Everyone I meet seems to have a snake story - and the main point of telling the story invariably seems to be to frighten us poor Brits.

The formula is always the same: reassure about how there's really nothing to worry about - and then slam in the punch with a tale of horror.

"No, you'll never get a snake in town," the saddler in Glen Innes in the Northern Tablelands told me. Phew!

"Except when a timber lorry comes through and a tiger snake drops out."

Not phew. Not phew at all.

Only this past week, I met two people in Tharwa who told snake stories scary enough to send every Brit into an emigration frenzy, a kind of rush to be a reverse Ten Pound Pom.

One was a lady who lives in an isolated, beautiful cottage right by the Murrumbidgee. Snakes abound. She comes across them all the time, she said. But she treats them with respect. She and they know how to work around each other. They keep a safe distance.

Usually.

Snakes are not a worry, she said - except that she did let slip that she woke once to find a brown snake under the bed. The cockatoo on the end of the bed seemed agitated (the lady, in her kindness, rescues sick and injured cockies). She looked under the bed and there it was: a brown snake which Google tells me can kill in under half an hour. Under half an hour.

But snakes, you understand, are not a problem for Australians.

She also found a brown snake in the sink one day. No problem. Just clap your hands and off it goes.

A little further down Naas Road, I came across Denis Evans, a retired scientist from the ANU. He was wearing gaiters so at least he recognised that being bitten as he walked the bush around Mount Tennent did present the occasional deadly risk.

But even he was reasonably relaxed about them, particularly when he related in a matter-of-fact fashion how he had been standing for a while and and then looked down to see a snake wound around his legs.

No problem, though. The snake relaxed and he did what he said was a world record for the simultaneous high and long jump.

He also said that he had been walking with a Japanese academic who was warned that there was a serious snake in the grass alongside the track. His companion for some inscrutable reason grew fascinated at the thought of seeing a real, live Australian snake and had to be rugby tackled away from certain death as he approached the animal.

But for Australians, particularly country Australians, the line is: snakes are there but not to be worried about too much.

Even for some townies. A nurse at Clare Holland House, the hospice on Lake Burley Griffin, told me that brown snakes would occasionally appear in the lounge. I shrieked at the thought of it. But she explained that it was quite simple: you just get on the table and call the snake catcher. (But what if you don't have your phone? Can brown snakes climb a table leg?)

It's true that the facts are against us phobics.

Snakes kill two people a year in Australia, fewer than the numbers who die from burns or horses or bees, let alone cars.

And, hey, the hospitals are good. "As nearly two centuries of statistics and clinical experience suggest, most snake bites in Australia are survivable, if managed quickly, calmly and effectively," wrote Ronelle Welton of the University of Melbourne and Peter Hobbins of the University of Sydney.

Even in colonial Australia, the early colonists soon realised that snakes could and did kill - but that painful realisation didn't provoke a general panic.

"By 1805 it was accepted that local serpents might kill humans, but they were hardly feared in the same way as the American rattlesnake or Indian cobra," according to the two academics.

And yet. And yet. I am not reassured. And I don't think Australians want me to be reassured.

I think they - you - are playing some kind of sad revenge game. "Here's a Pom. Let's put the fear of snakes into him!"

Revenge for what? Bodyline? I wasn't around and I don't care about cricket. Nor did I sack Gough Whitlam. It was Churchill who abandoned the Australian troops in Singapore, not me.

You've got a point on Gallipoli but, as a Welshman, I'm as angry at the patronising posh English as any chippy Australian.

So why? Why put this fear into me? Why?

When a friend from London came to stay with me, she thought it would be the height of English humour to bring a plastic toy snake and place it on the floor of the lounge for me to discover when I walked back in.

I'm still running. My heart is still pounding double time.

But Australians reassure me that there's nothing to worry about. Snakes are the shyest of creatures, they say - unreassuringly.

One thing strikes me, though. If Australians are so relaxed about snakes, why was there such panic when a brown snake appeared near the Canberra Centre a year ago?

Maybe you speak with a forked tongue.