When we were in Australia years ago we wild camped all over the place and never gave a thought to all the bitey, stingey things they've got over there.
You're not wrong there! When I was there I never went in the seas for fear of being bitten (sea snakes, sharks, stung (box jelly fish tenticles which can be 5km long or leave severe burns over skin) or eaten (shark). Mind you I did a fair few bush walks, seeing quite a few King Brown snakes which are pretty bad tempered things. One morning about 7am I was driving a minibus through an orange plantation in South Australia where I was working for a few weeks and this snake came straight out of one row of oranges across the dirt road in front of the van into another as fast as a man could run. No time to brake or swerve. Blink and you would miss it. We were doing about 20-25mph. It must have been about 8-9 feet long moving fast with it's head up about 4 foot off the ground. Scary.
Picking bananas in Queensland was the worst. Venomous snakes would slither down the frond and go to sleep around the huge fronds of bananas inside the huge foil lined bags used to ripen and protect bananas for harvest. You had to reach up into the tree and cut the main stem with a machete then take the whole weight of the huge frond (stack) of bananas on your shoulder. Any sleeping snake would rapidly wake up and bite you on the neck killing you within a couple of minutes. We always had dogs that would bark like mad if there were any snakes around the fronds. I didn't get bitten but a couple of my co-workers did and when we got back to the shed there were always snakes sliding out of the huge bunches as they were divided and packed. King Browns, taipans, scary scary work it was. And the sap was awful black sticky goo that wouldn't come off any clothing. It was bin your clothes at the end of every week. Spiders were a nightmare as well.
In the outback I was always told to sleep on a picnic table if you could off the ground as come morning you could well have an unwelcome visitor snuggled up against you or even inside your bag ..................
Saw quite a few snakes wrapped up inside wheel arches and around suspension parts adjacent to exhaust systems or actually around silencers. You always had to check shoes or boots before putting them on. A maintenance guy at one of the hostels I was staying nearly died as snake slithered into a large black bucket he was using for tools etc I guess for the heat. Anyway guy reached in for a tool without looking into the bucket and was bitten by a King Brown snake. He spent a couple of weeks in hospital and luckily lived.
