By Janine Toms/Living Vicariously in Western Australia

Residing in Cottesloe, a beachfront community in the suburbs of Perth, we landed a rental in one of the remaining original houses in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately for me, these old houses have gaps under the doors and windows, making them a breeding ground for cockroaches. This particular breed of cockroach, or “cockies” as I now lovingly referred to them, are quite the specimen. Pulsating with fury, they’re red like a lobster, have wings to boot and were abundant.
At night I literally swept a broom in front of me while walking, as the thought of one racing over my bare feet is more than I could handle. My encounters with them included a shower scene that makes ‘psycho’ look like an after-school special, with one scurrying onto the shower head. It was all I could do to hold back my scream, which would have scared the life out of the housemates, but merely step cautious backwards to safety; suds intact.

Naturally the kitchen became a commune for them. One night while scrounging up dinner I pulled a frying pan out of the cupboard to find a cockroach had taken refuge in it. Another evening one jumped out from behind the fridge onto the counter while I was doing the washing up. Needless to say in both instances I vacated the kitchen immediately, leaving behind two failed attempts at domestication.

Cockies aside, I inevitably had an encounter with a huntsmen, while living in Brookton. For those of you fortunate enough to have been spared such a meeting, a huntsman looks like a woolly relative of the Tarantula. And while allegedly harmless, I wasn’t prepared to leave it to chance. When I found myself eye to eye with one – yes spiders at this size have very distinct eyes – it was once again evening, or as I’d like to call it ‘crawling hour.’ There was no way that we could both spend the night under the same roof, and I assumed any attempts to hit the spider might end nasty for me. I could only speculate what retaliation a spider like that would have in-store, so I did what any other person in my position would do. I sucked it up with the vacuum hose.
I felt this was a simple solution to an otherwise night of terror, but just to be certain I would survive the night, I barricaded the vacuum behind a door bracing it with a goose-shaped door stopper, just in case the now departed spider got any ideas. Thankfully, I made it through. Only in Australia would these unholy tormentors be viewed as typical household pests.

Janine Toms is a former reporter who worked in the Columbia Valley, who is now working on her writing skills and other sundry life skills travelling throughout the Southern Hemisphere.

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