“His shorts were down by his ankles, but mate, ya know, when ya gotta go, ya gotta go. I told him, I says, Mike, there are crocs in those waters, you better watch out. But no, he knows better. He always did. Such a smartarse. I’m telling him these salties have jaws like sharks.”

Colin’s lounge was a museum of maritime memorabilia, a place where the bookshelves displayed the evil open mouths of dessicated sharks, the rib of a dugong, rusting pirate hooks and the poor flattened skin of a mink which he was using as a drinks coaster.s

"You’ve just gotta understand where a shark is coming from,
he said, cracking open another tin. “And I don’t mean east or west. These guys only attack if they know they stand a chance – if he thinks you’re too big, he’ll leave you alone. “Just look here," he’d said, picking up one of the toothy treasures, running his fingers lovingly over the rows of fortified calcium that could tear a man to shreds in less time than he could shout SHARK!

“What you gotta do is make yourself look much larger than you really are."

Colin was a charter fisherman by profession, so he should know what he was talking about. There were piles of shark related magazines, fishing almanacs with images of glazed-eyed fishermen staggering under the weight of their trophies. Blood and guts spilled on decks and feet. I assured him that confronted with my inevitable death, I wasn’t about to stick around to find out if my bark was bigger than the shark’s bite.

"Yeah. Mike. Well, there he was, doing what he had to do, when suddenly there was this incredible rush of water and Mike leaps up and screams, not even pulling up his Daks, and the boat almost capsizes as this bloody great saltie leaps out the water and almost bites off Mike’s backside. Talk about blood and guts."

He paused to let this incredible scene sink in, about as deeply as the
teeth of the fifteen footer. Then he laughed. "Poor bloke has to lie on his stomach for three months ….that’s what we call scared shitless."

In any other place in the world, this story would be ranked alongside the
Improbable Jonah and his Whale and Gulliver’s Travels.

But we were in Western Australia, close to where the first Dutch explorer
accidentally found Terra Australis in the seventeenth century. Had he not turned sail and fled back to Batavia when he saw what an inhospitable land it was, he would have spent a good deal of his time scurvy riddled and trembling with fear.

For this is a strange, red country, where evil looking lizards dress in
frilled collars that Mozart would kill for, dolphins cruise into shore to check out the latest human visitors, kangaroos stop traffic in their tracks and puff adders play hide and seek in sleeping bags. It is here that one dares not run out of petrol or water, that it makes more sense to have a jack than a jill and not having a footy team to barrack for is unwise.

In the heat of noon that same day, we’d talked to an environmental officer working on a conservation project to remove – by baiting and poisoning – the foxes, rabbits and feral cats that were wrecking the area so that the bandicoots, echidnas and other indigenous creatures would eventually return to their natural habitat, and the land would resort to what it was three hundred years ago.

Outside, a fat coastal sun had long since slunk behind the sea and we decided we’d escape Colin’s teeth rattling tales to seek out another of Australia’s oddities – the great Australian pub.

The wide, deserted bitumen street carved its way alongside the beach, lit at long intervals by weak streetlamps. We could see through large windows into the beach houses where the occupants watched television, stubbies perched on fat bellies, bare feet on cane coffee tables. A couple of yachts were moored on the lagoon still water, but otherwise the place was deadly quiet.

We walked between the streetlights, watching our shadows overtake us, into the dark.

From nowhere, a hissing, screeching, ball of flying fur came out of the dark, flung itself against my legs and spat.

I screamed. It cackled, hissed and spat again. I screamed again.

It cared not that I was twenty times its size. It paid no heed to the fact that it couldn’t possibly swallow me. It ran circles around me, this wild orange cackling fur-ball, claws extended, swelled to three times its normal size as if it had been plugged into an electrical socket, and attacked my foot.

My husband, my protector, Tony – the man I’d spent a quarter of my life with, screamed from under the light of a lamppost to where he’d retreated in his panic to escape the thing.

"Big! Big!” he shrieked, remembering Colin’s advice, and retreating further into the shadows. “Make yourself big!"

I whipped off my coat and flapped it like a matador in the maniacal yellow
eyes of my tormentor, but it was less scared than a two ton bull.

