Ask the Arachnophile

If you haven't been to Doug Wallace's place before, the big black spider hanging above the front steps will give you, if not a heart attack, a hint of what's inside: 83-year-old Wallace—"I'm a bit of a joker," he says, for the spider's only plastic—and, lurking among the books and papers that swamp what most people call the lounge room and he calls his workshop, more spiders, real but safely dead and under glass.

Wallace has spent most of the past 63 years getting as cosy with spiders as it's advisable to be. In a scientific way, mind: "Spiders are not something you keep as a pet. They're too precious." Driven by interest alone—a builder by trade, he never went to university—he's become a national authority on eight-legged crawly things ("arachnologist," he corrects), consulted by everyone from students to museum curators and pest-control firms. "Sometimes people send squashed ones," he says with a laugh. "Then you mightn't know what it is."

What's his favorite? "Well, naturally I'm impressed with the ones that have been named after me." They're here somewhere, Wallace says, looking about. "There's two, up on that shelf, beside the tarantula." Small bottles are fetched down and introductions made. "This is Ozicrypta wallacei, and this one ... let me think ... it's Molycria wallacei." There's a third one, Namirea dougwallacei, but he's not sure where it's got to.

It was war that brought Wallace and spiders together. In 1943, as an infantryman in New Guinea, he was reconnoitring in the jungle when he ran smack into a web and felt "this huge spider" scuttle onto him. A mate brushed it from his hair, but Wallace couldn't get the spider, a golden orb weaver, out of his head. "It was the size of it," he says. "And its silk was so strong."

Even as an Army private, Wallace had a reputation for knowing things. "I used to give talks on weapons," he says. "I thought the more we knew, the longer we had a chance of living." After the war, while he and his late wife Claire raised their three children (in this very house, which he built in 1951), he armed himself with books, a magnifying glass and, later, a video camera, and "followed up every bit of a clue I could find" about spiders. His discoveries about what he calls "probably the greatest predators of all"—our silent allies, he says, in the fight against insect pests—at times moved him to poetry: "the rearing plunge, one breath/ One quiver, trussed, immobile, bound in silk!/ Transfixed by spider fangs—held fast in death."

"Look at that," Wallace says. "Isn't it weird lookin'?" He's brought his visitor to the Rockhampton Botanic Gardens, where his spider collection (300 of Australia's 1,500-plus species) now resides. "That's a bird-eater. A big one can eat a frog in five hours: it sucks the juices in and out." He points to a cluster of brown pods. "They're egg sacs. Each one might have 500 tiny spiders in it. They crawl out, let out a bit of silk and float away."

Wallace no longer hunts spiders: "I've seen too many of 'em." Instead, he's trying to pass on what he's learned before, as he puts it, "I vanish into the big web up in the heavens." As well as giving spider talks at schools, he's busy adding to his self-published books of poetry and memoir. What he says of spiders might also go for his life: "Oh, it's a wonderful study."