Indonesia — The Deadliest Water on Earth

If you want to understand why this book insists that the crocodile is not the problem, go to Indonesia. It is the same saltwater crocodile that patrols the Northern Territory, the very same species, no larger and no more aggressive. And yet Indonesia loses more people to crocodile attack, by a wide and terrible margin, than anywhere else in the world.

The numbers make the point with brutal clarity. In 2024, the CrocAttack database recorded 179 attacks and 92 deaths in Indonesia. In the same year, in the same species' Australian range, the figure was seven attacks and three deaths. Same apex predator; roughly twenty-five to thirty times the toll. None of it is the animal. No difference in the crocodile can account for a gap that size, and the difference is entirely human: a matter of how people are made to live alongside it, and whether anything at all stands between them and it.