Seeing his beloved fighting for her life with an electrified fur-ball, Tony did what all chivalrous men do: he burst out laughing, and in so doing, dipped accidentally back into the shadows.

The monster let go of me, and lunged at his kneecaps, and my big, beefy hero, my saviour, screamed again, and his balletic acrobatics flung the creature from his leg.

"Light! Light!” He yelled to me. “Get into the light!"

We sprinted to the next streetlight, with the hissing thing lunging at our ankles, wondering about community spirit, neighbourliness, the residents watching us through the windows. Were they all deaf, dead, disinterested? Here we were, visitors to their town, drenched in the cold sweat of adrenalin, terrified by this alien orange fur ball, and everyone just went on watching television.

The thing retreated to a sandy hollow in the shadows, and licked its paws.
Its fur flattened and I swear I heard it laughing.

With the theme from Jaws playing in my head, the thing struck again. Bouncing around as if it was on a pogo stick, it bared its orange teeth and hissed and growled and cackled, tearing strips off my jeans. I flung my foot out and in the protracted second that the thing became airborne, we ran to the next light.

The thing retreated to the shadows. It paused just long enough for us
to begin breathing again before it lunged for Tony’s beard, claws bared, and we could almost smell its fishy breath. It screeched. We screamed. It spat. We screamed.

The residents turned up the volume on their tv’s.

We battered on the nearest door. It was opened by a man wearing a singlet, track pants and slippers.

"Help! We’ve been attacked!" we gasped. "On the way to the pub. This thing came
for us ..orange … fur .. teeth .. help!!"

"Um." He replied. "The pub’s up the road. Just past the next streetlight." Then he closed the door.

We ran past two people who’d been having a nocturnal beach stroll. She was
holding the arm of a man wearing one thong and an overcoat.

"Going for a walk?" We smiled through gritted teeth.

"Um." she answered.

"Careful!" we volunteered. "There’s a wild creature down there in the shadows. Big. Dangerous. Mad. It attacked us, tore our clothes!"

"Um." she nodded, and pulling her man’s arm, steered him away from us, whispering, “They must have just come from the pub.”

Inside the neon lit pub, half the town was watching reruns of Darryl Summers on
television.

A buxom waitress took our order of steak and chips. "There’s a wild animal out there!" we tried to tell her. She stopped writing and looked at us. "It lunged at us from the shadows, it was huge, at least this big, it had yellow fangs and it spat and …" She raised one eyebrow, said, “Um…” scratched off the wine from our order and scuttled to the kitchen.

Back home with our host, we were almost as wild eyed as our attacker. "You should have seen it, mate,” we jabbered to Colin. “It’s jaws were larger than that shark’s, it’s teeth like a tiger, it’s fur as orange as an orangutan – it followed us all over town, tore our legs to pieces, I think we’re going to get blood poisoning … have to lie on our stomachs for weeks …"

"Um!" he said, putting the kettle on, and leading us gently to our room.

We sailed with him for two days, chasing dugongs in a land before time, watching sharks feeding on sardines. We did not mention the thing.

At the airport, a kiosk with a grass roof, we recognised the conservation man, heading back to the big city, job done.

"You’ll never believe what happened to us!" we began, and he looked up from his Daily Blah. "You think your poison worked? Hah! You missed the biggest of the lot. He was this big, almost the size of a croc, he had rows of teeth, he growled, he ripped our clothes, he stank like a demon, he followed us into the pub, we had to call the fire department and when they sprayed water on him he multiplied so we had to call in Ghost Busters and …"

“Um,” he said, and moved to another seat.

On the plane, Tony sat next to a woman knitting. "What a place!" he volunteered. "It’s filled with wild animals. They line the roads, poisonous teeth bared, talons sharpened. They swell to ten times their size. They attack innocents and children, left right and centre. They spit, they …”

Her needles stopped clicking. "Was this on Tribulation Drive? Half way down, in the shadows just before the third streetlight?"

"Um.” Said Tony doubtfully. “So you’ve heard about our attack?"

“No,” laughed the woman. “Not yours, anyway.”

"Not ours?" Tony was incredulous. "You mean there’ve been others and that bastard is still alive?"