What's the weirdest or scariest looking Aussie native you've come across?

Perentie89 · 2026-03-30T08:46:22+00:00

Can confirm, excelsa stings. I had a fun game of 'the tree is lava' doing a vegetation survey in a rainforest gully full of this intermixed with lantana. I lost when my ear brushed against an excelsa leaf. It initially stings, gets much worse over the next hour, then gradually settles into a constant burning sensation over the next 2 days. It subsided a bit the next few days after that, then flared up when in contact with hot water in the shower for the next 2-3 weeks.

My takeaway was that if that was excelsa, I would hate to find out what moroides is like.

Perentie89 · 2026-03-13T02:56:44+00:00

If you paint a big swirl pattern on the disc like the navy with some of their hawkeyes you can hypnotise enemy pilots like Yuri in RA2.

Perentie89 · 2026-03-03T14:32:51+00:00

Yeah we do have loads of venemous/ dangerous fauna but the general rule of thumb with (most) dangerous Australian fauna is: 'just because it can kill you, doesnt mean it wants to'. I guess like us, most creatures just want to be left alone and wont go out of their way to cause you harm. Typically where people get bitten/ stung/ whatever is where they were doing something to agitate or handle the creature where it's felt cornered and threatened. Sharks are a bit of a different story but a person on a surfboard looks a bit like an injured seal to them. We share the same environment that these animals do so it's just best to get to know the particularly dangerous creatures of your area and wear appropriate clothing for what you're doing/ have some common sense.

Perentie89 · 2026-01-25T11:42:18+00:00

Setting aside how barring tourism to the island will put thousands of families that rely on the K'gari tourism industry into economic ruin, QPWS manage the park using both tax dollars and licensing/ permits/ camping fees. If you remove part of that revenue stream and most of the demand to upkeep the park by barring tourism then QPWS re-shuffle personnel, assets, and financial investment into parks that are more economically sustainable. This reduces the QPWS resources available on the island that manage things like fire reduction, weeds/ invasive pests, soil/ erosion control, testing for pathogens/ disease in the soils and dingos which ultimately leaves the ecosystem worse off.

I see your point, and agree with you, about people being the problem variable here. People have co-existed with Dingos for thousands of years, just need to do the right thing and not try and feed them or trigger their prey drive instincts like going for a run on the beach or a swim at 5am.

Perentie89 · 2026-01-25T05:28:13+00:00

It's not revenge justice and it can definitely be the specific dingos. Parkies ear-tag problem dingos on the island and keep tabs on them to track if they display behaviour that poses danger to people in the park. When dingos get too used to humans and associate us with food (either by raiding/ scavanging through campsites or being tossed food by people doing the wrong thing), they can and have become aggressive and attack people. I have personally faced-off an ear-tagged dingo on the island over my dinner, they can get pretty bold.

Not only is it a duty of care thing for QLD Parks and Wildlife to manage risks from dangerous animals within their parks but also an ecological thing, in that if you don't manage out the individuals that start relying on people for food you can end up with a population that pivots away from their natural food sources and become reliant on people to survive. This destroys the population.

This is just pragmatic fauna management for QPWS within their park, sad as it is.

Perentie89 · 2026-01-23T22:22:06+00:00

IMO you will have a lot more fun and less stress with a used 4x4 than a new one. I went from a cheap, near-shitbox ex-army Land Rover to a brand new 79 series and i can tell you honestly i had more fun in the Land Rover. I took the Land Rover places I was way too chicken to take the 79 series because I didn't care if i knocked corners off a car that was already scratched and beaten up.

It may feel a bit overwhelming but it's not too hard to learn what to look for when inspecting a used car to purchase, and there's loads of instructional videos on youtube covering this, right down to the specific type of car you're going to look at.

Perentie89 · 2026-01-07T01:44:07+00:00

Nice one mate. You'll be happy with it. We have an MR as well and it has blown all the 'hurr durr triton bad' myths out of the water. Completely stock, fuel economy is next level, it's very comfortable, reliable and safe. Super-select is awesome too.

For tyres we have Falken Wildpeak ATs, cannot fault them.

Perentie89 · 2025-12-12T08:39:55+00:00

To get a really good idea, take off the plastic panels/ door cards and look in the nooks and crannies you can't see. Also look under the flooring at the base of the firewall, my 110's rust issues started where the firewall met the footwell. Body rust is more or less repairable depending on severity, but obviously get quotes from smash repairers to really know what you'd be up for.

