This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchworth, my colleague Jeremy

Zakis, who is in New South Wales. And this is the Reptile Report. These are very dangerous creatures.

We're now going to talk about the Eastern Brown Snake, which Jeremy has educated me these many

months to understand that it's aggressive, that it looks like a stick moves like a stick,

but it doesn't bite like a stick. It bites like an Eastern Brown Snake. One of the, if not the most

venomous snakes in Australia. A young British tourist named Ben was walking on Fraser Island

without the proper footwear. Jeremy, where is Fraser Island?

Yeah, John. If you look at a map of Australia and you look at Queensland, so you're looking at

the top right hand corner, Fraser Island is actually in that state in the top right corner,

about halfway up. So approximately 300 kilometers, so you know, around about 150 miles north of

Brisbane in a very beautiful, very touristy part of the Australian coastline there. So it's

quite a tropical paradise. Ben told nine news. He wondered up the sandy slopes. I can already

chair me. I'm already thinking, wow, I mean, didn't he read anything? He's wandering up the sandy

slopes and trainers to retrieve something he'd lost, but disaster struck on the journey down. I

stepped on this darkish thing quite deep in the grass, felt like a stabbing pain, looked down

in my ankle and saw blood. What happened to him, Jeremy? Well, John, this is something that if you

know us Australians are taught, this is what you don't do. You'd never, ever walk in any sort of thick

grass or vegetation, certainly without socks. And certainly in this case without probbashews,

because what happened, John, that dark thing that he saw just under the surface in the grass was

in fact the Great Eastern brown snake. And this is a very common thing. And unfortunately, this is

why sometimes people get very, very ill and die because they don't realise that what they actually

had trot on was a snake, not a stick, because you can imagine too, John, that the Australian

...