Perth is the capital of Western Australia, but the city reminds us rather of a cosy allotment gardens association. (In Vienna it was quite common for people who live in appartment buildings to become a member in allotment garden associations and rent small gardens. These gardens are often close to the city borders. They are quite small, but people can happily plant vegetables, fruits and flowers and have barbecues there. Everyone in these associations knows each other, they’re quite a close community).

The average citizen in Perth has its own house with its small garden. We have that too now. We have a small, but fine townhouse with a small, but fine backyard/garden. For us average Viennese multistory building inhabitants it’s a totally new experience.

Also because we share our small but fine house with a not insignificant quantity of domestic animals. Many of our co-inhabitants have six to eight legs and are….. spiders. Spiders of any kind. Start with daddy longlegs, who are allegedly no genuine spiders, up to small black spiders and large black spiders. At first I was quite hysterical, meanwhile I’m nearly used to it.

On the day we moved in our house, we didn’t notice that we don’t live alone. This changed when I wanted to take a shower for the first time. I nearly collapsed as I saw that six to eight big fat daddy longlegs lived comfortably in our shower cabin. Somehow I managed to take my shower as quick as possible. After that shock I wanted to relax at the couch with my morning coffee. Do two of these beasts crawl merrily at the armrest of our couch?

Thereupon we began to have a closer look at the house. And what did we see? In each corner lives such a thick fat daddy longleg. And I mean really in each corner. Under each table, each cupboard, in the kitchen cabinets and particularly behind the couch. I don’t lie to you when I say there were at least 40 daddy longlegs and spiders behind the couch. With nests and everything.

Since killing of such a quantity of spiders is neither pleasant, nor would work without leaving marks, we took our vacuum cleaner and started the spider eviction program. After some hours of cleaning the house was nearly spider-free. Did you know that spiders shit quite a lot? They leave many small black dots at the floor. You need to scrub pretty hard in order to get the floor clean.

We thought that after this attack the spiders would be gone for good. Well, that’s not the case. Those spiders are rather tough and reproduce themselves much too fast. Therefore the vacuum cleaner is located at hand in the living room and whenever such a cheekily spider friend appears, it’s simply vaccumed away. We use the vaccum cleaner pretty often.

Worse than the daddy longlegs are the genuine spiders. Those are larger and heavier and unfortunately they survive the vacuum cleaner. Our vaccum cleaner has no dustbag and so you have to empty the dust container after the vaccuming and that’s not the best idea when you already hysterical! Thanks to my dear husband, he rescues me from these spiders. He catches them with a cup and brings them in our garden. I always hope that these spiders don’t come back to us but rather visit instead our neighbour.

Another spider, which gives us lot of pleasure, lives in the large tree in front of our house. It is night-active and builds each night its net between the tree and our car, which parks under the tree. When the spider had moved in the very first time, I ran into its net. So ghastly! Especially if the spider still sits in its net. The net is pretty large, approx. 1 meter in the diameter. Since I know that it always attaches its net to the passenger door of our car, I always get in the car a little later and get out of the car a little earlier. I’m flexible, am I not? We searched the internet and discovered that this spider is not venomous. Well, that’s at least something, isn’t it?