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@mariner4life that is brilliant and exactly what I was trying to avoid.
Many years ago I was a young kid getting over a knee injury spending 6 months living in Brisbane with the old man. He got me a job doing furniture removals to keep active etc and maybe help me sort my knee out(it did not...). One job we went to a retired surgeon's house. He had Parkinson's and had pretty much given up on life 10 years earlier. HIs once resort-like home was now a shit hole surrounded by overgrown, waist height grass and old bits of furniture he'd left scattered about his lawn.
We were told it was all going on the truck. I looked at all of this shit and thought it should all just be going in a skip. But orders were orders. The first thing I picked up was an ancient TV cabinet. Particleboard veneered shit. It disintegrated immediately. This went on for about an hour. We'd pick something up and it fell apart. The Dr actually had a go at one stage and told us to be more careful with his shit. But he was high on weed and whatever else so we were really just throwing his shit in the back of the truck and headed straight to the tip. We were halfway through when we got to some salvageable stuff. There was a 60s style record player in pretty good nick that one of the other guys picked up. As he did one of the biggest huntsmans I had seen to that point in time jumped out from behind the record player off the wall, flying just past his shoulder. He threw the record player across the room from the fright. The stereo was now fucked as well. We all had a massive laugh for about 20min and then got back into it. I chucked a smeg style 50s fridge on a hand truck and started to roll it out to the street. I was just going past the Dr's deck where he and his adult kids were smoking the reefer when the door of the fridge swung open - amateur mistake to have the door facing sidewards with the hinges against the hand truck - but when it swung open about 10 different sized huntsman came out of this thing. one immediately ran up my arm. I drop the fridge, screamed "fuck this" ripped my shirt off and started furiously rifling fingers through my hair and saying "get it off, get it off".
I walked. I was done. I went to the truck grabbed my lunch and wallet and called a cab.
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@raznomore I literally had no clue about huntsman when I moved to Sydney. Cleaned windows with my flatmate for a few months (now a helicopter pilot at white island incidentally), it was his company and he'd been there a couple of years so knew straya.
He finds a huntsman on one window so asks me to deal with it while he carries on.
Biggest spider I've ever seen, terrifying but I'd been assured not dangerous. The owner found me a bowl large enough to just fit it and I chased it around the window frame for a minute or two before catching it.
It was later that day I learn those fuckers can jump metres. Thank fuck that didn't happen, pretty sure I would've been on the first plane home.
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@mariner4life said in Straya!:
Fuck bats, stinky squeeky fruit raiding vermin.
You aren't allowed to handle them without having the required shots, so be happy you aren't dead Raz.
Approx 47 million of them used to roost in the city, creating entire no-go zones. When the council tried to move them on smelly hippies descended and tried to save them. Just shoot the fluffybunnies and be done with it (hippies or bats, I'm cool with either).
About 6pm in Cairns there is a shift change, where the cockatoos come back from the forest, and the bats head out. It's a pretty cool sight.
But also fuck cockatoos, noisy, drunk flying, destructive fucks.
Just on the bats again, the Hervey Bay colony is somewhat smaller but still huuuge. We don't get the shift change but the evening fly out is still massivy spectacular. The flapping noise of their wings is incredibly loud.
But don't get shat on. Bat shit is the stickiest horriblest gooeyest carpaint strippiest substance known on this earth.
Fuck bats.
Picture if you will one of your first nights in new accommodation in Brisbane. Quite a few drinks into the evening, you and another officer go outside for a cigarette. It's coming on dusk and you hear what sounds like a pterodactyl landing in the tree you're standing under. Squealing like big girls blouses you race inside, look at each other and start laughing at the spectacle it must have looked to a bystander. What it was was heaps of these little fuckers coming in for the night. They can grow to a kilo in weight each.
The sound of their wings as they took off sounded like they could carry a cow away with them.
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@antipodean I'm never closing my eyes again
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Huntsman.
We did a house and car swap with my Uncle when I was a kid. He's a Kiwi that lived in Aus, he wanted to show his kids around NZ, my folks wanted to see Straya.
We were all in the car about to leave somewhere near Canberra I think, and my father (the driver) went to wind (yes, wind) the window down, a spider the size of a dinner plate (well to me at the time) was on the door panel. Father screamed, flung open the door and refused to get back in. Mother, who it would be fair to say, wasn't easily flustered, and from a tough upbringing, grabbed a picnic blanket, and the hideous arachnid, and flung it out of the car - directly at my father. It hit him but didn't stick fortunately, as I would have been from a broken home.
3 kids under the age of 12, and 2 adults in a car for 8 hours. Not a fucking word was spoken.
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Huntsman.
We did a house and car swap with my Uncle when I was a kid. He's a Kiwi that lived in Aus, he wanted to show his kids around NZ, my folks wanted to see Straya.
