When Warnings Are Ignored

If Indonesia shows what happens when people have nothing standing between them and the crocodile, Australia shows the other half of the truth. And it is not entirely flattering. Here is a wealthy country with warning signs, public campaigns, ranger patrols and genuine infrastructure, and it is precisely because of those things that Australians so rarely die. Yet people still die. They do. And when they do, it is very often not the wide-eyed tourist who takes the fatal risk. It is the local, the confident, the one who has decided that the rules were written for somebody else.

The causeway that keeps proving the point

Nowhere concentrates this lesson like Cahills Crossing, the tidal causeway on the East Alligator River where Kakadu National Park meets Arnhem Land. The attack chapters later in this book set out its deaths and its crocodile counts in full. What belongs here is the behaviour. At the turn of the tide, fish pour over the concrete and the crocodiles gather to meet them. People fish there anyway. They wade the crossing anyway. They stand at the water's edge to photograph the very animals that could take them, sometimes with the tide already washing over their feet.