A bloke at Austinmer sent me a photo on a Monday of something black curled up in his pool skimmer basket. He'd noticed it Friday afternoon, decided it had drowned over the course of an evening in the pool, and left it there because it was Friday and the cricket was on.
I told him not to tip the basket out by hand.
He rang back about twenty minutes later somewhat rattled. He'd hosed it into a bucket and it had got up and walked.
This is the fact about funnel-webs that I'd most like every household between Helensburgh and Nowra to know, because it's the one that catches people. They don't drown the way you'd expect. They trap a bubble of air in the hairs around the abdomen, and the Australian Museum's page on funnel-web spiders puts it at surviving at least thirty hours underwater. A spider that looks dead in a pool, a bucket, a dog bowl or a blocked drain is very often a spider that is having a rough weekend.
Nobody in that house was ever going to be bitten by a spider on the bottom of a pool. They were going to be bitten emptying the basket.
Now, in late winter, is the boring part of the year
I'm writing this in August because the calls haven't started and that's exactly when the useful work is possible.
Male funnel-webs are the ones that turn up in a laundry or a garage, and they wander at night through the warmer months, roughly November through April. Not in a big co-ordinated event like the termite flights — just individual males walking around after dark looking for a female's burrow, night after night, for months. Rain brings a rush of them because it floods the burrows and pushes everything out.
Which means the season is a long, low, constant thing rather than an emergency, and the yard work that lowers the odds is more useful done now than in a panic in January.
The identification problem, honestly handled
I'm going to be straight with you: in a torch beam on a laundry floor at ten at night, I don't tell you the genus.
There are a few big, dark, glossy ground spiders in the Illawarra that look broadly similar to a person who is understandably not keen to get closer. Funnel-webs proper. Mouse spiders, which are stockier with a huge head end and which the same antivenom covers. Trapdoor spiders, which are usually browner, hairier and much less of a worry. And black house spiders, which are web-builders in a corner rather than wanderers on the floor.
So the working rule I give people, and the one I use myself, is that any large dark spider walking on the ground inside your house gets treated as a funnel-web until somebody qualified looks at it properly. That's not being dramatic. The cost of being wrong in that direction is nothing at all, and the cost of being wrong in the other direction is genuinely serious.
A couple of things that push it towards funnel-web rather than something harmless. It's glossy rather than furry, almost lacquered-looking. It rears up on its back legs when you go near it and holds the front pair in the air, which trapdoors mostly don't. It's on the floor, in the open, at night, and it's clearly going somewhere.
Local aside, and I find this genuinely good: the escarpment here has its own. Illawarra wisharti is a single species in its own genus, isolated in the wet forests of the Illawarra. That is our spider, in the sense that it doesn't live anywhere else on earth.
Where they actually are on your block
Where they dig in matters more than how many are about, because they aren't randomly distributed and they're rarely out in the open lawn.
Funnel-webs want moist, cool and sheltered. Burrows under rocks, in and under rotting logs, in crevices. The museum's description of the garden version is rockeries and dense shrubberies, and it points out they're rarely found in open situations like lawns.
Walk your yard with that as the search image and it's usually obvious. The rockery. The sandstone edging. The stack of pavers left over from the patio job. The mulched garden bed on the shaded south side that never quite dries out. Under the water tank. The pile of firewood that's been there since two winters ago. Beneath a low deck. Along the base of a damp retaining wall. On an escarpment block, add the whole back third of the property, which is a discussion of its own in what changes when the bush is your back fence.
The other search image is where a wandering male ends up. He's walking at ground level and he goes under things. Roller door gaps. The undercut beneath a back door with no weather seal. A subfloor vent with the mesh gone. Then he's inside, and he heads for somewhere cool and dark, which is why it's so reliably the laundry, the garage floor, a pile of washing, a boot left by the back step, or the shade under an outdoor table.
Shake the boots out. Genuinely. It costs you two seconds and I've had two people show me a spider that came out of one.
First aid, before you need it
Read this part now rather than at the moment it matters, because at the moment it matters somebody will be looking things up on a phone while somebody else panics.
A funnel-web or mouse spider bite is one of the few in this country where you apply a pressure immobilisation bandage. Healthdirect's advice on spider bites is that an immobilisation bandage is only for funnel-web or mouse spider bites, and that an elasticated roller bandage is recommended for anyone bitten by a big, black, hairy spider. Bandage firmly over and above the bite, keep the limb still, mark the bite site, note the time, and call an ambulance. Keep the patient still rather than walking them to the car.
Do not wash the area, do not cut it, do not apply a tourniquet.
An antivenom has existed since 1981 and it changed the outcome of these bites completely. That's the reason a funnel-web bite in 2026 is a serious hospital visit rather than the thing people's grandparents were frightened of. It's also why hospitals need a steady supply, which comes from spiders that members of the public catch and hand in. I'm not going to talk you into doing that. If you're the sort of person who would, you already know the drill; if you're not, a container over the top of it and a call to someone is plenty.
If the spider is safely contained and it isn't a risk to anybody, keeping it in a jar helps whoever ends up identifying it.
What a treatment does, and what it doesn't
I'd rather set this out honestly than have you feel misled in February.
A spider treatment on a residential block goes into the harbourage: the eaves, weep holes, window frames, the subfloor, the shed, fence lines, path edges, and the ground shelter close to the house — rockeries, mulch beds, retaining walls, the damp corners. That reduces the resident population living against your house, and it holds for months. It's real and it works.
What it does not do is put a force field around your property. A male funnel-web that hatched in the bush over your back fence and is walking through your yard on a warm November night has not read the invoice. If he crosses the treated band he's very likely to pick up a dose and not get much further, and that's the mechanism, but nobody can promise you'll never see one again. Anyone who does is telling you what you want to hear.
That's why I push the carpentry as hard as the chemistry on these blocks. Get a proper weather seal on the bottom of the back door and the laundry door. Brush seal on the roller door. Re-mesh the subfloor vents, which is the same job that keeps rats out and is set out in rodent-proofing an older Illawarra home. Move the rockery and the woodpile away from the walls if you can bear to.
The general spider material for the region, redbacks very much included, is in getting rid of redbacks and funnel-webs around your home, and the treatment itself is spider control.
The short version
Anything big, dark and glossy walking on your floor at night is a funnel-web until proven otherwise, and dead-looking in water means nothing.
The wandering months are November to April, worse after rain, and it's the males doing the walking.
Fix the door seals before the season and get the ground harbourage treated in spring rather than after somebody finds one in the laundry.
Learn the pressure immobilisation bandage now. It takes five minutes to read and it's the only bit of this that's actually urgent.
And if you're on the escarpment side of the highway and you'd like the yard looked over before the warm weather, ring or send a photo. I have never once minded being sent a photo of a spider that turned out to be a huntsman.
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