Is it really so dangerous to live in Australia? I have friends from there who I'm sure are trying to scare me when they talk about spiders and snakes, crocodiles and sharks etc etc etc and that I shouldn't come over because so many people aren't prepared and die.
But it doesn't seem to be in the news that all these naive tourists are dying over there so I think they're making it up!
It's not hugely dangerous - except to people who are Darwin Award candidates no matter where they go.
We do have venomous snakes - but most of them live in deserts and bushland; places that are largely uninhabited.
We certainly have venomous spiders (huntsman's don't fall into that category) and they certainly are dangerous, but it's hammered into kids from as early as preschool/kindergarten (so, age 3 or 4) that you DO NOT TOUCH the spider with the pretty red stripe! Because redbacks are common even in the inner city pretty much everyone knows to leave them alone, or spray them with the bug killer before you get rid of them.
Crocodiles only live up north, and it's always well signposted that they're known to be/have been sighted in the area. Idiots who climb onto the croc traps for 'pretty photos' deserve to lose the hand they are teasing a 12-foot killing machine with.
We also have blue-ringed octopi and box-jellyfish (the 'Squishy' in Nemo is a box-jellyfish) but every surf-lifesaver is trained in how to treat the stings.
Then there's the sharks, but they mostly ignore people.
Realistically, the most dangerous animals (to tourists who don't know better) are probably the kangaroos, because people think they're harmless, but the middle toenail on their back foot is about two to four inches long and usually fairly sharp - male kangaroos who are fighting over a female during mating season can disembowel each other with them, and every year or so a story surfaces about a tourist thinking it'll be funny to try and 'box' with a kangaroo, and getting sliced from neck to navel when the roo kicks them in self-defense.
When I put it like that (and these are just off the top of my head) Australia really does sound insanely dangerous! But then you also need to consider that the Australian continent is roughly the same size as the Continental US and we only have 20 million people living here; the large majority of the continent is uninhabited.