Deadly Oz

Australia’s reputation is that ‘danger is everywhere’, and in truth I expected to see something deadly every single day …and if it wasn’t terrifying, then we’d be going ‘awww it’s so cute’.

I came to Oz with a bingo card full of animals I wanted to see – kangaroos, koalas, duck billed platypuses, sharks, whales, dolphins, dangerous spiders, big lizards, camels, snakes …and, a late addition, wombats.

On our third day, driving from Adelaide to Melbourne, we thought we’d seen a dead Koala on the road – we’d felt incredibly sad, numbers had been falling rapidly in recent years and there was one lying dead by the side of the road, but my sister told me it wasn’t a Koala (even though she didn’t see it!) – ‘how do you  know?’

‘It just doesn’t happen very often, but wombats, they get killed on the road all the time…’

I had no idea what a wombat even looked like, so we looked them up…They are like the adorable ground dwelling teddy bear cousins to the koala – unbelievably speedy and shaped like little barrels…they moved into second spot above sharks and below snakes. I really wanted to see one, alive!

If I only came to Australia once in my life I wanted to see as many of these fabulous creatures in the wild as I could…to sit quietly and watch a koala waddle into view, to be casually minding my own business when a deadly snake slithered across my path, to walk along the shoreline and see a shark fin bearing down on a surfer (…it’s well known that sharks don’t like the taste of human – they just look a bit like seals, and if they do bite one of us by accident they spit us out because we’re full of germs, or the bones get stuck in their teeth, something like that anyway…The truth is they only attack ‘when they are confused or curious. If a shark sees a human splashing in the water, it may try to investigate, leading to an accidental attack’…not particularly comforting for the human in question but good to know it’s not deliberate!) 

By the end of the first month though, I had only seen kangaroos from my list…to be fair we had seen an echidna, (awww, so cute) and several huge bats which we didn’t even know lived in Australia, maybe I needed to have a shorter list…

The bird life was extraordinary and if I was a twitcher, or even a birder (the more chilled out neighbours of the twitchers), I would have been completely content – we saw so many stunning birds.

White and black cockatoos, lorikeets, galahs, rosellas – both Eastern and Western. Then kookaburra’s, cat birds, yellow robins, Aussie magpies, King parrots, several unnamed eagles, two tawny frogmouths, punk doves (not certain that’s their official name but it is an accurate description : )

We saw cormorants, pelicans, lapwings, bush turkeys, minor birds, egrets, corellas, brown booby’s, kestrels, the ever present pigeon …and last but not least bin chickens : )

A mighty list for any bird watcher and we did love the birds and their noisy colourful beauty – we were even lucky enough to see emus in little flocks in the outback…But…

Where were the sharks and the dolphins? The koalas and the platypuses? Even  the funnel webs were absent …and what about the snakes? The way everyone talked it seemed like there was a deadly snake in every back yard. Was it possible that Australia was actually mostly full of leeches and bin chickens…？

I looked again at my list and after some practical on the ground advice…’Koalas are lazy mate, there’s almost no chance…’ and ‘look, you don’t really want to see a funnel web up close.’

I shortened my list to just ‘snakes and wombats’.

We had after all seen a whale shark on our first Pelni ferry so that ticked off both whales and sharks, and we’d seen dolphins too…I had seen a huntsman spider in my sisters bathroom and they are pretty big, how much did I really want to see a funnel web as well? Camels are another of the very many invasive species now living in Australia, and love them though I do, this was no more their land than mine…

I was VERY attached to seeing a snake though …I’d had four or five different snake briefings from helpful family and friends, snakes seemed to always have been around the day before or the day after everything we did. Everyone had a story, everyone except me.

I was ready, I had my bandage in my bag to strap myself up if I got bitten…I knew not to move if I saw one, I knew to keep looking down when I walked along…I knew not to go walking in long grass in sandals …and still no flippin’ snakes.

What was I going to have to do to see them? I wasn’t going to go ‘full bush’ and head out into the wild with my billycan (and my bandage) ‘don’t ever leave the path’ ringing in my ears …apparently all of Australias snakes live in the scrubby grass just next to the track… ‘knowing your luck you’ll tread on the belly of browno and get yourself airlifted to Sydney’ I wouldn’t have minded but this was from a bloke on a bus who had never met me before!

I am not someone who gives up particularly quickly though and even though six weeks and a LOT of walks in the bush had passed I was determined to keep trying…

When we got to Bellingen Lowanna asked me if I wanted to come for a walk with her…her home is fully surrounded by forest so it was a big yes from me… they hadn’t seen a snake for a while but they did get them (…and the mama and baby koala that had visited the previous spring were adorable…awww!)

