Christchurch was my home not four months ago. And recently it has been a world news headline once again, with a mass shooting taking place in the CBD. It's devastating to see such violence and hatred within the city where I was born.

There's been plenty said on the matter, and there will be plenty more said. So I shall keep the things that are on my mind very brief.

I love Australia, and I love New Zealand. They are both my countries. As a dual citizen who has had many happy memories in both countries, I can say that with perfect conviction. So I'm properly grieved that this happened in New Zealand and that it was an Australian who perpetrated the attack. There's been a great deal of insistence that "this isn't New Zealand" and "this isn't Christchurch". I would also like to say that this isn't Australia. And fourthly, despite whatever Tarrant might have said in his manifesto, this is not Christianity. Perhaps Tarrant had some links to Christianity. He certainly made a great many excuses to justify his actions.
But this is not the face of Christianity. First and foremostly, true Christianity is not a white supremacist thing. It's a walk of life that spans all nationalities over the world. But if you want to be picky, it began in the Middle East, where Jesus Christ associated with the Samaritans, the tax collectors, and the "sinners" of his day - people whom the religious leaders despised. And then He gave His life for them and many others, before being resurrected and striking death its final blow. Christianity is about compassion, generosity, grace, and new life. True Christianity has ministered and always will minister to the vulnerable.
As I write this, I know that there will be Christian brother and sisters of mine, over in China or Pakistan or other countries overseas that will be suffering intense persecution. My husband and I support a missionary group in Pakistan, and we frequently hear of Christians there who have been abused, tortured, and even killed because of what they believe. So Christians know what it is to be persecuted. And I hope that true Christians will stand by Christchurch and the Muslim victims of this attack in this time, because of that knowledge. True Christians should empathize and be compassionate.
One thing that I've seen is a lot of people encouraging others in New Zealand to wear Muslim head scarves, to show their solidarity with Muslims in this time. I personally feel that perhaps this isn't the most helpful thing we could be doing right now. If a gunman had walked into my church and shot dead a group of Christians, I should feel uncomfortable if the government or another group requested that everyone wear a cross in solidarity, or that everyone get a T-shirt that says "Jesus is the only way". The fact is, not all of us believe what Muslims do, just as not everyone believes what Christians profess. And the response to this catastrophic event should be respect for religious freedom, not necessarily requests that everyone should wear a head scarf. In the light of this, people should affirm each other's freedoms to seek out the truth for themselves and to think what they wish to think. This is a fundamental human right. Secondly, those who are able should help the victims in more practical ways than donning a head scarf. Making meals for those who have lost a loved one, for example. Walking with Muslim women who are too afraid to leave their houses after the attacks. Offering company to those of the Muslim community who need it. Offering rides to those who would prefer not to walk the streets of the CBD at this time. Writing cards expressing your sympathies and well wishes. Praying for the victims of the community (for this event has highlighted the importance of freedom to pray). But whatever anyone does, it should be a practical sign of love and compassion for others.
The resounding message should be that we are all human, no matter what we believe, no matter where we come from. And we ought to love each other and reaffirm each other's human rights.

Anyhow, these are the thoughts of a Kiwi in the Australian outback at this particular time. I shan't be wearing a head scarf on Friday, because I believe in freedom of belief for all - Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and all other religions alike. But each night, I remember Christchurch and all the Muslim victims of last Friday's shootings in my prayers. I particularly think of the family of Mucad Ibrahim, who was only three when he was cruelly shot. And I pray New Zealand will see better days as the horrible fresh pain of this event begins to subside.
God defend New Zealand.

It's been a while since my last installment on our Australian adventures. We are gradually getting used to life here and enjoying it very much. There are always new challenges, but also new joys. I don't think I'll ever get tired of watching bats fly against the orange sunset. It's an unusual and yet fascinating sight.

One thing that I have almost forgotten with the ordinary and enjoyable day to day life here are the many adventures and complications that brought us here. What I mean, of course, is that immigrating isn't an easy thing. We seem to have fallen on our feet on the other end. Good jobs, wonderful people, a great church, a good community. It's not everyone's experience.

