Home > Work > In a Sunburned Country
101 " Sydney has no box jellyfish, I was pleased to learn. The famous local danger is the funnel web spider, the most poisonous insect in the world with a venom that is “highly toxic and fast-acting.” A single nip, if not promptly treated, will leave you bouncing around in the grip of seizures of an incomparable liveliness; then you turn blue; then you die. Thirteen deaths are on record, though none since 1981, when an antidote was devised. Also poisonous are white-tailed spiders, mouse spiders, wolf spiders, our old friend the redback (“hundreds of bites are reported each year…about a dozen known deaths”), and a reclusive but fractious type called the fiddleback. "
― Bill Bryson , In a Sunburned Country
102 " It struck me, not for the first time, that there seemed to be more places in Australia for tourists to go than there were tourists to fill them. At "
103 " The chronicles of Australian fauna are amazingly full of stories such as this – of animals that are there one moment and gone the next. A more recent casualty of the phenomenon was a frog called Rheobatrachus silus, which was around for such a short time that it didn’t even manage to attract an informal name. What was extraordinary about R. silus (and it almost goes without saying that there would be something) was that it gave birth to live young through its mouth – something never before seen in nature inside Australia or out. It was discovered by biologists in 1973 and by 1981 it had disappeared. It is listed as ‘probably extinct’. My "
104 " But if you’re not giving the kids the lessons because the parents can’t help them, then those kids, when they become parents, won’t have the core skills either, will they? "