The walk was gentle at first but very quickly it turned into army boot camp – straight up.

Lowy seemed unaffected by the ‘up’ and carried on chatting like a normal fit person, me? Not so much…I had to figure out how to answer questions like ‘so what route do you think you’ll take home’ in two words…three would have killed me!

When she finally said ‘this is as far as I normally go’, said in a perfectly calm level voice, we’d been going up for nearly an hour…(or twenty minutes depending on who you want to believe…)

I stood breathing hard waiting for the exercise ‘high’ to come and sweep me into her loving arms but that didn’t happen …or if it did, it just lifted me up from my bent-double, head close to my knees, position so I could stagger back down again…it was only when I got to the bottom that it finally kicked in: ‘that was fun, I should do this every day’.

I did actually walk up that little mini mountain nearly every day we stayed with Lowy and Kev…sometimes so slowly my breathing didn’t change at all – and a couple of times I attacked the ‘up’ like all the snakes in Australia were coming for me…

After a few days I decided that I needed to stop ‘searching’ for snakes, maybe if I could make myself believe I didn’t mind if I saw one or not…then I’d see one!

Meanwhile Theo had decided that the track was his best chance of seeing a Koala. ‘Shan there were two here in the spring, they clearly live around here…’ Fair point.

One morning we decided to go up the mountain together, although by the time we headed out it was nearly 1.00pm …amazing how busy we could both be doing our different things each morning. I introduced Theo to my ‘six minutes of intensity’ work out which involved twenty seconds of walking as fast as you possibly can then a minutes recovery – 4 times.

Back home Diane had said this was ‘all you needed to do to get fit’ – just three times a week!’ (It’s just possible she may have said some other things we needed to do but I wasn’t listening to those bits – six minutes three times a week seemed like a great idea to me).

It got us up the first big hill and then there was a flat bit before the second and third big hills – Theo had had enough after the third and stayed to look through his binoculars at the treetops, and I carried on…

Instincts are funny things. The point at which I stopped to turn back was about sixty feet away from my first snake, but I didn’t see it.

I looked back at the way I’d come and looked forward again and decided to just go a little further, it was so peaceful up here.

And there she was…

A slender bright green snake just on the side of the path – she slithered across in front of me, barely ten feet away, I turned the video on my phone on and just held it roughly in place…I wasn’t going to miss this by looking at it through a screen.

Snakey stopped and turned towards me, on the other side of the path now. She lifted her head up and flicked her tongue out a few times, tasting me…then she moved her neck back and forth, either waving at me or reminding me she was utterly deadly and not to mess with her – she was beautiful, and we spent about two minutes looking at each other before I decided I might need to step back a little in case she was getting ready to strike and not in fact extending the warm hand of friendship from the snakey queendom…

It was only then that I noticed I hadn’t actually turned my video on…maybe it was a moment just meant to be between her and I (…and maybe pay more attention next time next time you switch your video on!)

I rushed back to tell Theo of my deadly encounter and I texted Mike to ask him what species of snake I had just seen.

By the time I got back to Theo I had found out my bright green snake was one of the only non-venomous snakes in Australia : )

I didn’t care she was beautiful and I had seen a snake!!

The next day we headed out early and went ‘up’ (why isn’t it getting any easier? How long does this bloody fitness thing take?!)

No snakes just heaps of kookaburras all laughing at some joke I didn’t get…Kookaburras have been the soundtrack to Australia for us, if you imitate them you end up laughing : )

I went out again that afternoon because I was clearly getting addicted to the exercise ‘high’…and after about ten minutes I stopped…

I’d just started to go up and it was hot so I took out my water bottle and looked around, and there, on a woodpile by the side of the track, was a bloody big black snake – I had just enough time to notice how big it was, how deadly it looked, before it took off…diving back into the woodpile.

I stood in shock, registering that if it hadn’t liked me it was close enough to have sunk its fangs/teeth anything it had at its disposal really, into any part of me it fancied.

So, seeing snakes was a bit scary…

That black one was at least seven feet long and two inches across.

I raced back to get Theo and approached the wood pile carefully, but it didn’t appear again…

I had seen a red bellied black snake and it was the tenth most venomous in Australia, and the 45th most venomous in the world…I wasn’t sure I’d want to meet some of the other top ten…who’s laughing now…(probably only the kookaburras).

I was chuffed though, and had a bit more of an understanding of how careful you might need to be around some of Australia’s snakes…

Woohoo – I had seen snakes!

We headed back to Ellie’s and at some point in the coming fortnight turned our attention to wombats…neither Theo or Rosa were particularly upset that they’d missed out on the snake sightings…Rosa had been a bit freaked out by the close encounter in Thailand and Theo wasn’t such a big fan of them as me.