The journey here wasn't quite as smooth and was filled with a huge sense of risk. For a start, being a New Zealander immigrating to Australia is a somewhat risky thing. There are many New Zealanders going back to the land of the long white cloud because they have run out of money. In simple words, they lost their jobs or never got one after immigrating, and the government here will not support any New Zealanders on Newstart. Unless they've been unemployed for years. Then to the best of my knowledge, they give you Newstart for perhaps six weeks. And after that, you're on your own again. So both of us giving up very decent jobs in New Zealand to immigrate to a place on a set schedule without knowing whether we would have jobs by the time our flights came around was pretty daunting.
It was made less daunting by the fact that I am an Australian citizen, though. If either of us run into financial hardship, our income should drop below the threshold enough for me to get a little help from the government. So that is good. But it would be just enough for one person to live on. Better than nothing, but not necessarily everything needed in a tough time.
Once upon a time, New Zealanders flocked to Australia in hordes. It was a land of better pay and opportunities for many. New Zealanders even used to be allowed to collect the dole here in Australia, well over a decade ago. Then the Australian government changed the rules. They allowed New Zealanders to keep living here indefinitely. But they cut most of them out of opportunities for citizenship. So many tax paying New Zealanders here cannot vote and cannot get income support while they are jobless. They are entitled to Medicare cards, but apparently (I've not ascertained how true all this is yet, but it's something I've heard) Australians still get more perks. Some New Zealanders insist they've been denied some healthcare subsidies that other medicare card holders have gotten. Who knows? Time will tell for us. It's still a privilege to be allowed to live here.
We were advised quite strongly by a few people not to go, and I certainly did take that to heart. I never do something without worrying about it ten times first. But at the end of the day, both of us felt the urge for a big change. We made a decision that we hope will benefit us and possibly any children we have (who will be allowed dual citizenship because of me). 
The first step on our journey was to check what sort of teaching job my husband could get. As I'm self-employed, I need to build up my income over time. Not all Australian states accept New Zealand qualified teachers indiscriminately. For some of the states, you have to do a whole lot of extra paperwork to get in. So that narrowed down our choices.
Originally, we looked at most of Australia - excepting Tasmania (too cold) and Northern Territory (too many crocs). Then we cut out the states that didn't offer mutual recognition for New Zealand teachers. That unfortunately knocked out New South Wales and Victoria. After that, it was a serious toss up between Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland. We had our sights set on Adelaide for a while. Then we wondered about Perth - less hay fever and warmer seas. At last, we settled on Queensland somewhat reluctantly. The jobs were better around Brisbane, with more plentiful opportunities. I was concerned about the humidity and the termites, which are sometimes worse in the North.
We looked specifically at Brisbane but also looked at towns scattered around about it, which was how we came up with Chinchilla. A job at the Christian College was being advertised. Chinchilla looked like a great place to live - comfortable, cozy, and outfitted with everything anyone needs for day to day life (except a maternity ward, but thankfully people here don't pop out a baby every other day). Michael's mutual recognition had come through by the time he applied for this job, and he had paid for Queensland Teachers' Registration. It was quite extraordinary to see this all come through in the mail. So he emailed a few recruiters and applied for the Chinchilla job. He was accepted for the Christian College here relatively quickly. It was extraordinary that by the end of August, he had a job to go to, and we knew we were going to be financially okay in a new country. The relief was immense. We had already committed to immigrating (he had resigned from his previous job), so it was good to know things were looking positive on the other side. Much later in the year, the recruiters got back to Michael and offered him a potential position in Townsville (which is probably still partially underwater currently) or Mount Isa (which is so remote it may as well be on another planet). Chinchilla is probably the place for us. Besides which, Townsville has crocodiles, and I'm not quite ready to go level up on my Australian challenge yet.
After Michael got the job, I was also offered work at the college teaching singing and piano. This meant a lot of paperwork for me. In Australia, everyone is required to pay for a blue card when working with children. It's like getting police vetted in New Zealand, but it's not free. It costs a decent amount every three years. So that was step number one. Then to get an ABN (Australian Business Number) and a TFN (Tax File Number) all so that I could get personal indemnities insurance. This is so that if I accidentally burn the school down, I'm covered for the damages. All this took quite a bit of time.
We visited Australia in September and stayed in Chinchilla for a few days. Unfortunately, one of our first introductions to living in the town was viewing rentals in the newer areas of Chinchilla. It's not all bad, but it is worth saying that some places were built pretty quickly during a mining boom, and it does show. I felt thoroughly depressed after viewing a couple of places.
I'm pleased to say our current rental (an older home) is a better fit for us. It's better built and more solid.

