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Last Night while we sat mindlessly staring at the Samsung, kids all in bed, dinner time chaos all cleared away; out from beind the dresser we spotted the unmistakable spindly dark shape of a spider walking up the wall. Bigger than others we had spotted around the house and certainly more stout of body than our house guest we named Sid this one looked different. It moved swiftly too, stopping here and begging for a better look. Without a question of a doubt it was a white tailed spider and I flew into the kitchen for a tumbler and sheet of paper – HM Customs and Revenue demand for late payment as it happens.
Quickly without hestitation the glass came down over the spider and he went mad, darting around the inside of the glass like a thing demented. Taking great care not to slip for I didn’t know exactly how dangerous this little guy could be the customs letter was duly slid under the mouth of the glass and I took him through to the halogen kitchen lights for a better look. He was almost black on the lower half of his body, which in spiders is the abdomen and the centre section – the bit that holds all the legs and is called the cephalothorax – was more a silvery grey colour with that last milimetre or so of tail at the spinnerette a distinct white. He also sported quite a prominent pair of pedipalps which I assumed were the mechanisms for launching his notorious painful bite. I later learned that these appendages were the kind of ‘feelers’ and the sickle shaped fangs are the tips of strong chelicera. They must’ve been there even if I hadn’t identified them there and then but if he hadn’t been so mad I would have liked to let him out as the thick sides of the glass were actually hampering what I could see.
There’s a free leaflet promoting a pest control company and designed to be attached to the fridge door with a suitable magnet, which drops through the letterboxes on a regular basis called Spiders of Sydney and it lists the dirty dozen or so inhabitants of garden and home. There are four extremely dangerous ones and two of those are notorious enough to have their very own TV programmes; the funnel web and specifically the Sydney funnel web spider are two of the most venomous spiders on earth. Then there’s the redback, a close relative of the black widow and also scary enough to feature regularly on cable TV and the harmless sounding mouse spider that make up this first group.
According to the leaflet and ranked one level down on the danger scale is the “very painful bite” team and white tailed spiders along with trapdoor, black house and wolf get their name in lights here. As well as the excruciating pain a bite from a white tail can result in an ulcerated open wound that in some cases turns necrotic, killing off flesh and tissue. Nice.
And here he was furiously looking for a way out of the glass prison and back to the hidey-holes in our lounge. We looked at each other after studying him a while and mutually decided that this guy was most definitely not going anywhere near our lounge again and straight away dispatched him to a place of safe distance. It left us pondering about the safety of it all but when all’s said and done I don’t suppose for one minute that particular spider wanted to be where we found him. And as if to reinforce my paranoia the very next day as I put some coffee cups and fruit waste in to a wheelie bin over on the park reserve what should be running down the side of the bin? Yep, a white tailed spider.
I guess they’re everywhere if you look for them.
It has 6 million hand driven rivets, its steel weighs 39,000 tonnes, the Guinness World Records have it listed as the world’s widest long span and highest steel arch bridge and along with helicopter rides through the Grand Canyon, safaris with Africa’s Big 5 and swimming among dolphins, climbing it ranks among many people’s things to do before they clock out.
So we did.
Lindsay, Alistair, Zoe and I climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a blowy but very clear grey day in July. It was nothing like I had imagined and easier than falling out of bed. Since 1998 the Bridgeclimb outfit has been offering people the chance to scale the southern half of this enormous iron bridge and has developed it into a super-slick operation enabling them to shuffle hundreds of pop-eyed guests up, across and down the arch, in what has to be almost perfect safety. It’s not possible to take anything onto the bridge that is not secured to your zoot-suit via clips and rings, nor is it possible to smuggle cameras up there as everyone gets to go through the metal detector once suited up.
As for falling off, forget it. You are attached to a secure steel cable system as used by professional climbing outfits that runs the entire length of the climb. A notched wheel slips onto the cable at the beginning of the track and runs along clacking its way through bends, corners and vertical-horizontal transitions keeping you permanently attached. And it’s secured to your belt by slipping the wheel through a loop in its own short lanyard and pulling it tight on the D-ring.
Then you are kitted up with thermal fleeces and rain jackets that are cleverly packed into clipped on bum-bags that again remain attached to the bag when you have to unzip them, 140 metres above the harbour in a gale and try like the Birdman of Alcatraz to put the garment on. The final piece of need-to-have gear is a one-way radio allowing you to hear the commentary above the howling wind.
And then it’s off to the bridge. For me the best part was the first part where you have to walk along a very narrow gangway that’s suspended under the roadway to get you out to the first pylon. You get a great view straight down through the planks and grilles of people milling around the site of the old fort that marks the first landing spot of the European settlers many moons ago. It’s also possible to look into the clear blue waters of the harbour and see the ferries motoring below. Some sad history on how those first dwellers had their houses taken off them to build the bridge is followed by stories of cows roaming around the Opera House site and native inhabitants being wiped out by hitherto unknown sicknesses like the common cold.
The pylons themselves don’t actually add any support to the steel work but without them the whole lot would probably have been driven into the ground by the forces of physics. I got a little lost in the finer details, although it impressed me that the whole bridge expands and contracts by up to fifteen centimetres every day during the summertime when the weather’s at its hottest and these pylons have huge dampers mounted at their bases to cater for all this necessary movement.
Also impressive is that fact that all six million rivets were belted home by hand and not a single one has been replaced in the Bridge’s chequered 75 year history. Dorman Long claimed they’d never built a bridge before taking on this project and what a way to kick off your bridge-building portfolio! The most striking thing about the actual bridge once you climb the four near-vertical ladders and get up onto the steel arch is its sheer size. It is quite simply enormous. It might stretch in the heat and shrink as it cools down but when you’re up there you can’t feel a thing, not even a vibration. It’s like being on a mountain the thing is so solid. And there’s not once a feeling of being high as the part you actually walk up is about two metres wide. I had hoped to be looking down on model-like cars and trucks zooming along the roadway but you can’t see them until you cross over the bridge at the highest point in the centre. The only time you really feel up high is when one of the TV or radio station helicopters buzzes past at eye level.
We got the standard been-there, done-that photos snapped off and although I had hoped for one of Sydney’s typically beautiful sunny days the wind and odd rain shower somehow made it all the more memorable.
Coming down was as easy as going up but for a couple of hours afterwards the legs felt very jelly-like. 1439 steps along planks, walkways and steel stairs accounts for that I suppose. I didn’t count them by the way.
If you’re ever here and you have the three and a half hours it takes to do then book it and treat yourself because there can’t be many experiences like it available to the general public. It won’t scare you, it probably won’t thrill you but you get a first class view of a quite unique place and real dollop of Australian patriotism as well as an insight into what makes the old coathanger such an icon.
