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At that rate, he would be able to drink 100 in 1100 seconds—that's less than an hour. But he couldn't keep that up. For obvious reasons; he'd burst, for one. I wasn't the only man in the bar making these calculations. In the great circle that now surrounded Ivan, men were looking at their watches and counting. To save time the barman had put twenty cold stubbies on the counter just as Ivan downed the tenth. Ivan didn't pause. He was drinking, or working, as rhythmically as though he were on an assembly line: pour down one bottle, pour down the next, both bottles on the counter, pick up the next two, flip off the tops, pour down one bottle, pour down the next.

To catch a koala, all you do is startle it so that it jumps or falls off its branch, and then you entrap it in your net. At any rate that's what Mary Anne told me. She didn't mention that it only works with co-operative koalas. We stacked our gear, camping equipment, medical kit and the cages near the wharf and went koala hunting. The trees on Kudulana are all very small and spindly and we had no trouble locating the koalas. There were only twelve, and they were in a grove of eucalypts around a large deep pool surrounded by ferns.

Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Launceston. ' It would never have occurred to me to mix them but I nodded solemnly. Nod solemnly is pretty well all you do when you're talking to a snake man because they never actually converse — they just tell you things about snakes. Blackie was a travelling snake man. He travelled in a huge pantechnicon which had wooden covers on the sides. Whenever he found a paying audience—a school or a tourist centre—he would drop the wooden covers and reveal a glass-walled box the size of a large room.