A good 30 percent of all insects are entirely unknown, while for spiders the number is closer to 80 percent!īryson first came to truly appreciate Australia’s history and vastness while traversing it by train.Bill Bryson follows his Appalachian amble, A Walk in the Woods, with the story of his exploits in Australia, where A-bombs go off unnoticed, prime ministers disappear into the surf, and cheery citizens coexist with the world's deadliest creatures: toxic caterpillars, aggressive seashells, crocodiles, sharks, snakes, and the deadliest of them all, the dreaded box jellyfish. It’s estimated there could be around 100,000 species of insects, but the true number could be double that. Around 80 percent of all animal and plant life is native to the continent, and given that it’s such a hostile, hot and flat environment, there’s a stunning abundance of it.īut the country’s vastness makes an exact headcount difficult. There are hundreds of other fascinating stories waiting to be discovered in Australia, and that alone makes it worth exploring. That’s a pretty good snapshot of the kind of place Australia is – a country so vast that covert nuclear bomb tests can go unnoticed for years! How did the world respond to this shocking news? The New York Times ran just one story, in 1997, four years after the actual event. Apparently, its aim of putting an end to the world included secret bomb tests in the desert! More disturbingly still, the group was known to have nuclear engineers among its members. When the authorities investigated, they found a sophisticated laboratory and evidence that members of the group had been mining uranium. Subsequent investigations turned up a massive 500,000-acre property owned by the group near the site of the previously unexplained seismic activity. Later, in 1995, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult achieved notoriety after killing 12 commuters in a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway. In the end, the tremors were chalked up as an unsolvable mystery. It couldn’t have been a meteorite strike as there wasn’t a crater, and the activity was too intense to be blamed on a mining accident. An earthquake was ruled out, which left a couple of possibilities. The disturbances took place in the Great Victoria Desert. Take the seismic activity that baffled experts in 1993.
Even the most bizarre events there barely make international news. It’s a massive country that leaves a comparatively small footprint in the global consciousness. What do you really know about Australia? If you’re not from “down under,” probably not a lot.
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