Before we visited Chinchilla in September last year, I had this not-so-bright idea. If we bought a car, we wouldn't need to pay for a rental. So we bought a car, literally over the phone. It's actually an excellent car, so we were pretty lucky. But the major issue came when we wanted to drive it away. I didn't have an Australian driver's license or address, so I had none of the vital identification documents to register as the car's official owner - and most of my New Zealand ID did not count. A friend let us park our car at her place for two months while we were back in New Zealand prior to moving, and I had luckily put her address on the insurance documents for the car (which were hopelessly difficult to get from NZ as few companies wish to insure a car when the owners are still living in another country for a few months). So with the digital copy of my insurance statement and my Australian citizenship certificate, we pulled through, after about an hour of waiting at a government agency. My writer friend Russell Proctor kindly drove us to the government agency and then also took us to town where we verified my bank account in Australia.  The Commonwealth Bank here allows you to set up from another country. But you still have to verify your account in the middle of a large city. However, it did mean we could transfer funds into our account before arriving, meaning we had money to spend.
Without good friends letting us park our car at their place or driving us around in Brisbane CBD, we would never have made it through.

After our return to New Zealand, we spent most of three months preparing to move and finishing up our work. We had originally chosen to leave our dog behind, but I wound up deciding I would miss her too much. The day before she traveled, we received an invoice for her flight, detailing a transit to Melbourne. That freaked me out, and I got on the phone really quickly.
"Oh, it was just a mistake," the pet transporter told me, rather casually. "I meant to write Brisbane."
Phew.
The good news about transporting a dog from New Zealand to Australia is that there is no quarantine for pets from New Zealand. The main reason for this, I suppose, is because New Zealand is so busy being clean and green. And it has way fewer pests than Australia overall. No poisonous spiders. No snakes. No termites. No biting ants. And so on. So we got to pick Peyton up the same day she traveled.

There was a time when I spent every available moment researching how New Zealanders immigrate to Australia. Now we're here. When I look back, it seems awfully hectic. But we're still here and settling into our beautiful new home in Queensland.

Well, it's been another week or so here in Queensland, and my love for this place continues to grow. The countryside is beautiful, and the town feels like home already.
The heat is pretty consistent. Last week on Wednesday, it was forty-two degrees. I survived the day, but my work printer - for music teaching - did not. Unfortunately, the studio that I normally teach in climbed to about forty-five degrees before I moved from the dining room to there and flicked on the air con to begin teaching. By this time, it was already too late for my printer. The fronts of the cartridges had melted within, and all the printer wanted to do was repeatedly groan and flash its version of hazard lights at me. So that was frustrating. This Wednesday, it's going to hit forty again, and I will be keeping my printer somewhere other than that studio.
​Over the past weekend, my fifth book released. I'm looking forward to when it arrives in the post and I get to hold it and put it on the shelf with my others. We've also put Rafen, book one, on sale for a dollar. So if you want a cheap read, it's there, and it's no more expensive than throwing a coin at a street musician.
Other things happened on the weekend too. It was Chinchilla's famous Melon Festival - their twenty-fifth anniversary too! Thankfully it was only thirty-four degrees outside, so it wasn't a bad day to walk through town and watch the parade. Numerous floats came down the packed streets - and I mean packed: it was like Brisbane CBD for a day. A lot of tourists came to see it. The floats were decorated with... you guessed it, melons. But they were also festooned with green, red, and pink decorations. People dressed up and had a ball. A whole fleet of vintage cars drove down the street. And hundreds of market stalls sold all kinds of things (not just melon-related either).
The day contained a number of events, some of which we glimpsed, and others of which we gave a miss because we had to drive to Dalby to get some help with our printer. You would be amazed how many things you can do with a watermelon. For instance, the Mad Dash for Cash - a race in which the competitors charge down the main street and back, clutching a large watermelon each. When we watched this, someone dropped their melon by mistake, and it smashed on the asphalt. They were sadly disqualified. There's also Melon Bungy...??? And Melon Skiing, which is famous. We got to watch the set up process for the Melon Ski. Helpers spread a long tarp down on the field and slosh huge buckets of overripe melon all over it. Sometimes someone just runs out of nowhere and hurls a water melon at the track, where it smashes and dies in a spray of red flesh. I managed to get a picture of the warning signs around the area. Notice the emphasis on "there will be injuries". Everyone falls over in this event. It's kind of to be expected when you stick your feet in watermelons and then get pulled top speed down a tarp with more deceased watermelons smeared all over it.
The night before the weekend, they also had the watermelon Weigh In. We didn't witness this competition, but I've heard the watermelon this year was the biggest ever: 100.5 kilograms. How you grow a watermelon that big, I shall never know. Steroids? And do you eat it afterwards? Or smash it on a tarp? Your guess is as good as mine.
Later in the afternoon, we headed an hour down the road to Dalby (a town of 15,000 people instead of the 6,000 we have here) and got some help at Harvey Norman. We probably had some ulterior motives for getting out of Chinchilla. Unfortunately, the water mains broke down partway through the morning that day, so the entire town was without water. Imagine 10,000 extra people all needing to go to the toilet when the water mains are broken down. Additionally, just washing your hands or getting a drink becomes a problem. I had luckily put some water in the fridge earlier in the day, so we had that when we came home for a bit. But other than that, it's a bit hard to know what to do when so much of your life requires water and there is none. So Dalby was a good option until the water came back.
The man at Harvey Norman removed our damaged cartridges from the printer, and now we're waiting on new ones. Excitingly, on the way there I saw a twister of red loam soil in a nearby field. These occur quite often in the dry conditions, apparently. I was mesmerized.
In the meantime, I've gained a few more music students and hopefully sold a few books over the weekend. Things are slowly coming together for us here - my husband's medicare card arrived and the woman who rang me from medicare finally believes I'm an Australian citizen (long story which I'll tell maybe next time). So my medicare card should be coming soon. And on the weekend, we relax at the Weir. We've found a branch of the waterway that the motorboats don't go down as much. There, the pelicans, cormorants, and kangaroos gather, and we enjoy a leisurely paddle, watching them.
Until next time!  