We were all in the car about to leave somewhere near Canberra I think, and my father (the driver) went to wind (yes, wind) the window down, a spider the size of a dinner plate (well to me at the time) was on the door panel. Father screamed, flung open the door and refused to get back in. Mother, who it would be fair to say, wasn't easily flustered, and from a tough upbringing, grabbed a picnic blanket, and the hideous arachnid, and flung it out of the car - directly at my father. It hit him but didn't stick fortunately, as I would have been from a broken home.
3 kids under the age of 12, and 2 adults in a car for 8 hours. Not a fucking word was spoken.
yeah, my uncle was on a motorway doing 110 when one walked out from behind the sunshade...
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I didn't realise huntsmen could leap so far either although its common sense when you look at how fucking big they are.
Rented a place in Noosa Opened the sun umbrella on the deck and one of the ugly feckers leapt straight at my face.
Helluva fright I can tell you although I didn't scream like a little girl I too did the end of the broom at arms length thing and pushed it off the deck into the undergrowth.
Next morning I pulled a pair of shorts on and a fucking enormous Queensland cockroach ran up my groin. I screamed that time. Dirty fluffybunnies roaches.
Place I lived in Netherlands had a small colony of bats (15ish) in the roof. Was cool watching them fly out of a winters night across the snow. So yes from an early age I did, indeed, have bats in the attic.
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@mariner4life said in Straya!:
Huntsman.
We did a house and car swap with my Uncle when I was a kid. He's a Kiwi that lived in Aus, he wanted to show his kids around NZ, my folks wanted to see Straya.
We were all in the car about to leave somewhere near Canberra I think, and my father (the driver) went to wind (yes, wind) the window down, a spider the size of a dinner plate (well to me at the time) was on the door panel. Father screamed, flung open the door and refused to get back in. Mother, who it would be fair to say, wasn't easily flustered, and from a tough upbringing, grabbed a picnic blanket, and the hideous arachnid, and flung it out of the car - directly at my father. It hit him but didn't stick fortunately, as I would have been from a broken home.
3 kids under the age of 12, and 2 adults in a car for 8 hours. Not a fucking word was spoken.
yeah, my uncle was on a motorway doing 110 when one walked out from behind the sunshade...
That happened to me once just as I'd got the motorbike up to 70mph, one walked across my eyeline on the INSIDE of my helmet visor. Admittedly not huntsman-sized, but quite intimate and close up for first thing in the morning. I somehow had the self control to calmly pull over, remove gloves and helmet, and brush the thing to the roadside. Rather than flail like a maniac. Fuck spiders.
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Lots of talk about spiders, snakes and crocs, but no mention of the one thing that makes living in Australia almost unbearable. The fucking shopping trolleys. What cnut would design a shopping trolley with four wheels that swivel? Makes the trolley next to impossible to control, and if it wasn't for Mrs Crazy Horse being in charge of the fucking things when we go shopping, I would have ditched this country long ago.
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@Crazy-Horse said in Straya!:
Lots of talk about spiders, snakes and crocs, but no mention of the one thing that makes living in Australia almost unbearable. The fucking shopping trolleys. What cnut would design a shopping trolley with four wheels that swivel? Makes the trolley next to impossible to control, and if it wasn't for Mrs Crazy Horse being in charge of the fucking things when we go shopping, I would have ditched this country long ago.
And I always get the one fucking trolley that wants to go the opposite direction than I do. Fuckers
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All good observations from the lucky country but the glaring stain on the great republic of Australia is something absolutely hideous that I first noticed in 1988....
Some of them call their daughters "Peta"!
Yes, as in Peta Williams, Peta Snell, Peta plumbly walker etc
Give me a thousand huntsmen and a troop of chlamydia riddled koalas anyday over asking to see "Peter" and having a chick show up!
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Cane toads in Queensland... I might be a socialist* who sees some value in keeping the native fauna around, but fuck them.
*Not really.
I don't think they are native , they were bought over to keep down some sort of bug in the sugar cane but they don't jump high enough to get the bugs at the top of the cane.
Nuke the fluffybunnies from orbit , its the only way to be sure.
A mate told me when you run them over it sounds like a tire blowout, any truth to this?
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All good observations from the lucky country but the glaring stain on the great republic of Australia is something absolutely hideous that I first noticed in 1988....
Some of them call their daughters "Peta"!
Yes, as in Peta Williams, Peta Snell, Peta plumbly walker etc
Give me a thousand huntsmen and a troop of chlamydia riddled koalas anyday over asking to see "Peter" and having a chick show up!
Yeah sure mate, you'd complain if Peta Wilson showed up
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Cane toads in Queensland... I might be a socialist* who sees some value in keeping the native fauna around, but fuck them.
*Not really.
I don't think they are native , they were bought over to keep down some sort of bug in the sugar cane but they don't jump high enough to get the bugs at the top of the cane.
Nuke the fluffybunnies from orbit , its the only way to be sure.
A mate told me when you run them over it sounds like a tire blowout, any truth to this?
Not sure, it's been decades since the last time I saw them in person.
You're correct on their (not) native status - that's another reason not to care about their survival in Australia...
Straya!