okay ive been told it’s a “wateringhole” but what’s a wateringhole
receiving a lot of conflicting answers so im just gonna put em all together and assume billabong is a big, putrid, stagnant body of still water that australian citizens can reach into to find beer, ice cream, and clothing for douchebag 14 year olds.
The Redback would like you too! They love humans and human homes, and seem to preferentially prefer living around us. Their venom causes almost pure pain and they are happy to share it. Here’s a picture of one eating a lizard.
Perhaps you’d like the Sydney Funnel-Web Spider instead? A spider that more or less is restricted to our largest, most populous city and can kill you. It likes to dig holes in your garden.
Perhaps reptiles are more your style? Consider our Tiger Snake, which is not a peaceful soul content to be left alone. Tigers have attitude and will have a go when provoked, unlike the relatively chill red bellied black snakes.
Also around our homes we also have the notorious Magpie, aka murder bird, which is not really as bad as the internet makes them out to be unless you’ve bothered them previously, but they can do significant damage divebombing your skull if they decide to.
Like birds? The cassowary probably should be a cryptid, but this dinosaur who didn’t get the message really exists, and will trample your organs. It eats fruit.
On the topic of large herbivores, red kangaroos are as big as ours come. They will eviscerate dogs and humans that get too close, and will total a car in a crash. Do not approach a red kangaroo hit by your car unless you are sure it’s dead.
If you’re interested in something a little more legendary, we have the Razorback pigs. These are not cryptids, they are large enough up north to start eating cattle.
But of course, they’re not the biggest snout at the dinner table.
And I haven’t even talked about what’s in the water.
Man, skunks aren’t even dangerous! They’re just unpleasant to piss off. Usually the only time you smell one is if it’s been hit on the road. If you meet a skunk, just be chill and keep going on your way, it’ll probably do the same thing.
Rabies is scary as Fuck, but we can fix someone who’s been bitten by a rabid animal with rabies vaccines. We cannot fix someone who was bitten by most of the above with, well, anything.
my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this
look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit
motherfucking australia
if there was a post to describe australia, this is it
wait.
you mean to tell me this isn’t even a pet bird?
that in australia, you have wild birds that just fly from house to house with the express purpose of fucking shit up?
fucking HELL australia, what is wrong with you?
wake up australia
That’s what birds do
They fly around and fuck shit up
Do you have some kind of mysterious nice birds in your weird foreign country
Do birds in America and England fly into your house and make the bed and tidy up the living room a little bit
It’s cold here, so they just bounce off the windows and lie there and twitch spasmodically while you look for the shovel.
Basically hurling themselves at windows is the worst thing birds do
yeah man a kookaburra literally flew into a classroom at my high school and just sat his smug ass down on top of the desk for a good 20 minutes
why has nobody mentioned the fact that in australia there are 3-4 months a year where everybody just accepts that they’re going to get attacked by magpies. It is literally called “swooping season” and these birds will fly down to peck your fucking face, and people get their eyes ripped out and shit, it’s fucking brutal.
My teacher had to go to hospital and have surgery because of swooping season. It was in the parking lot of school and all the kids would do a mad dash towards the car as the magpies tried to kill us.
no but when you’re 12 years old and riding your bike like mad on the way home from school with an icecream bucket on your head with like branches and shit sticking out if it to scare them off and none of this is considered strange
what the actual fuck australia
I am pretty sure all of these Australia stories are a massive, globally-spanning trolling effort, and only the people who have visited the country are allowed to be in on the joke.
Nope.
Went there.
Parrots tried to take our car.
Came home IN A FUCKING HURRY.
Interesting thing about magpies – they’re not great at identifying individual humans visually, but if you make yourself identifiable in some way they’re usually open to reason. We used to have some very aggressive swoopers in our back yard – as soon as they realised that the humans *inside* the fence never bothered them and were the source of the delicious compost heap, they turned into flying black and white guard dogs who would viciously assault any passing stranger but never bothered anyone inside the yard. Several times they swooped at us when we approached from outside, then when we walked into the yard they would pull up and act incredibly apologetic like sorry ma’am I had no idea it was you I would never please don’t stop stocking the food pile.
There was another little group of magpies in the park who would attack any solo pedestrian but never bothered anyone walking a dog or pushing a pram, because apparently those were identifiable traits indicating a non-threatening human. In the spirit of inquiry, I started going out of my way to be polite to the magpies – carefully walking a wide arc around them when they were on the ground, etc – and emitting an identifiable call of ‘hello birdie’ before swooping season started.