It's been nearly a month since we immigrated to Australia, and so far, we're settling in pretty well. I had my first day at school the other day, and I have plenty of private music students already. Up north, places like Townsville have been flooded out. Meanwhile, we still haven't had a drop of rain for weeks. The weather has cooled down though - only thirty-four or thirty-five. It's due to the clouds and a bit more breeze.

In the meantime, we've seen a few unusual things, which gave me moments of delight, wonder, or disgust each in their turn. One night I went out to toilet the dog, and a green tree frog had parked by the back door. I have to say, they are actually extremely cute. They're also extremely fast. It was being all photogenic until we actually tried to take a picture of it. Then it took off and went underneath the house. That was when I realised what that weird, rhythmic sound that I've heard so many mornings was. It's most probably a frog sitting beneath the house croaking.
That was a relief, because at the time I had thought it was our pipes imploding or something more sinister.

Every evening, hundreds of bats fly overhead - thousands even. The council has estimated that Chinchilla has between 10,000 to 15,000 local fruit bats. That clearly outnumbers the local people. The locals talk about taking a gun to them. I think it's because fruit bat poo burns away your car paint and causes general devastation. Also, apparently bats really stink. I haven't noticed it, but then I don't have much of a sense of smell.
I noticed that the bats always issued from the same direction every night, between seven and seven thirty. They fly remarkably silently. Any other bird that flies in a flock here is bound to announce its presence by screeching its lungs out. That's quite normal in Australia. Crows become the background music (ahem, cacophony) to your life. Bats are relatively quiet by comparison. They fascinated me.
Then one day when we were heading to the farmer's market, I glimpsed a bunch of trees over the creek with lots of large black teardrops clinging to them. Michael and I turned around the car and headed down the street toward the trees.
That's when we discovered where all the bats come from. You have to see it to believe it, but there were literally a thousand on one tree. Last year, the bat colony settled above Charlie's Creek in the middle of town. The council eventually got people to use spud guns and things to move them to a more "natural habitat" as they put it. They succeeding in getting the bats to move... across the road, which was where we found all of them.
The trees were so laden that the bats were rearranging themselves during the day. When they fly in direct sunlight, their wings are see-through. 

My weird wildlife sightings came to a climax with seeing my first snake at school on Monday. It was most probably a baby eastern brown, and it looked very frightened of all the children, slithering and twisting like crazy. I was leaving anyway, so I just went around the area where it was. It was good timing, because if I'd stayed any longer I probably would have been shut in the school for an additional ten minutes along with everyone else while the snake was being dealt with. 
I surprised myself by not really being that worried, even though the eastern brown is rated as the second most poisonous of all land snakes, and baby browns are often highly venomous.
All in a day's work in Australia, I suppose. I survived another day and returned home to eat chicken nuggets for tea.
In the meantime, it's ten/eleven days till my fifth book releases! So I'm looking forward to the excitement that that brings into my life as well.
Until next time!

