PhotoHunt Take Two: Red Means Danger

There’s two danger stories I clearly remember from my childhood. Both of them are associated with red, in a way. I came across both on the same day a week ago, and had the opportunity to photograph them.

The first… I was four years old and we were visiting a friend of my parents’ in Sydney. They had a kind of basement area that we got to stay in, so it was dark and dingy and a little scary. On their fridge was a spider identification and warning poster. My sister and I were told very firmly to watch out for the Sydney Funnelweb, and were shown what it looked like on the poster. That’s not what caught my attention. All the spider drawings on the poster were black, except for the last one. It had a slash of red down the abdomen - the Redback spider of tacky Aussie bush song fame. According to the song, it likes toilet seats.

Somehow I associated the fear of being told to avoid the Funnelweb no matter what with the Redback instead. That fascinating and awful red stripe caught my fear and held it.

They still strike fear into me. Any other spider? It can meet a simple death with a flip of the shoe. Not a problem. The Redback? That fear and morbid fascination cause me to stare in horror and freeze.

We had a batch of local pumpkins delivered to the veggie shop I work in a while back. They were infested with Redbacks and I didn’t know about it. I busily gathered a bunch of these pumpkins in my arms and hauled them into the prep room to cut into wedges for the shop display. Only when I raised the knife to punch through the first one did I discover a happy little family of Redbacks gathered around the stem end. Oh shit.

Yes. My workmate at the time discovered that I have a terrifying weakness. The man thought he’d have some fun and get one of these spiders on the end of a knife, pointing it at me. I was backed into a corner and shaking with a mixture of terror and anger, yelling at him to get it away from me.

The second… Red-bellied Black snakes. My family lived on a river, in a somewhat rural setting. There were tall reeds on the riverbank, and plenty of tall grass in the paddock next to the house. Snakes were a given.

The house was a big old one with a wide verandah that went all the way around to near my bedroom. My sister had built a “cubby-house” right outside my bedroom window, which consisted of some sort of frame, and blankets – from what I can remember. One day she was playing out there with her friends when I heard a scream. I was outside, too, and I knew what that scream meant.

Snake!

There was a Red-bellied Black snake in the cubby-house. Right outside my bedroom window.

We all bailed, in a hilarious manoeuvre (hilarious with the benefit of hindsight, of course), to an island of hope. The septic tank.

After that I had trouble with the idea of sleeping, just in case something came into my bed to snuggle up with me. I settled with having the bedding tucked right up to my chin, with all limbs within the covers at all times. A little Vic cocoon. I still worried about my head, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

Another Red-bellied Black incident I had was on the riverbank itself at the family home. We had goats tethered about the place as part of some inventive laziness scheme of my father’s never to have to mow the lawns again. He was good at inventive laziness. The ideas he had were brilliant in principle, but execution was always a different matter. The goats had to be tethered because there wasn’t proper fencing. They got a star picket hammered into the ground with a rope on it, giving them a radius to eat everything within. So instead of mown lawns, we got crop circles. Of course, in the parental tradition of child labour, we were contracted into making sure that the animals had food and water daily.

I was pretty young. I had - hold back the laughter - pink gumboots on. Not bright happy playful pink, but dusty prissy boring pink, with white soles. I was standing down on the lower part of the riverbank with a bucket in my hand, feeding one of the goats when a snake came out of the reeds. I think it was a combination of good teaching and fear reaction that caused me to freeze on the spot. The good teaching said you know what to do when you see a snake? Don’t move! I can hear my father’s voice saying it to me even now. The fear reaction? I think part of the reason I froze was also a bit of a deer in the headlights situation. I just stared and went into lockdown.

So I stood there, watching with horror and morbid fascination as a Red-bellied Black slithered out of the reeds, and directly over the tips of my little pink gumboots.