Austrailia Wants To Kill You

Australian wildlife has two commonalities: everything is either deadly, or sleeping. In the guidebook I perused on the quick plane ride over, I noted the many references to deadly snakes, spiders and jelly fish. There’s even something called a “drop bear,” which sounds horrifying.

Australians live in their vicious wonderland with unnerving nonchalance. When my girlfriend toured me around her family’s backyard, she would occasionally note deadly animals in the same off-hand tone of voice she uses to described lawn ornaments or curtains.

“That’s a funnel spider,” she’d say, gesturing to what appears to be an eight-legged squirrel gently bobbing on a fishnet with glowing red eyes. (Poisonous.) “If you go down to the river, best to walk slowly and loudly, what with all of the poisonous tiger snakes.”

It’s a continent specifically designed to kill human beings. Or possibly everything. Most snakes, spiders and sea monsters endowed with venom carry neurotoxins capable of dropping oxen in seconds. This is perplexing, as no creature of such size exists here. Evolution somehow equipped all Australian critters to exist in a constant state of Mutually Assured Destruction with one another.It’s all quite sneaky, too. Where I’m from all the animals that kill you are honest, carnivorous creatures that hide in caves and come out to devour your family. You just make friends with a guy who has a bum leg and figure the bear or wolf or velociraptor will eat him first.

If an animal isn’t bubbling poison all over the place in Australia like an unwatched boiling pot, it’s sleeping. In Australia “the lion layeth down with the lamb” because the both of them are too damn hot to chase each other around. You can poke most animals with a stick here without angering them, because the stick will melt like a big toosie roll anyway.

I recently toured the Caversham Wildlife Park, home to pouch-sporting creatures which appear to be force-fed sedatives by the staff, but are merely unable to rouse themselves in the continental oven which is Australia.

Koalas sleep eighteen hours a day, like college students. When they manage to rouse themselves for a half hour increment of consciousness, the eucalyptus leaves they consume are so bereft of nutritional value that they can do little more than blink in fuzzy incomprehension, nibble some leaves and wander over to Introduction to Anthropology.

Despite being the nacroleptics of the marsupial world, koalas have scant predators in the wild. As they spend most of their time napping or pooping in gum trees, they are safe from predators on the ground, as Australian animals are too lazy to construct ladders.I’m still not entirely clear on what wombats are or do. On first glance wombats look like tree pigs who are overwhelmingly satisfied with themselves. They are furry, pudgy creatures which, like all marsupials, are constantly slipping into adorable heat strokes.

Eventually I struck up a conversation with a park ranger when they noticed me trying to steal some kind of hopping fuzzy kangaroo creature. Wombats are not “tree pigs,” as I originally assumed, but some kind of megafauna mole. They live underground, and burrow, which means there must be Bugs Bunny-style tunnels all over Australia to accommodate their robust girth. Though I’m told these roley-poley creatures are actually all muscle.

It was my first time petting a kangaroo. I wound up petting a dozen or so. Caversham has kangaroo petting areas, where the animals hop around until the oppressive heat compels them to flop over and pray for death. When they reach a catatonic state you can pretty well do whatever you’d like with them. Pet them, curl your fingers around their paws, whatever.

If I’d had the presence of mind I would have brought tiny costumes and dressed the kangaroos up like people, as the animals lay powerless in their catatonic states.