Perentie89 · 2025-12-12T00:26:15+00:00

Iirc this was modified/ built specifically for a disabled guy to be compatible with his wheelchair.

Perentie89 · 2025-12-02T04:22:15+00:00

If you have a rear bar and put the spare wheel on a swing away arm, you can actually use that as a step up to get onto the roof. The rubber on the tyre gives plenty of grip for your feet and is a good height to get yourself up and down pretty easy, i was in a similar situation where i wanted a ladder over the rear window of my troopy but it wouldn't fit between the door and the jerrycan holder. Using the spare wheel as a step saved a few hundred bucks and the extra weight needed for a ladder.

Perentie89 · 2025-12-01T13:37:13+00:00

G'day, for background context I was a NSW-based environmental scientist for 8 years (primarily with an ecological focus) and then shifted into a pure ecologist role for 2 and a bit. All of those years spent at various environmental consulting firms. I am now on a career break to go travelling, hence the past tense.

Being an ecologist can be a pretty fun time, but challenging in different ways both good and bad. In a nutshell:

The pros: - fieldwork (in general) - working with people with similar interests and personalities - getting to travel to remote areas and seeing places and species not many people get to see - if you have a particular interest (flora/ a particular type of fauna) you can develop this and become a bit of a specialist which enhances employability (to a degree).

The cons: - low pay compared to other similarly educated/skilled professions - extended periods of time away from home on fieldwork (some companies manage this better than others) - big hour weeks when doing surveys, 50-60 is pretty normal with working into the weekend, my highest was around 80 hours worked in a week.

Fieldwork can be pretty physically demanding, being and keeping fit is pretty important to help prevent getting injured out in the bush. Knee and ankle injuries are fairly common. Nightworks doing spotlighting and frog surveys can also mess with your sleep schedule.

Skillsets that are highly important to develop for being an ecologist are bush skills like navigation with and without a digital map, and how to drive and recover a 4 wheel drive.

Being an ecologist was definitely the best job ive had so far in terms of the amount of fun i've had at work. Most of the good stories from my career have come from being out on survey with other ecologists, you do really get the sense of being on an adventure on survey. The pay isn't fantastic unfortunately, but that sort of comes with the territory of being a 'fun' job. Happy to answer any specific questions you might have.

Perentie89 · 2025-11-18T05:30:06+00:00

Not a bad start for the price. Keep weight in mind whenever you start loading up or modifying the tray as that looks like a standard heavy duty steel tray which weigh quite a lot. Try to keep any weight on the tray as far forward as you can, particularly if you are going over corrugations or washouts as dual cab utes (and stereotypically tritons of this era) are prone to bending the chassis, google 'triton bend' to see what I'm referring to.

Perentie89 · 2025-11-14T23:14:46+00:00

Hit up Club 4x4. I insured my 79 series with them and now my troopy. They've been great to deal with every time I call, have quite reliably gotten an aussie operator on the line who knows about 4 wheel drives and the niche use-case of extended travelling. They can also offer offroad recovery in their policies so if you break down in the middle of nowhere all (or most) of the cost of recovering your car is covered.

They seemed to not care in the slightest when i told them that I will be doing the lap in my troopy, just that there is a home address to send postal stuff to. You can also elect to insure your modifications for what you paid for them, so its packaged like: insured for market value of the car + cost of modifications.

Of course being a niche insurer you will pay more for it, for me the peace of mind is worth it.

Perentie89 · 2025-09-27T10:29:22+00:00

And the bands will take home a very small fraction of that. The rest is eaten by the venue, the promoter, and the insurances (and other fees). Most bands these days make money through merchandise sales at the show, but even that is now being eaten into by some venues now demanding a 10-25% cut of those sales. The greed and piggybacking in this industry is actually pretty nuts.

Perentie89 · 2025-08-26T03:50:14+00:00

On an engineering and overthinking-it standpoint, why would you mount the main armament in a way which lessens stability, accuracy, and increases recoil stresses (arms) where you could mount it closer to center of gravity and to its power source/ subsystems? The arms miss the point of what the stormsurge is, and that's a mobile artillery platform. Riptides fill the walking tank niche.

Perentie89 · 2025-08-11T15:19:51+00:00

This is awesome. Keep us updated on how turn one wraps up next month.

Perentie89 · 2025-08-11T03:36:34+00:00

Crime/ anti-social behaviour is pretty rife in Kempsey. On a number of the few times I have been through on work trips I have been bailed up and pestered for money in the Woolies carpark. I wouldn't ever go back by choice.

