he air is soft and still when I awake pre-dawn encircled by the Hunter River’s prehistoric craggy cliffs of sandstone. Apart from the faint call of a black cockatoo echoing over the waterway, it is ghostly quiet, and as time ticks on, eerily mesmerising. Only by chance do I spot the two large marble eyeballs watching me from a slit in the flat surface of the river. Unruffled by my presence, the crocodile’s eyelids open and
