Well done, Richard!
Few years back an English tourist out near Windsor on the Hawkesbury picked up a bluey and got bitten several times. Thing was it was an adder and he ended up in hospital! So I guess to the uninitiated they must look kind of similar.
He was a local and Australian, but severely inebriated. The newspapers interviewed me at work about it. What got me was that it was reported as a 'snake attack' in the paper, whereas to me it sounded very much like a 'man attack'. Snake minding its own business until a drunk guy harassed it.
To add to the 'puff adder' and 'brown snake' stories, many years ago (before I learned to disregard the observational skills of 99% of the lay public) I got a call from a Canadian acquaintance living in Sydney. He and his flatmates were frantic, as their cat found a snake in their yard and was hissing at it. The snake had since retreated into a burrow or under something, but was described as being short and thick, with an angular head and dark and light bands down its body. Good description of a death adder, I thought, so I told them to ring me the next time they saw it and I'd relocate it. For the next three days I'd get a call, invariably after the snake had been chased back down its hole by the cat, with yet another description. On the last day the description included "oh, I noticed today that it had tiny little legs". When I told them it wasn't a snake, but a lizard called a blue tongue, the response was "but the legs were only little". I shouldn't have laughed, but I asked how small a lizard's legs would have to be before it qualified as a snake.
Story i constantly hear from people is that the local pythons are now venemous due to cross breeding with the red bellys and browns....No matter how hard you try to explain thats the dumbest thing youve ever heard there convinced there right and there cousins brothers hairdresser can back up there story completely.
I first heard this a few years ago from a guy I worked with and was later shocked to discover it was a common story. When I explained the impossibility of this he nodded with a "yeah, and what the f would you know" sort of look, for he grew up on a farm and I grew up in Canada.
Over the years I've heard a lot of bizarre stories relating to reptiles and I continue to hear them from the public at my workplace (I work in a zoological institution). I love those stories, as long as they don't lead to harm to the animal (which unfortunately they often do). Most people have a slim grasp of biology and physics anyway, but when you add an animal that they find creepy and fail to comprehend, it seems anything is possible.
! Most people I find are pretty good, it's just the odd stories that tend to stand out and I've found there's little point arguing. "Some mother's do ave em'".
