Koalas: cute, cuddly and ready to pounce (this one’s dreaming of ways to kill you). Photo: Arnaud Martinez.
What makes us unique, exciting and beautiful also, it seems, makes us very scary to the rest of the world – especially timid Europeans!
Recently I conducted a very unscientific study of a group of international folk I was working with to determine if they had ever visited Australia, and if not, why not.
General consensus was that during COVID, Australia slipped off the radar of the international tourist. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind, most agreed. Everyone knew about Fortress Australia, so people looked elsewhere for their holiday plans. They found places closer to home.
Most people thought costs were also prohibitive. Too much to get to Australia, too much to get around within Australia, and too much to pay for food, accommodation and other essentials.
Others worried about bushfires and floods, given those stories had received a lot of prominence in recent years.
But the most common line I heard? Too many things in Australia that can kill you!
Yes, it seems our wonderful fauna, and even some of our flora, is scaring the bejingoes out of a lot of people around the world. Spiders, especially, seem to really strike fear into the hearts and minds of many.
You need to remember, Europeans, especially, come from a region of the world where walking and sleeping in the bush, leaving your shoes outside and sticking your hands into dark places is perfectly safe.
The list of Australian killers put forward to me as reasons to stay well away includes spiders, snakes, sharks, crocodiles, dingoes (yes, dingoes) and even emus. (To be fair, no one suggested emus could kill you; however, there was general agreement that they look quite threatening and could be particularly terrifying if they chase after you. It seems there is a clip or two on social media showing an emu chasing a human).
Some people had even heard there were berries and mushrooms in Australia that could make you very sick. I did proffer that these poisonous food items were not offered as menu options in any café or restaurant I knew about.
I argued that these things, which made Australia scary, also made us unique and were reason enough to visit. It was a tough sell. Someone had heard the song about a redback spider on a toilet seat, so their preference now was to view the wonders of Australia’s wildlife via nature documentaries.
I learned that some of the most popular clips and memes about Australia doing the rounds on social media centre around how scary it is. And while the antics of Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton rarely, if ever, make the local news bulletins, a media story about a fisherman being eaten by a crocodile, or a surfer being attacked by a shark, or a toddler stumbling across a King Brown in their back garden, definitely makes the international news. And goes viral!
I probably didn’t help. I told the story of how I pulled down the sun visor in my car and a huntsman fell onto my lap. And the time a dugite snake slid over my mum’s foot while she was standing at the oven at our family farm.
I was revelling in the moment, for once having captured the attention of an audience who didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Unfortunately, I probably confirmed in the minds of that same audience that Australia is just too dangerous, and it is much safer to stay on a continent where your biggest threat comes from a misguided Brussels bureaucrat.
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