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Adventure Travel
’m walking to Normanton’s railway station when my eye is caught by Krys the Croc. It’s a lifesize fibreglass model of the largest crocodile ever to be shot in Australia, and it’s hard to ignore at 8.63 metres in length. As well as being terrifying, it tells a story about the frontier nature of this town in the Gulf Savannah region of north-west Queensland. The original Krys was downed in 1957 by Krystyna Pawlowski, who later regretted that fatal shot and became a conservationist in partnership with her husband Ron. In the 1970s, they helped convince the Australian Government to ban the hunting of crocodiles. There’s always been a tension between nature and development here in Normanton, the place that inspired Nevil Shute’s novel A Town Like Alice. At one point it was expected that Normanton would become the next big tropical city – another Darwin – but instead it’s stayed a sleepy
DEC 2019/JAN 2020
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