Well, it's been Australia Day here recently. We didn't really know what to do on this particular festivity, so we just chilled at home for some of the day and then went to the Weir later. I thought the Weir would be less busy than the local swimming pool - which it probably was. Still, it felt like most of Chinchilla had showed up, chilling in Australian flag towels or shorts and eating water melon.
There's nothing like getting your body temperature down on a hot day though. We enjoyed the water and deliberately stayed on the side of the wharf that is farthest away from the jet skiers. That's what a lot of people do at the Weir - they take a boat into the water, hook someone up at the back of it and tow them around the Weir in rapid circles. They get around it in less than two minutes and create waves in otherwise calm waters, meaning the other half of the people who are there (who are most probably calmly bobbing around on blow up floaties) get thrown around a bit every so often. The jet skiing can be fun to watch but it is slightly stressful if you take a kayak out to the Weir, because you make significantly slower progress than a motorboat. So you've just managed to frantically paddle your kayak over to one bank to avoid the motorboat. Then it passes; you relax and kayak out into the middle of the causeway and breathe a sigh of relief. But right then, the painfully close rumble of the motorboat crescendos as your favourite waterway friend sweeps around the bend just behind you again. Cue frenzied paddling with the motorboat and the wildly swinging jet skier bearing down on you. And in the meantime, you're trying to prevent your dog from jumping ship and getting run over by said motorboat.
Nice.
We survived, but I have to admit, it's different than kayaking about the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, because you don't encounter the same motorboat twelve times in less than half an hour there. Next time I should just tie our blow-up kayak to the back of a jet skier's boat and go for a ride myself. It's probably easier being behind the thing.

In the meantime, Michael's been at work, getting used to a new school and new culture, and I started teaching singing again this past week. Year eight of music tuition, here we come. So far my students are representing Australian singing tolerably well. This week, many things are starting up again. There'll be Bible Study, and the first official meet up of the brand new Chinchilla Writers' Group. I didn't start it up, by the way. I just attended the first casual meet and greet. It consists of essentially two young ladies who work for the local paper who like to write a bit. So it should be good fun working on stuff together.
I'm sort of used to attending things like this, being asked what I write, and pulling one of my published books out of my laptop bag to save time explaining. But it doesn't seem to get old for other people. They look at me like I've arrived from another planet. Seriously though, writers are just normal people.
Scratch that - we are really weird, but apart from that we're normal, whatever that means.
In the meantime, daily life around here includes trying new ways of keeping the dog cool. I've never seen her pant so much - or lie around languidly for such long periods of time. Yesterday I tried putting her in a sink full of cold water after her walk. She unfortunately associated this with a bath, so it took her a long time to relax. I seriously do not understand her. Baths seem so relaxing to me.
I've had the privilege of looking over the interior of Consort to the Shadows, Part One this past week. Together with my author care manager, we've been working on improving the overall look. It's beginning to look really good, and I'm so excited to hold it soon!
I wonder how long shipping takes to Australia from the USA.

One of the cool things about living in Australia is that you get to use Amazon. New Zealand is missing out. My husband has become extremely excited about Amazon, and he's ordered three or four things in the last ten days alone. One was an air fryer that came in a massive box which contained another massive box which contained a third less massive box that actually contained the product we bought. Has anyone ever told Amazon they're not very efficient with packing?
Still, our New Zealand packers could learn a thing or two from them. They destroyed our dinner set and my antique soup tureen.
And in the meanwhile, the heat continues. 37 today again. Nothing new on that front. Still, you've got to admit that the giant blue sky behind the gum trees does look pretty spectacular. I just have the ceiling fan on three throughout the night so that I can sleep. It's kind of like having a helicopter permanently landing in your room. The sheets are blasted against your body and loose papers go flying about. Sometimes I wonder if the fan will fly right off and decapitate me during the night. Still, I'm too hot to care!
More soon.

