Spiders in Australia
A Poetic Perspective
Whenever you tell someone you’re from Australia, the first thing they ask you about is the spiders. Are they really that deadly? Are they really everywhere? Are they really trying to kill you?
Considering the positive reaction to my previous installment of Australiana, I thought I’d answer these questions about Aussie spiders in a poem. I expect the last stanza will amuse (and puzzle) some non-Australian readers.
The fat black spider sits and waits,
A bowling ball with hairy legs.
If you don’t guard your every step,
Your mouth will keep her eggs.
The deadliest of deadly things,
Her sharpened fangs replete with venom,
She’s quicker than impulsive scream,
Ubiquitous as denim.
They call her “The Australian Death,”
Because she rules The Land Below,
Where even Satan’s ministers
Are afraid to go.
She’s not the only one around;
Australia lets her species thrive.
The country’s citizens don’t boast
“We live,” but “we survive.”
Only one thing can stop the march
Of the malignant, crawling throng:
You’ve got to build your courage up,
And whack them with a thong!
Eight points
Statistically everyone has an average of 23 spiders within 1 metre of them.
A friend let a Huntsman spider stay on his bedroom ceiling. One drunken night he thought the ceiling was moving. No, thousands of the spider's eggs had just hatched and they were running away before their mother ate them.
A spider the size of one's hand suddenly appearing next to one's face certainly tests one's voluntarily muscular control ability.
There's a myth that the innocuous looking Daddy Long-Legs (a spider with a tiny body and disproportionately long thin legs) has a formidable toxin but no way to deliver it to a human.
Having stoned friends tell you of the wonder of running with abandon through the matchwood forests (managed forests grown for lumber where all the tress are planted on a square grid pattern) certainly gets old the instant you run into a king-sized bed sized spider web.
The last recorded spider bite death in Australia was in 1979 yet 12 or so people die from bee stings each year.
A bite from a White Tail spider might cause a progressive skin condition called necrotising arachnidism (the skin around the wound dies and the skin continues to die from the site of the initial wound.)
Well, that's ate!
There is one called the Ogre-face Spider and another ,The Giant Hairy Hadurous-I know because I was trying to work out a dire spider phobia,and I did an art piece on these "Mini-Beasts."