And there indeed one was, a pair of sleepy malevolent eyes, a long thin bobbled snout, the body suspended in the water in a horrible pretence of weightlessness.

Just as with lovers, your first croc isn’t necessarily your best. This one took a slow, languorous look at our steel hull and submerged himself. There was no point waiting. He could stay down longer than we could stay awake. But we would see dozens more before we were through with the north of Australia. We would meet Humpy, who wrestled with them for fun. And we would stand upon the very jetty from which a Queensland girl had tumbled backwards, glass in hand, into a pair of waiting jaws – only her fingernails found in the eighteen-footer’s belly when it was shot and gutted after an orgy of vengeance.

Before we started back for Darwin Tom took us on a quick bus tour around Jabiru, service town for the nearby uranium mines. Jabiru is a closed town. You are not permitted casually to spend the night at Jabiru unless you register as a relation of a mine employee and guarantee to stay with him. The official justification for these restrictions is that Jabiru stands on Aboriginal tribal lands, but of course the Mining Companies have reasons of their own for not minding that they’re applied.

It looked a dead, ratshit, corporate place, with secrets. Just like other closed and half-closed mining towns we would see. Funny how malevolent purposes will out in the architecture. Jabiru had clean, deserted streets and shopping precincts, and rows of neat, samey houses which were let out to employees for peanuts. It was the manicured desolation that told you all you needed to know. Had it turned out that sophisticated biological weapons were being manufactured here I wouldn’t have been surprised.

As we drove through, Tom told us the story of how the tribal elders had granted a lease to the mining companies on the understanding that they would employ available local Aboriginal labour. This was agreed, but the Aborigines kept their own hours, took rests at times which seemed appropriate to them, and sometimes didn’t turn up for work at all. Another agreement was therefore hammered out whereby the mining companies could employ whoever they wanted in return for granting the responsibility for all the town’s social services and civic amenities to the Aborigines. No sooner was this ratified by all parties than the elders placed an advertisement in Darwin offering the Jabiru social services and amenities to European tender. ‘So who says the Aborigines are simple?’ Tom asked.

I wondered how strong local feeling was these days on the question of uranium mining.