This is super cool, if a bit scary. Man Australia has it all though, 8/10 of the deadliest spiders, half the deadliest snakes, crocodiles, rockfish, and now firebirds.
Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance.
Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance.
Given that humans inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years without the benefits of domesticable crops or herd animals, I'd say it's a testament to incredible perseverance.
So, I left. 30 years later, I'm taking my kids back for a bit of tourism.
And for sure, we'll be keeping an eye out, back up on those long stretches, for the odd kite or two .. not that there's much to burn where we're going.
Australia is a huge, and most awesome place in the world. It's a pity what its current humans are doing with it.
I learned to travel at a very young age, and don't have any national identity worth defending. I think of Australia as a wonderful country; pity about the people. Its no fun going back there every few years and seeing the landscape covered in copy-paste strip malls from Arizona ...
However, as time passes, my views are starting to change somewhat. There is a large enough body of literature to lead me to believe that there are more progressive elements of Australian society, that I was not broadly exposed to previously. Perhaps this realisation has come in time, through maturity, and I am also seeking it out more.
I'm currently reading Reynold's The Other Side of the Frontier[1], a ground breaking work from 1981. Other publications like The Monthly[2] are also worth reading (Noel Pearson's essay this month particularly so). The more I seek out such alternative views, the more I'm convinced there is a large enough minority who do give a damn and that positive change is still possible.
If I was to return on a permanent basis, which seems ever more difficult as I'm seriously embedded in my current European location now, I'm quite sure I will not live in a major metropolitan location like Sydney or Melbourne. I'm thinking now more like Tasmania, maybe Adelaide region or even far north Queensland. Somewhere the white noise of boganism may not have penetrated quite so deeply.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Frontier
Australia, for geographical reasons, simply started the process too late, when we were already getting cold feet. Now that we understand how Nature works a bit more, it’s become difficult to justify large-scale efforts to remove these threats to human life. We find it more acceptable to suffer a potential spider bite here and there, than to risk irreparable losses to the variety of life and the quality of our planet’s natural state.
If anything, the fact that Australia manages to slowly expand human footprint while still maintaining a balanced truce with our predators, is testament to the level of emotional maturity that our animal race has reached.
We can be wiped out by some of the simplest lifeforms, and even simpler, not quite lifeforms on the planet.
Until that actually happens, I'm gonna call that BS pessimism. Humans are waaaay more durable, persistent, clever, stubborn, and hard to kill en-masse than you are giving us credit for.
And yet, we are not.
It's really very simple. Here is a diagram:
[place where bad things are]
[me]
It's just not difficult.
Its only rival in my heart is New York.
A friend of mine was driving around his property and found the track blocked by a fallen tree. He started pulling branches off the road and trod on a tiger snake in the grass. He was bitten and survived after administration of anti-venom. He wasn't doing anything particularly dumb and probably 99.9% of the time wouldn't have trodden on a snake.
I used to work on a farm. One day after moving the irrigation sprays I went to the well to turn the pump on. Around the well was about a 3 foot high concrete wall, maybe 3 inches wide. I sat on the edge of the wall to wait until the pressure came up and sprays started working. As I turned to leave I happened to notice on the wall, about 30cm from my hand, was a red-bellied black snake sunning itself. Close call.
I remember as a child, my mother chasing brown snakes out of our front garden so they wouldn't be a danger to us children.
If you're outside of a major urban environment in Australia, snakes are around. One just needs to be a bit careful.
The dangers in life are what make it interesting to think about, right at the end of it all...
The so-called 'deadly' animals (some of which, including a variety of snakes, I come across frequently where I live) barely rate a statistical mention.
For instance, if you throw me in the sea next to a great white in a feeding frenzy, my chances of dying will have nothing to do with the probability of dying from a dog bite.
The statistics for the probability of dying from specific causes can help predict what one is most likely to die from- but not to how likely one is to die from encountering a spider or a snake.
In other words, people are afraid of, say, black widow spiders, because the probability of dying given one is attacked by a black widow is extremely high. And that is perfectly reasonable and a very good statistic to keep in mind if one is in any situation where encountering a black widow is a possibility (even one with a small probability).
> Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance
.. whereas the stats indicate that the dangers in practice are minimal, and the measures to obviate them are largely obvious, easy to implement and almost universally observed.
Rare's the week I won't come across a brown snake or redback. Never's the week that either is the most significant danger I face.
What are the most significant dangers you face, if I may pry? What's worse than snakes and spiders on a weekly basis?
But far and away my most dangerous daily encounter will be with other road users. If I drove a car, that would be my highest risk of death. And that's multiplied by about 30 (IIRC) because instead I ride a motorbike. It's Japanese, not Australian, and poisonous to nothing but the atmosphere.