There's a description from a Bill Bryson book about somebody being stung by one of these things. It went along these lines:

&gt;Even after he was sedated by the ambulance team and unconscious, he was still screaming.

Then he speaks to a ranger who was mildly stunng by one and desribed it like having a lighter held to your arm for a few minutes. 

&gt;Did it hurt?

"Yeah it did a bit."

Then Aussies look baffled when the rest of the world talks about how their entire ecosystem is quite obviously trying to murder them. No, it's because you're so used to it that you don't even see it as an issue. 

There's a Terry Pratchett novel where Death (of course it would be him) goes to his immense library of every living thing and asks for a book on the least dangerous things in Australia. He's then promptly buried by about a thousand books and emerges holding a piece of paper that says "some of the sheep". That pretty much seems to sum it up.