No fire in his (red) belly!

I met my second snake of the season this morning, while doing my morning bike ride. He was there on the road looking very fierce. He was a red-bellied black snake, tenth on the list of  Australia's deadliest snakes, according to Australian Geographic. We make out that's the same as tenth deadliest in the world. Not so. Anyway, it's pretty venomous.

Mind you, they don't often chase you, or bite you. Especially when they're dead! This one had in fact been hit by a car, and he was quite lifeless.

I respectfully picked him up from the road, and put him on the footpath, so he could scare pedestrians all day! Must have worked, because when I went back this evening to photograph him, he was still in exactly the same spot. I think they'd all given him a wide berth. In fact by then his smell was considerably worse than his bite.

Surviving the museum

 'Surviving Australia' is the name of one of the galleries at Sydney's Australian Museum. It's packed with scary venomous spiders and snakes, things like sharks and crocodiles that eat you, stingers, biters and buzzy things, all the things the tourists love. And so do we!

It's been 20 years or so since I'd last explored the place, and it's come on quite nicely. There's still the classic galleries with the the fine collections of stuffed birds, insects, marsupials etc. There are skeletons galore, and of course dinosaurs. Menacing, noisy dinosaurs. Australian ones too these days. There are rocks, gemstones and meteorites.

A lot of work has gone into making things very accessible and exciting for kids and for tourists.  

There's also a classy gallery on indigenous Australia, and intelligent displays on environmental degradation and extinctions.

I think an Australian Museum visit is a must for visitors with a few hours to spare and a wish to gain a good quick introduction to the country, and it should probably be on the agenda for all of us locals too now and again.