I was in Falcon, a suburb about 15km south of Mandurah in Western Australia (WA). Mandurah is about 80km south of Perth, the capital city of WA. It was a coastal suburb and was well developed with houses and paths, and very few trees or bushland. The main problems were caused by the council spraying chemicals everywhere and killing the birds and plants. This meant there were few insect predators. Following on from that was most people in the area used an ant powder that contained Fipronil or something else and both chemicals killed all insects and spiders. This killed all the bees, wasps, praying mantis or other predatory insects, and when an insect bred in the area, there was nothing to control it. Finally it was caused by dirty neighbours that couldn't/ wouldn't clean up their sheds or do anything to control the pests.
It was stressful and my neighbours must have thought I was nuts going off all the time.
I don't like killing things and initially tried using natural repellants but they didn't do anything. I tried stepping on things and catching and moving things outside. But eventually it became too much and I went nuts and started using alcohol in a spray bottle and a cigarette lighter. By the end of it I was pretty close to looney bin status and had zero tolerance for anything that moved. It was awful.
There were also flies that would appear between September and January. They were horrible bloody things. You literally couldn't go outside during the day otherwise they mugged you. And this continued for several hours after the sun went down. They didn't go away when you waved your hand about. They were persistent and would be straight up your nose, in your mouth and eyes. You would have so many on your back while walking along it looked like you were wearing a black shirt. The locals would say "the flies are friendly today", while I would be doing the crazy dance waving my arms about screaming and yelling bloody murder at them. I'm sure the locals had a good laugh after they saw me trying to shoo the flies away.
During spring the flying ants would come out and they would be so bad you couldn't see the end of the driveway. The local crows and magpies (birds) would be sitting on the driveways eating the flying ants as they crawled out of the holes in the ground. The birds would eat so many ants they could barely fly away at the end of the day. And they didn't make any impact on the insects. For every ant eaten, 10 more would escape. You could see streams of them just crawling out and flying away. I walked down the road one day to go to the shop. By the time I passed 3 houses, I was literally covered in flying ants and had to return home because they were crawling all over me.