I spent the next ten years crossing that park at least once a day and as long as I turned at the first flutter of wings and said ‘hello birdie’ to the magpie waiting to attack as soon as my back was turned, I was fine. Every time, the magpie would stare at me for a minute and then fly off to harass some other pedestrian because apparently the magpies and I, we were cool.
Parrots are a lot less open to negotiation, and the little bastards travel in flocks. Beware the parrots.
What the fuck
@commanderholly holy shit has Ross ever told you this stuff?
This post gets more hilarious every time it comes up on my radar. There’s a whole paragraph on the Australian Magpie wiki page about swooping, and what does (and does not) work, along with a picture of a person wearing an anti-magpie modified bike helmet. And of course, Youtube Videos
And, famously, most of the Australian countryside is made of explodium.
The eucalypts that feature so prominently are practically dripping with highly flammable oils. There’s even a myth that koalas will explode if they get too close to campfires. The trees certainly will.
In fact, as an approaching bushfire bakes the forest in front of it, you can get a horribly volatile mix of eucalyptus oils and oxygen. Then it can all go up at once.
The Australian bush is so flammable that hundreds of plant species have evolved methods of surviving the conflagration. Indeed, many of them require a fire to germinate their seeds.
Oddly enough, despite living in a tinderbox, bushfires have only killed about 800 people in the history of the nation. Unhappily, 179 of those were during the 2009 Victorian Bushfires.
But if our bushfires aren’t enough for you, feel free to combine them with the tornadoes.
You always see list of deadliest toxins, but almost never lists of least fun toxins. I mean, a bite from a taipan snake will kill you dead, but in a brisk and orderly fashion that will unfold from “Ow, bugger, what was that” to “x_x” in about an hour.
The reaction to the gympie gympie stinging tree, however, can last for months, during which time there is precious little they can do for you except pump you full of steroids and strap you down to a table with a brace in your mouth so you don’t do yourself serious injury. In the 1960s, British military scientists studied the tree for its potential as a biological weapon.
The research was apparently abandoned, for reasons which have never been released to the public; but if I had to take a guess, I’d look to the example of civilian research scientist Marina Hurley, who spent three years studying the gympie gympie, and was forced to abandon her research when, despite using every manner of precaution, her exposure to the plant’s neurotoxin nevertheless led to hospitalization. The hairs on the plant which carry the toxin, you see, are regularly shed, and become airborne, at which point they can be inhaled and cause severe nosebleeds, asphyxiation, and anaphylactic shock.
One survivor of a brush with a gympie gympie described the stinging persisting for over two years, made worse whenever he took a cold shower.
That one thing we’re notably good at as a species finally has a use that will benefit mankind (and more)
Yes, humanity
We are the ones that will drive the gympie gympie to extinction
Yes that plant may well be the one thing stopping Australia from being overrun by venomous spider-wasp-scorpion-bears, but that is a fate far preferable to continuing to share a planet with the gympie gympie
No, we might need it for when we’re attacked by aliens
Even better – it continues to shed the hairs even after it’s dead.
OMG everyone I know the ACTUAL story behind the gif this time!
Yes, it’s in Australia– that’s a big angry goanna that wandered into a popular restaurant. All the Australians in the vicinity went OH FUCK NO and cleared off, because goannas are mean.
The waitress you see there is a French exchange student, who was quoted as saying something to the effect of “I thought it was a weird ugly dog” and had no idea it was a reptile that wanted to rip her arms off. She’s been hailed as a hero who saved diners.
This is a long running joke on the internet and honestly our wildlife would benefit from being left alone more. We do have more poisonous things than just about everywhere else, in basically every biome, and our wildlife is generally either gnarly and dangerous to handle, or actively harmed by human interference.
I think the internet can handle one of its longest running jokes and if they can’t and chose to avoid Australian native animals because of it, the animals will be no worse off.
If you would like to discuss this further, you are welcome to. Off Anon.
@fearthekeira we’re getting you out of Australia, mom
LMFAOOOOO oh come on, Australia is fucking awesome!! And all of these things are parts that make it so awesome!
Hey. If it makes you feel better, I’ve survived 25 years down here. And even more than that, I’m like 4th or 5th generation Aussie! Which means my ancestors are tough as shit too!! So if my family can do it, you can too! 😀
lol… I’m pretty sure the only non-deadly thing here is the Sugar Glider…
nawwww look at it!
…plus, we gave the world Chris Hemsworth… you’re welcome!
i demand to know why that spider is not called something like facehuggerius scaretheshitoutofyous
Which one? The one that leaps off the wall – that one is pretty big – probably a bird-eating spider…
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