Be careful of the snake in your bed, the spider in your mind, and the scorpion with the sting in its tail.

Fear is a powerful thing and I remember when I first learned that fear can actually, be manipulated. And it was a long time ago that I let fear rule my life. Unless it is fear of heights... but that is another story..... 

So let me tell you how it happened...

Wind the clock back. It was 1972 and I had inherited a small legacy, sufficient to buy a block of land or? 

A 50 cc motorbike and a trip to Australia. My goodness, how times have changed. That block of land would be out of my reach these days. 

After a great deal of deliberation, ( Not really! ) I decided on the latter.

Such is the wisdom of youth. The short term gain or a long term investment. Though, as it turned out, that decision changed my life. 

Prior to my departure from  New Zealand, I had been working in a hotel as a receptionist and many of our staff were young Australians doing a working holiday.

I was so excited - off across the Tasman Sea! At 17, it was the most exciting thing I had ever done.  

The young Australians learned of my forthcoming trip. They approached me, prior to my departure, with important safety tips:

" When you get to the hotel in Sydney, don't worry about the snake. 

Every hotel room in Australia has a snake in the room to eat the funnel web spiders ... "

And

" if you see a kangaroo, make sure you  stay well away - they can be almost as vicious as a koala bear.. " 

And I believed every single word.

By the time I arrived in Australia, I truly believed that I was traveling to ( literally ) an urban jungle where rampaging roos and cannibalistic koalas lived in every hotel room in Australia.

That is, assuming that the snakes and funnel-web spiders hadn't gotten there first.

Needless to say, I stripped my bed every night and thanked God that I had survived another night.

I was too full of fear to tell my parents that I was terrified. I knew that they would laugh and tell me that I was being teased..... and I did not want their ridicule. It was somehow easier to play along with the fear than to be told that I was being foolish. After all, what if they were wrong? And my Australian "  friends " were right? 

My mind often went to the block of land I had seen - in the New Zealand bush - where the most ferocious thing was a possum or a glow-worm. New Zealand does not have snakes and there is only one poisonous spider called the katipo and it lives in an isolated area of sand dunes and is very anti-social. I wondered if I had made the wrong choice? 

We finally left the horrors of Sydney and my parents and I traveled to the safety of Newcastle and the Hunter Valley where my Aunt and Uncle Bob lived.

I felt as if I had survived a Jumanji movie ( only it had not been filmed or imagined back then... but you get the idea ) and I settled back down to a thing called normality and commonsense.

Uncle Bob was larger than life. 

He was politically opinionated. I still have a photo of him with me and I cherish it. It is beside my desk as I type. 

He was so exciting and clever. He made me laugh. He made me THINK. He made me ENJOY myself.

He told me that my friends had " had a lend of me " and I had been "set up. "  In short, he removed my fear. 

And he said

" The problem is that people today believe anything that they are told because they are too frightened not to believe it. "

Over the next few weeks, he introduced me to the cheese and pineapple burger, the chocolate malted milkshake and the delights of the pub counter meal back in the 70's.

I learned about the magnificence of the steam powered engine;and the wonder of political debate. He took us to wineries in the Hunter Valley and I learned about the history of coal mining. I was introduced to normal Australians who laughed and told jokes and damned near piddled themselves when I told them of my experience in the Sydney hotel. 

There was not a mention of a snake, a spider or anything that could frighten me, I started to look at Australia in a different way: I started having fun.

I stopped being afraid. 

Years later, at a wedding reception, in 1984, we were out in the drinking and smoking area of the outcasts at a teetotal non smoking wedding. 

Uncle Bob , whisky in hand and cigarette in the other announced that he believed that the power of the masses could overwhelm the power of common sense and responsibility and it would be done through fear. 

I listened and thought to myself: he's wrong. No way could common sense be overridden by fear! I had forgotten about the snakes and the spiders in Sydney all those years before. 

He went on to say

" The world can only fall when the masses agree to their own destruction."

I have never forgotten that.

Well, here we are in 2024. Where people are terrified of damn near everything. 

There is no climate crisis - a simple fact for any of the greenie leftist luvvies who want to send us back to the stone age. 

People sign up to everything prefaced by the word Fear. Fear of bloody snakes in hotel rooms or drop bears is one thing - but this is out of hand. 

In fact, at the rate the world is going, we will no longer be able to use fire or the wheel because it will be " bad for the environment. ". Let alone eat a hamburger and swig down a milkshake or a vino or two. Unless we are of the " upper echelon. " 

Tough for us, as we sit around our campfires wondering why they don't work anymore. And the hotel beds are chockers with migrants sleeping soundly while Australians sleep in their cars or tents and worry about the real threat of the real snake that is in OUR bed. 

Over and over again, people recite the mantra that I thought died out when mental health care came in – “ The End of the World is Nigh “ spouted by a bedraggled homeless man who stood on a soap box or street corner, waving a placard and preaching his sermons of lunacy.

In those days, we could throw a coin in his pot and move on, feeling sad for his delusion but also grateful that he was standing on a street corner and not in Government.

Even I did not believe him back when I was sucked in and duped by some larrikin Aussies telling me to strip the bed every night in an inner city Sydney hotel. 

Only, these days, the bearded demented fool waving his placard of doom and destruction IS IN GOVERNMENT, encouraged and hailed by our newspapers and television stations – and listened to and worshipped by millions of devotees to the cult of climate change. 

I almost wish that someone would put a snake in a few beds.... this fear joke has ceased to be funny. 

My worry though is that I have become the man on the street corner. Warning that the end is nigh. 

But I don't have a beard and I am not deluded. 

I am fair dinkum. 

The End of the World IS Nigh. Unless we get the snakes out of our beds and our heads and our governments. 

Shaydee.