As crocodile attack shows go, there was no reason to suppose this wasn’t a good one. He prodded a few twelve-footers, lying invisible in twenty inches of stagnant water, into rearing up and showing us their teeth. By means of a large piece of meat on the end of a very long rope he enticed the meanest croc in the place – an eighteen-footer this one – into a simulated death roll – the method whereby, prior to ingestion, the croc subaqueously subdues his victim. And altogether he put on a convincing demonstration – should anyone have needed to be convinced – of why an Australian crocodile was to the human body what an American Baha’i was to the human nervous system.

Nevertheless he confessed himself to be even more frightened of the cassowary. ‘Don’t be fooled,’ he warned us, ‘these birds are accomplished killers. Just north of here is a creek called Cassowary Creek. So named because it was there that a cassowary killed three dogs and a boy in a single encounter. It’s the toe that does the damage – that thing, there, that looks like a scimitar.’

I wasn’t interested in any of that. Lethal animals are ten a penny. Even geese would kill you if they could. What impressed me about the cassowary was its digestive system. No messing about with gastric juices here. As soon as the bird had tossed down his apples and bananas whole and unpeeled he went looking for rocks to swallow: small stones, pebbles, whatever was laying around – he wasn’t particular. Then he’d go off on a short galumphing run so that the stones could bounce up and down and pulverize the fruit. Primitive, but according to Peter, highly efficient. Certainly we saw no cassowary looking dyspeptic while we were there. And the rocks and stones? Passed quite effortlessly through the system and lying there on the ground waiting for the next time. The cassowary his own little eco-miraculous Great Chain of Being.

Before we left, Peter delivered us a small oration on the subject of wild pigs. Apparently the damage caused to the Queensland rainforests by unscrupulous developers was as nothing compared to the havoc wreaked by the wild pigs. ‘They’re not native, you see,’ he explained. ‘The Poms brought them in. I know – I know – my fault. But I’m not ashamed to say so. Now the politicians in Canberra won’t let them be shot. That’s the wrong kind of conservation. They’re “monitoring the situation”, they say, but by the time the situation’s been monitored the pigs will have destroyed the forest.’

These were the only animals Peter spoke slightingly of. I had no reason to doubt the truth of his diagnosis but I put his special passion against them down to their being Pommy pigs. It’s common and natural for the English to turn against their own when they come to Australia. The country somehow shames you.