Many years ago, God sat down with his angels one Friday night and after a few bottles of Blue Nun decided it would be fun to try to improve on the rabbit. But sadly, it had been a busy week on the production lines and all they had left were two big legs, two small ones and the body of a bison. So they ended up with the kangaroo. It was a plainly idiotic piece of design but they made it anyway and, not surprisingly, Skippy has been a bad-tempered and aggressive pugilist ever since. Then there was the duck-billed platypus. What on earth was that all about? The idea of mating a mallard with an otter was never going to work and, let's be honest, neither was the emu. A bird with no wings is just plain daft.

Still, having made these rejects, it was decided that the world needed a remote, faraway rubbish bin in which to put them. So on the eighth day, God created that dusty, overheated wilderness subsequently called Australia. And having built it, and seen it was huge, he reckoned it might be just the spot in which to put not only the silly animals, but also the dangerous ones, the sharp-toothed venomous experiments that couldn't be allowed to live in close proximity to man. And so it is that something like 60% of the world's most active killing machines are found only in Oz.

The lizards are 5 metres long, there are six types of deadly snake and the spiders aren't just stand-on-a-chair scary. Even out at sea things don't improve, with transparent jellyfish that paralyse your bits, leaving you as bait for the sharks. Only last week I read the story about some Australian fishermen who were disappointed to find a man's head inside the stomach of a cod they'd just caught. Yup, down there you even get killer fish.

Wonky humans went there, too. Rock paintings found in the Northern Territory show that the original inhabitants of Australia were sticking spears into one another 10,000 years ago. That's more than 5000 years before the noble savages elsewhere on the planet started killing one another. Now, I understand why people emigrated there 200 years ago; they had no choice. But I'm not sure why people are still at it today, choosing to live among the spiders and the snakes.

Perhaps it's because they're not terribly bright. There is some evidence to support this. Only in Australia do they call a range of mountains that have snow on them the Snowy Mountains, and it didn't take much imagination either to come up with a name for their great barrier reef "Hey. Let's call it the Great Barrier Reef" They call the deadly taipan the fierce snake, and a ray which lives in lagoons and has blue spots on its back, the blue spotted lagoon ray. And then they go walkabout in the Great Sandy Desert. There are intelligent Australians, of course. You can see them, every day of the week, in the bars of Earls Court, London. They're particularly partial to a pub called the Australian.

But those back home are all over the place, complaining about French nuclear tests and banning nuclear aircraft carriers from their ports while mining uranium and exporting highly enriched weapons-grade stuff from their atomic power stations to Scotland. Of course, this year Australia has been in the news because it is hosting the Olympic Games, an event that may come with one or two notable new sports. Queen racing, for instance. Certainly, Her Majesty will reach hitherto unseen speeds as she moves from place to place, mainly because the programme itself tells visitors to do away with the "ghastly good taste and censorious conservatism associated with a monarchist culture".

The drug testers will be busy tool especially when someone reaches 800 km/h in the pool. Was this because he'd been at the anabolic steroids or was it because, as he will claim, he was being chased at the time by a man-eating cod? Mostly, though, the Olympics, as usual, will be the same old dirge. I appreciate, of course, that those who participate have sweated buckets and made great sacrifices, but I'm not completely convinced that I should have to make great sacrifices too, while they go about their running and jumping.

The Olympics is a televisual neutron bomb. Every four years, the schedules are decimated by a need to bring us news of some Chinese stick insect who can dance while hanging from the ceiling. For week after week, the commentators will search the arenas for a glimmer of hope in the British camp, and when they find it we'll be subjected to whatever it is for days. Last time out, someone caught the whiff of victory in the coxless pairs, and that was it. Hours of men with improbable shoulders rowing boats.

And the time before that it was ice skating, a sport in which ladies sail past the judges with their legs as wide apart as possible. This year, though, there is at least some good news. We'll be spared live coverage of the trying Brits and the crying Americans because God not only made Australia very far away, he also, very sensibly, put it in a different time zone. So while the games are going on, I can be where the sensible human belongs. in bed.

Jeremy Clarkson - The Sunday Times, London