Huntsman Spiders are generally large spiders that forage on vegetation, usually amongst foliage or on the trunks of trees. They are also commonly found in Australian Houses, and less commonly in cars, where they can cause consternation by running across the inside of the windscreen or dropping onto your lap from beneath a sun visor.

My Spider Horror experience occurred in about 1980 in Gilgandra, NSW. I was looking beneath the bark of trees for geckos (I have since developed a more efficient, less destructive method of finding geckos) and pulled a strip off bark about three metres long from the trunk of a Callitris pine. The bark broke, crashed against the tree, and from beneath a shower of about 100 huntsman spiders (Delena cancerides) showered down all over me, then ran all over me, clearly terrified, as was I. It has taken over twenty years to recover from that incident, and photography has played a major role in my therapy.