Well, this past week has had some fantastic developments - the first of which is that we have internet properly installed! Hooray. Now I can do my writing and blogging from home instead of in the library.
We had an interesting journey with Belong internet. First, the courier left our package on the front doorstep of our rental, even though we had told Belong to deliver it to the local post office, as we wouldn't be in the country for another couple of weeks. Thankfully, our local pastor kindly picked up our modem before someone stole it. Next, Belong delayed our installation somewhat, so we rang up to talk to them about it. Every time we rang them up, the call went something like this:
"Hello, this is Yvette, and I wanted to call about--"
"Sorry, I can't hear you. I can't hear you - are you there?"
"HELLO, THIS IS YVETTE--"
"I can't hear you, sorry, I can't hear you, are you actually there?"
"HELLO, THIS--"
Click.
Ugh. We rang them up from two different phones, and every time we had the same result. This was because their phone line was being updated, apparently. (Is "updated" code for downgraded?) In the end, I complained in a comment on their Facebook page, which got a response very fast. And now we're connected.

In the meantime, everyone in town is eating watermelon, which I suppose is unsurprising as this is the watermelon capital of Australia, and they do have a massive model slice of watermelon at the front of town. (I keep wanting to take a picture with said slice, but because the melon festival is coming up, the local council is very protective of it. They've fenced it off with orange netting and even sometimes set a couple of watchmen/workers over it.) Watermelon was sixty cents a kilo the other day at the farmer's market, so I picked up a ten kilogram monster. I keep telling my husband we're eating so exotically here, with all the dragon fruit, rock melon, and watermelon. He pointed out that the word "exotic" implies foreign, but we actually live here now, so it's not exotic.
And because we live here, we've discovered that we've been eating watermelon wrong our whole lives. For a start, the locals told us that you have to get the round ones that aren't too big or too small. They should be the ones that have zero black seeds. Apparently, the football shaped black-seeded watermelons are a necessary evil with the breeding process, but they're not good to eat.
Well, blow me down, because until I moved here I have only ever eaten football shaped black-seeded watermelons. The Australians I was talking to on this occasion informed me that it was because those particular melons weren't considered good enough for consumption or even for smashing at the melon festival. So they sent them to New Zealand. This was, of course, a joke. But they still seemed pretty pleased about it, and I suppose it is kind of funny living across the ocean from a country that is consuming all the worst melons and remaining completely ignorant about it.
So, my apologies, New Zealanders: many of you have never eaten a proper watermelon in your lives.

I also bought some tomato plants this past week, and I planted them in three different places in the back yard. Unfortunately, four died miserable deaths. I couldn't even see them when I went out to water them the next time. I assume the sun just gobbled them up. The other four are still hanging on. I planted them in the shade. Who could know you could have too much sun?
Apparently, this is the perfect weather for snakes. Someone a kilometer down the road from us had a brown snake (an innocuous name for the deadliest serpent in the world) in their backyard the other day. It slipped away, but that means it (and its invisible cronies) are still on the loose. So I'm wearing proper shoes and socks out there, despite the heat.
In all honesty, you could pretty much believe yourself somewhere much more ordinary than Australia most of the time. Obviously, there are parrots and crows and the occasional fruit bat. But the only unusual things I see daily are skink lizards and flying cockroaches (I prefer the lizards). Now and then, you'll see a kangaroo at the Weir. But the grass has gotten so long where they graze that they're mostly hidden. And I wouldn't want to walk through it unless I magically transformed into Steve Irwin. I know I haven't seen any snakes yet, but I'm not fooled. They're definitely out there.
Although, I'm saying all this while our house still has some form of pest protection on it. When that wears off, I may see more unusual things. We went to a friend's place for dinner the other night, and they were talking about red backs (poisonous spiders that are essentially the Australian version of the black widow).
"Do you know, our house had a red back infestation before we had it pest treated? I was trying to put my USB into my computer and it wouldn't go in. And when I scraped out the port, there was a very sick red back!"
"That's not too bad. We knew some friends who had a red back infestation so bad, they were just dropping into the baby's cot, ha ha ha!"
I used to live in Victoria in Australia where we were told red backs could kill you, so don't go rummaging in any wood piles without gloves, etc. In Queensland, people don't seem to have that much of a problem with them. Still, I can't imagine myself cheerfully going "ha ha ha!" if red backs were dropping onto furniture in my house. 
One day, maybe, I'll be a true Queenslander.

By the way, just before I sign off - you know those beautiful pictures of the Whitsundays towards northern Queensland? Apparently those are taken during winter. In the wet season over summer, you sometimes don't see the sun for six weeks. And you can't really go swimming either, because the stingers (box jellyfish) and crocodiles are out and about and looking forward to meeting you/preying on you. So I think we wound up in the right place in Queensland. I love it here.
But then again, we've seen nothing but sun for the past ten days!