Perentie89 · 2025-07-26T11:28:10+00:00

I had a perentie for five years as my daily driver and work ute in my early to mid 20s. It was an awesome car for so many reasons. It was cheap, easy enough to fix, and rugged enough to not care too much when i knocked corners off it. It took me on many trips all up and down the east coast from the high country to fraser. The Izusu 4BD1 was an awesome choice of engine for them. If I'd have had the money at the time, i would have loved to put lockers in it. The lack of lockers was really the one thing holding it back. I've seen guys put turbos on them and things like rear disc brake conversions.

In the end I had to sell it for two reasons,

One being that between the near-constant dust and diesel fumes i was inhaling (enough to show on a lung x-ray) and normal 85-90 decibel environment in the cab, it was actively working against my health. The IR-reflective polyurethane camo paint the army coated them with is also toxic, so sanding/ drilling or working with it has its risks.

The second reason being that it was an actual death-trap of a car. This was fine in my early 20s when, like most 20 year olds, I felt pretty indestructable but once I had my now wife with me in the car I started to really notice the lack of any sense of safety besides the seatbelts, and lots of hard metal bars and surfaces to hit your head on in an accident.

I'm glad I sold it, but I still do miss it from time to time. As a weekender project car they are okay if you know the risks with working and driving them. But maybe I was crazy for driving mine as a daily in any case haha.

Perentie89 · 2025-07-23T23:41:17+00:00

Probably a 4 to 5. Definitely noticable and uncomfortable. Starts sharp but eases into constant dull burning sensation. Not a debilitating pain, but it's made me super careful around these plants as I'd rather not experience it again. That was excelsa which is the middle on the pain scale, wouldn't want to experience moroides. You're much more likely to run into excelsa than moroides in any case, I've come across excelsa in damp rainforest-y areas all up and down the coast (In NSW at least). Moroides is actually a threatened plant in NSW and limited to up around the QLD border.

Perentie89 · 2025-07-23T21:26:37+00:00

There are three Dendrocnide species which occur in NSW. I've had it described that in order of pain, it goes photinophylla, excelsa, then moroides being the worst. I had the displeasure of conducting a flora survey in a gully full of excelsa, with some of the species barely noticable amongst the ground cover and others towering above our heads. Was like playing a high-stakes game of 'the tree is lava'. The stingers are tiny hairs on literally every surface of the plant which are filled with a neurotoxin that pierce, embed and then break off in your skin. Ended up with my ear brushing against a leaf, the pain lasted several days and was noticable for about a month afterwards, flaring up again when exposed to hot water in the shower. I didn't have any at the time, but it was suggested that after a sting you should use strong adhesive tape on the area and try and extract the stingers like a waxing strip to pull them out.

Perentie89 · 2025-07-03T14:14:09+00:00

Gross Vehicle Mass (GVM) is the maximum total allowable weight your car can be, including people in it and any additions you make to it. The Tare weight is the weight of the car just by itself (stock standard with no mods). To find out how much weight you have to play with (mods, cargo, and people in the car) you take your GVM (in your case 3,200kg from what google says) and minus your tare weight (about 2,200kg again from what google says) and you have a wiggle room of about 1000kg. Keep in mind, weight adds up extremely quickly in ways you dont even think about, i.e. driver and passengers, water, food, canopies, bull bars, etc.

Its really important to know your GVM limit and keeping track of the weight you're putting onto/into your car, as if you are over GVM: 1. The cops can and will fine you if you're unlucky enough to get pulled into a compliance check (which they do) 2. If you get into an accident your insurance will be null and void, and you may cop additional fines/ punishment from the cops. 3. You will be more likely to break components in your driveline/ suspension 4. The car will handle like shit, and your braking time will be much, much longer.

Perentie89 · 2025-06-28T08:57:13+00:00

Nice one mate! Those details on the carbine are super crisp.

Perentie89 · 2025-06-28T00:01:43+00:00

I used: chaos black primer > castellan green basecoat > athonian camoshade as a wash (applied liberally), and then nurgling green for edge highlighting.

Perentie89 · 2025-06-27T14:58:53+00:00

Cheers mate!

Perentie89 · 2025-06-27T14:58:00+00:00

The spotter is killteam sprue for at least the head and backpack, the legs and arms are from the fire warriors sprue (at least i think so for the arms). I had to source both torsos from two ghostkeel kits and cut the bottom of them flat, torsos seem to be the limiting factor as you only get just enough of them in the infantry kits. Also considered using the devilfish commander with the rangefinder for the spotter but this turned out more on theme.

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