I've lived in reasonably rural areas (you know, with primary schools that have 30 students enrolled overall), as well as more populated places in Australia. Ultimately, my experience is that if you live in even somewhat populated areas, you will run into very little of this nature.
It does also depend on your house, if it is insulated/built properly, which keeps bugs from crawling in at every orifice. If you're living in a caravan... well, let's just say I once stayed in a caravan in the same fairly populated yet still rural area that I live, and we had THREE giant spiders in the room with us later at night. None of us slept until they were gone. (We had no idea what breed they were, but they could have easily been harmless huntsmans.)
Really, if you're an American or to a lesser extent British, you might freak out in rural areas here because in Australia "rural" can mean anything from "no one else lives close for 40 kilometres, and that's just a gas station" to a population of 20,000. The former, which Americans for the most part would not have experienced at all thanks to heavy urbanisation in their country, would be scary for other reasons (I've seen people scared about not having a supermarket nearby, and I tell you what, they get rare in some places. And video game stores? If you need them, stay away from central Australia... except Alice Springs.) That makes you twice as paranoid about bugs, but that's not often a justified approach.
Anyway, the risks in living here where any of the people are (mostly on the East Coast) are really low. Yes, a spider that eats birds. You know what? It'd have some difficulty with a human. That's not just a typically Australian blasé attitude speaking, but a serious fact. People freak out too much about spiders, and often they're not even a breed you SHOULD be careful with (by the way, freaking out is the worst way to BE careful). Poisonous ones like the funnel web (look it up, or read the thread), now they're a more pertinent issue. Unless you're a bird.
Even more pertinent than spiders or other fauna, though: the road. Seriously, some of our highways are atrocious. Not because they're half-repaired or anything, we're rich enough as a country to keep them fixed and everything. But the planning is terrible, people die over and over on the same well-known spots because there's blind angles and turnoffs all the time.
Rolling Thunder said:
AWC Viper said:
Africa is only dangerous because of the militia other than that it's less dangerous than Oz
You have clearly never been charged by an elephant, sir.
Or more harmfully, the rhinoceros. Which kills far more people than just about anything else in Africa, by memory.
Either way the rule in Australia is the bigger the better. Smaller they are the more deadly they are.
