"It was said to be a giant, red-eyed, copper-coloured serpent that could lash out with the ferocity of a crocodile. Until the Wikmunkan people of the Cape York Peninsula lead naturalist Donald Thomson to a living speciman in 1933, the reptile was thought to be a myth. Thomson published a scientific paper about the discovery of the taipan but, as Brendan James Murray points out, it was hardly a discovery, more a "translation into white mythology of what Wikmunkan people and others had always understood". This dual perspective makes Venom much more than a tense, vividly written human drama about the race to make an antivenom for one of the most deadly snakes in the world. Through the remarkable survival story of Indigenous boy George Rosendale, Murray subtly traces the venom unleashed by European settlers themselves." -- Sydney Morning Herald.