Wombats though…we all wanted to see one of those in the wild. It looked like ‘Kangaroo Valley’ was where they all lived so we made a plan to go there.

The day before our wombat adventure Louis called to say he’d found a baby python in his house – he’d moved it into the garden and did we want to come and see it…? Ellie and I went over straight away and this time I did get to take some photos and film the little beauty…(three sneks!)

We made a picnic for ‘wombat day’ but the weather had other ideas. The sky was overcast and dreary at first but quite quickly turned into a torrential storm as we set off – what self respecting wombat would come out in this weather?

We drove on anyway – this was our last Monday together so we were definitely carrying on. None of us knew anything much about wombats so we looked them up and found out that they didn’t like hot summer days! They tended to stay in their burrows when it was hot…much preferring to come out when it was cooler. The mood lifted considerably with that piece of news and after some expert flood driving from Rosa we came through the worst of the lightening storm. We left the highway and started driving through forests…as we got close the mist drew in (…what is it with us and mist?!) –

I was driving now and could hardly see ten feet in front of the car…eventually we got below the clouds and the beauty of the valley opened up before us.

We parked the car in the campsite and saw kangaroos up by the toilet block. They looked relaxed and a bit like new forest ponies, this was their campsite and we were tolerated. We saw our first joey in a pouch that afternoon and it looked pretty big to me. I had some sympathy with mum who was moving pretty slowly…

So, there were kangaroos in ‘Kangaroo Valley’, the ‘what it says on the tin’ aspect of that was both satisfying and hopeful – the guides had said there would be kangaroos and wombats here …and there were kangaroos, tick…

We grabbed an apple each from the picnic bag and went for a walk along the bank of the wide river. There were big sign boards detailing wildlife in the area and indicating trek routes that you could only get to in a canoe…this was clearly a place for having ‘wild’ adventure, but we were here to see wombats, where were they most likely to be?

Our information gathering had told us they were most active at dawn and dusk and we had three hours to go so we carried on walking along the river… we saw lots of ducks and cormorants, and then we saw their burrows.

Literally loads of them all along the side of the river.- we could see what looked like recent activity in the entrance way to some and went back to the car to eat and get ready for the evenings watching.

We’d borrowed a spotting torch from Mike and, fully kitted up with raincoats a picnic blanket to sit on and lots of hopeful optimism, we headed back out along the river bank.

We sat halfway between two of the burrows we’d seen earlier and waited, and waited…and waited.

I looked round and saw Rosa had given up starring at the grass and was playing a game on her phone…I nudged her, ‘you are the one with the best eyes here, we need you’ …she gave me ‘a look’ but put her phone away and as the shadows lengthened and twilight began to become darkness Rosa saw something (called it!) …it was round and pretty small but definitely a ‘something’.

We got up quietly and headed slowly towards it…yep that was a wombat!

The smallest one was about the size of a badger but much rounder and a bit shorter, I never actually got a good look at any legs or feet though. They had the look of an enormous short haired guinea pig but their faces were those of a bear – button eyes and triangle snouts…we all wanted to take one home, to cuddle …(but we didn’t!)

We grinned at each other and kept inching closer – it paid us no attention whatsoever…eating and waddling, making low little grunting sounds to itself and then we saw another bigger one near the river – we saw them in the grass by the track, in the campsite, in the bushes…there was even one up by the campsite toilet.

They were every bit as adorable as we thought they would be and we got within a few feet of a couple of them.

Wombats are cute!

We didn’t see them run – I absolutely do not believe that those little round creatures can run at 40 km an hour but everything else we’d found out had been true, so maybe they do…

We left the newly named ‘Wombat Valley’ happy, and with Ellie determined to bring Mike, Thoma and the girls here.

When I finally came to write down the list of the wildlife we’d seen it was rather wonderful and perhaps with just the right amount of deadly…

• Kangaroos
• Wallabies
• Goana
• Monitor lizards
• Gecko’
• Skinks
• Echidna
• Green tree snake
• Red bellied black snake
• Ring tailed possum
• Huntsman spider
• Leeches
• Flies
• Rats
• Bats
• Squirrel glider
• Greater glider
• Pademelons
• Wild boars
• Brumby’s
• Diamond python
• Wombats
• Frogs

My impression is that Australia loves its wildlife and in the words of John Seed, the Wizard of Oz himself:

‘Life on this planet spent nearly three billion years as a whole load of amoeba, and now we can write operas. I reckon there isn’t much we can’t do if we put our mind to it ,and right now we need to remember that all life is connected and  turn our considerable ingenuity, intelligence and compassion into sorting out climate change.’