Beyond Australia

No stretch of water on Earth carries a heavier crocodilian reputation than the arc of coast and river that runs from the mouths of the Ganges, down through Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, across New Guinea, and onto the northern shoulder of Australia. Australia, for all its fame, sits at the quiet end of that arc. The animal a reader has come to know from the Northern Territory, the saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus), is not an Australian animal that happens to stray abroad. Nothing of the kind. It is the most widely distributed crocodilian on the planet, and Australia holds only its southern frontier.

Follow the saltie north and west and it never really leaves you. It never does. It hauls out on the beaches of New Guinea, patrols the tidal rivers of Borneo and Sumatra, threads the mangroves of the Philippines and Malaysia, and works the estuaries of mainland Southeast Asia. It reaches the east coast of India and the great tangled delta of the Sundarbans, where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra empty into the Bay of Bengal. Across every mile of that range it is the same animal: the same size, the same patience, the same capacity to take a person from the water's edge. What changes from country to country is not the predator. It is the number of people who die to it, and that difference is the true subject of this half of the book.