The Wet Season Changes Everything

This is the chapter people most often fail to understand, and it is not only a Top End problem. From Darwin to Borneo to the rivers of India, people carry a mental map of where crocodiles live: in rivers, in obvious billabongs, behind warning signs where there are signs at all. That map is reasonable in the dry months. Then the monsoon comes. Once it does the map turns dangerously wrong, and the reason is the same everywhere: water, vast and moving, spreading in connected sheets across country that was dry a month before.

The Top End has two seasons, and they are not subtle

Unlike the four gentle seasons of the temperate world, the Top End essentially has two: the Dry, roughly May to September, and the Wet, roughly October to April, with the monsoon proper arriving around December. The Wet does not mean occasional showers. Nothing like it. It means monsoonal downpours that can drop staggering volumes of water in hours, day after day, until the land itself is transformed.

And the same monsoon that soaks the Top End swings clear across the saltwater crocodile’s range. The whole range. It sweeps New Guinea, Borneo, the Indonesian islands, the Philippines and the coasts of the Bay of Bengal on roughly the same calendar. The name for the season changes from one country to the next; what it does to the water does not. It lifts the rivers over their banks and stitches the wetlands into one connected sheet, and the crocodile travels on it.