warning; long post ahead...

OK, I know this is a bit slack but I was trawling through the wreckage of RADAR and found this piece. It was written two years ago but the cunt editors mangled it beyond recognition, so here is the original...

How often have you heard it said: ‘Australia is a big fucking country’.
Big and bad.
It’s invariably described as such by men who seem to know about these things. Men with deep, rich, impossibly sincere voices that make them sound both ancient and experienced enough to have witnessed the Earth’s formation first-hand. Men like John Laws and Sir Richard Attenborough.
They will inevitably drone on for an Ice Age about Australia’s history as the harshest, meanest, toughest, driest, most dangerous, most spectacular, most stupendously diverse motherfucker of a continent that ever poked its nose above sea level.
It has deserts the size of China, ice-shelves bigger than North America (if you count our frozen property holdings in Antarctica), ancient wetlands vast enough in which to drown New Zealand (not a bad idea either…), rainforests of towering hardwood giants and supernatural Eucalypts and mighty rivers which carve their way from rugged inland mountain ranges created at the dawn of time, to the boundless and bountiful oceans that surround this largest of all the islands on Earth.
Mother Nature, we’re reminded has done a remarkable job in creating a raw, brutal, yet handsome landscape of which we can be truly proud…
But what the fuck kind of drugs was Mother on when she handed out the animals ??
Australia got absolutely screwed !!
OK, not necessarily to begin with and not necessarily across the board, but we eventually got stuck with the most boring, useless, harmless collection of decidedly non-deadly mammals in the world; Europe notwithstanding. Yes, they’re cute, cuddly, unique and superbly adapted to their respective environments – one or two of the monotremes can even lay eggs, the clever cunts - but as far as we humans are concerned, there isn’t a dangerous, snarling, razor-toothed beast amongst the lot.
Where are all our killer mammals ??
According to an SMH article, ‘killer mammals have been rare on all the continents, with only 45 big kinds existing on the planet during the past 65,000 years’. OK, fair enough, they were quite scarce, but we haven’t got ANY of these murderous fur-balls around anymore.
Not one !!!
Apparently we used to…
Apparently, ‘the carnivores that called Australia home millennia ago included six species of killer kangaroo (oooh… how terrifying), 13 kinds of Thylacine (sounds like a type of hand-cream) and eight species of marsupial ‘lions’ (the apostrophes apparently necessary so that these mysterious, extinct beasts are not confused with actual lions). Even historically, our mammals were a pretty lame bunch, although they were plenty more ass-kicking than the present mob.
We have no big, savage cats around whatsoever. Today there are no living descendants of our marsupial ‘lions’, which were thought to have hunted fake antelope, quasi-zebra and the fabled miniature-hornless-pseudo-water-buffalo. When these prey were not available, marsupial ‘lions’ dined on tofu with sun-dried tomatoes, and a group of them were known as a gay pride.
We do have a large rat though; we call it a kangaroo. Whilst it can give a full grown man a nasty scratch which could conceivably get infected, there is little chance of one chasing down a victim, tearing its throat out with large, retractable claws, biting off its head and gnawing on the stump for a few hours.
And what of the bears ?? Did we get any Grizzlies, any Browns, any Blacks ?? Did we fuck; even our Antarctic land mass is a polar bear free zone. We couldn’t even manage a panda or two…
We did get a bunch of ferocious koalas though. These mighty hunters, during the two hours a day they manage to stay awake, may strike fear into the heart of the nation’s gum trees, but you are far more likely to be bored to death than gored to death if you ever came face to face with one in the forest
Wild dogs anyone ?? How about a Big Bad Wolf ?? Perhaps a hyena; laughing, serious or otherwise…
Nope, we got screwed again there. Our most famous wild dog was the Tasmanian Tiger, a mammal so ridiculously designed it actually went extinct voluntarily rather than live with its shame. The last known ‘Tassie Tiger’ is thought to have hung itself with a rope plaited from the hair of its own tail, whilst held in captivity in Launceston Zoo…
All we have left in the canine carnivore cupboard is the dingo, a lean, mean scavenging machine that specializes in plundering road-kill. I wouldn’t back fifty dingoes to last one round in the ring with an African Honey Badger .
We don’t even have any vegetarian behemoths capable of crushing a person to death by accident, like an elephant, rhino or hippopotamus; in fact our biggest danger probably comes from our giant, flightless birds, which have very nasty tempers. A flightless bird…good grief…could anything be more pointless ??
Perhaps a fish that can’t swim ??
Look, I know Australia leads the world in man-eating sharks; our sharks are first class, they excel. They are often the size of ocean liners and armed with teeth that can chew through concrete. We also have the most excellent crocodiles in the world, up in the far north of the country, most of which are capable of snapping a submarine in half with their jaws. There are some wonderfully toxic jellyfish around, however these lethal blobs of protein are rendered completely harmless when faced with a protective shield of panty-hose.
Actually, our aquatic/amphibious animals can be very proud of their ability to kill victims quickly, savagely or painfully, but we have a real problem with the specific lack of land-bound mammalian terror.
Snakes, spiders, scorpions; we have billions of the things. And it’s not that I don’t respect reptiles or insects as proper fauna, or doubt their capacity to drop a wombat at fifty paces, despite the fact that you can’t dent one of those fuckers with a stick of dynamite and a shovel.
It’s simply that if I had to be killed by an animal on land, I think I’d like to die with some semblance of dignity. There would be a certain degree of satisfaction, although an undeniably large amount of pain involved as well, in being dragged from my tent in the dead of night by a 1000kg mass of fur, claws and teeth, torn to shreds and devoured bone by bone.
There’s nothing classy at all about dying alone in your sleeping bag, the victim of a poisonous bite on your helmet…