fire.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “You gotta burn the field before we cut it. You wanna get rid of the snakes, right?”
I thought about that for a minute and then I asked, “So, that works, does it? It gets rid of the snakes?”
“Pretty much. You do see the odd one.”
After the break, I tried shoving my head back into the canopy but I found it just wouldn’t go. The farmer watched me for a bit and he started to chuckle.
“You don’t have any poisonous snakes in Canada, do you?”
I said we did have the Massasauga rattlesnake in Ontario. But they weren’t that dangerous. The man raised his eyebrows in astonishment and turned to the others. “Did you hear that? The Canadian says they only have one poisonous snake in Canada . . . and it rattles!” They all roared with laughter.
He turned back to me. “A lot of folks tell us they don’t like snakes and I can’t blame ‘em.” He paid me for the morning’s work and I drove on, up into the Cape Yorke peninsula, habitat of the dreaded Taipan viper, crocodiles and the venomous box jellyfish. But I never saw one of those either.
I did have one brush with death on that trip when I climbed up on a retired racehorse and went for a canter around the pasture. I coaxed the old thing into a gentle turn and she heeled over like a sailboat in a stiff breeze. Then she kept heeling until she fell right over. It was a close call but I escaped with only a temporary sprain of my knee.
Statistics confirm that horses, cows and drownings kill far more people every year in Australia than snakes, spiders, crocodiles, sharks and jellyfish and everything else combined. So if you do go to Australia, be sure to swim between the flags and, if you go to a farm, never, ever get on a horse.