I had an encounter with
Gympie-Gympie/Stinging bush
(Dendrocnide moroides) in the early 1980s when I was camping for some weeks at Emmagen Creek, Cape Tribulation which is about 50 miles north of Cairns and past Mossman in Queensland's Daintree rainforest. (Back then, Mossman was a single street with none of the modern luxurious tourist hotels/accommodation that it has today and Emmagen Creek was just cane toad infested wilderness.)
To say the stings were painful would be gross understatement (it's not something one ever forgets)! Nevertheless I was lucky as my encounter could have been much, much worse if it had not been for a quick-thinking local who grabbed me by the belt and pulled me back as we were tracking through some thick undergrowth (he saw it before me but not quite quickly enough).
Also, I'd been forewarned about Gympie-Gympie and another nasty native which is aptly known as Lawyer Cane/Vine or Wait-A-While (Calamus muelleri) — once you're in its 'claws', needle-like hooks, you definitely wait—you're not going anywhere quickly (extracting oneself is a long and painful process).
Being forewarned doesn't help much if one's only description of these hazards is verbal, one needs a picture as both are hard to see in the thick scrub and undergrowth and much of it looks pretty much the same (both are easily disguised amongst other greenery).
Fortunately the Gympie-Gympie only got me on the back of one hand. I was also lucky in another respect in that the local advised me to wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt before we started out on that treck. (As it's so hot and humid in the Daintree such attire wasn't the usual norm, but getting around shirtless and in shorts is.)
Back at base, much time was spent with the medical kit tweezers extracting the essentially invisible hair-like threads that had embedded themselves into my skin. I recall some lidocaine-based sunburn cream helped but my hand was sore for ages afterwards.