I'm a member of a net forum called Quora. It's a place where people can ask questions and generally get them answered without all the crap that occurs on many other forums.
One of the most memorable questions I have seen on Quora was someone asking (paraphrasing) "How do people in Australia cope with all the dangerous animals and insects?" There's a strong perception that we are surrounded by lethal wildlife and to be fair, we have played up on that a bit... okay, a lot!
We really do have a large collection of harmful wildlife and are listed as the country with more species of venomous snakes than any other place in the world but it's no more dangerous than living in Africa.
Having said that, I have personally encountered venomous snakes many times and in cities, not simply out in the bushland. At my last workplace we had venomous snakes come into the building during breeding season, specifically Tiger Snakes and Dugites both of which can be lethal. The last one I saw was in 2013, it was a Dugite about 1.5 metres long (almost 5 foot) that decided to slither under one of the cars in the carpark and go to sleep. There was a decent stretch of undeveloped land on the left side of my former workplace, lots of tall grass, ideal place for animals to avoid people and thus a great place for those same animals to breed.
The company closed down in mid-2014 so whoever has that particular piece of real estate now will be having the normal Australian summer breeding season problem with snakes. We always knew when the snake numbers had increased because we'd see a lot fewer small animals (i.e. rabbits, bandicoots and so on) in that stretch of land.
One of the family cats was killed by a Brown Snake, another one of our venomous snakes that can prove dangerous to humans. And to be clear, I live in the suburbs, not on the outskirts of the city.
When I was still in the Army Reserve my unit was shadowed by some feral pigs one night (maybe not as large and ferocious as Razorback from the movie but still dangerous, as dangerous as alligators and crocodiles particularly as they are a lot more curious). In some areas, when on training, some NCOs are authorized to carry live ammunition to deal with feral pigs, water buffalo, feral camels, crocodiles and so on (depending on where in Australia they are training).
My father was in the Aussie Army and told me that when he was a junior officer (back in the 1960s), he had to co-write a report on a young soldier from his unit who had died as a result of a snake crawling into his sleeping bag when they were training out bush. Apparently he moved and disturbed the snake which bit him several times. He was dead before anyone knew what had happened and they only found out when they tried to remove him from his sleeping bag and the snake crawled out.
There's a good list on the Australian Geographic site of our top 30 most dangerous animals
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/ ... he-top-30/
A bigger threat in Australia is the environment. Many tourists do not appreciate how large the country is, how small the population is in relation to that and how bare of resources the land is (both natural and manmade resources).
For example, the city I live in, Perth, is the capital city of the state of Western Australia. Perth is just over 2000km (1240 miles) from the nearest capital city, Adelaide in the neighbouring state of South Australia. 2691km (1672 miles) if you stay on the roads.
And in all seriousness, you might travel through maybe 20 to 25 towns in all that distance.
Dark Conspiracy adventures in this part of the world are as much about surviving the environment as they are about surviving the ministrations of the Dark Ones.
Australia is almost as large as the United States in terms of landmass but has a population of 23 million (as of 2013). The US state of Texas has a larger population than Australia but in a landmass that is nearly 3.6 times
smaller than my home state of Western Australia. Western Australia has a population of around 2.6 million giving us a population density of about 1 person per square kilometre - so if you do go out into the "outback" make sure you are properly prepared. You can't walk to the nearest farm, road, river or railway like you can in Europe, the distances are too great.
If you do get into the shit in the outback, then to quote a song, "If you go out to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise." The lack of population means it could be days and sometimes weeks before you're found. You will be found... eventually. Whether you're still alive is a matter of how well prepared you were and whether you tried to play any games with the wildlife.
