Persistent would be an understatement

Hedda gettin back at the flies....
Uploaded by m_hagen.

It all started in Kakadu National Park - up in the 'top end'. We were camping at the Merle campground and as the sun set the mosquitoes started to emerge. Holy shit, I have never in my entire mosquito fearing life been surrounded by such an ungodly number of buzzing mosquitoes.
I retreated to the van, put on my longest trousers, and despite the fact that the temperature was in the 30s pulled on a long sleeved sweater. I then covered my ears nose and hands with 30% deet. All this did was make me hot and angry. And the mosquitoes were still there, buzzing in my ear, taunting me. The van has mosquito netting on the windows, and even though I had killed every living insect in the van with a massive dose of bug spray, all I could hear was the constant whine of the damn bugs outside the van, buzzing at the windows, trying to get in and bite me.
As we've moved further south, the number of mosquitoes has decreased and the number of flies increased. And Australian flies are the most numerous, annoying, persistent of all the flies in the world. And, when we were eating a lunch at Uluru, I finally lost it and pulled on the fly hat. They may look ridiculous, but hell, they're effective. It's just hard to eat a sandwich when you're wearing one.