Wake Up Australia

Michael speaks to Ranger Mick from the Australian Reptile Park, who warns that there will be a funnel-web spider 'bonanza' due to Sydney’s recent wet weather.

 

Rainfall across Sydney last weekend paired with summer temperatures have created idyllic tropical conditions in which the funnel-web spider thrives… with summer months marking its mating season.

 

The spider’s diet consists mostly of insects, although items as large as frogs and lizards may also be taken.

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Michael speaks to Vic Alhadeff, Chief Executive Officer of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, as survivors prepare to visit Auschwitz on the 75th anniversary of its liberation.

 

The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War 11 becoming a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question. 

 

The death toll includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and up to 15,000 other Europeans. 

 

Those not gassed died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.

 

As the Soviet Red Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, toward the end of the war, the SS sent most of the camp's population west on a death march to camps inside Germany and Austria.

 

Soviet troops entered the camp on 27 January 1945, a day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

 

In the decades after the war, survivors such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl and Elie Wiesel wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust.

 

In 1947 Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II and in 1979 it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

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Michael talks to Dr Kevin Tolhurst AM, Melbourne University fire ecologist, who has joined fellow bushfire experts in recommending that people should stop building in highly dangerous areas.

He says there were some areas of the Australian bush where houses should never have been built — or rebuilt.

"People shouldn't be surprised that if the house burns down, that they're not going to be allowed to rebuild because that property has perhaps already been identified as one that's in a place too dangerous to live," Dr Tolhurst said.

"If it comes as a surprise, not only do they have the trauma of losing things through fire, the trauma of not being able to rebuild adds to that problem."

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Michael talks to Dr Garnett Hall, veterinarian at West Coast Veterinary Hospital & Captain (Royal Australian Infantry) in the Army Reserve, who this week proved that even with the bushfires devastating the country, Aussies still have a sense of humour.

In a video uploaded to Facebook by Australian video producer Sean Mulcahy, UK’s ITV News Asia correspondent Debi Edward was at Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park when she was offered the chance of a close encounter with a terrifying Australian species – the ‘drop bear’.

Kitted out in protective boots, armour and goggles, the clip shows veterinarian Dr Garnett Hall warning Ms Edward of the danger she’s about to be in.

“They’ve actually got really small fangs, and the interesting thing about the fangs is they have a really mild venom,” Dr Hall tells her with a straight face. “It’s not like a snake venom that can make you really sick, it just causes a lot of really local irritation.”

He then backs away as the Park’s owner approaches with a koala, leaving the journo scared stiff.

Listen to the full show podcast with Clinton Maynard filling in for Michael McLaren

The NSW Minister for Water, Property and Housing Melinda Pavey joins Clinton Maynard on Wake Up Australia to discuss the recent downpour which drenched parts of New South Wales and Queensland yesterday.

Listen to the full show podcast with Clinton Maynard filling in for Michael Mclaren