Thursday 10 May 2007

Close encounters




At last, the authentic slice of Australiana I’ve been yearning for. Overgrown with mangroves and pandanas, Cooktown’s Endeavour River and its maze of lagoons ooze an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere - so twisted is the network of tributaries that it would be easy for the uninitiated to get lost and simply disappear forever.

It reminds me of the scene in Crocodile Dundee when the hopelessly out-of-her depth, innocent but dumb Linda Kozlowski sets off to show Mick she can go walkabout on her own. She’s a New Yorker after all. She can handle it. A dubious Mick tracks her – close enough to save a damsel in distress but far enough away that she can’t see him – and we know just what he’s thinking as she bends over the billabong (duhh!) in her dumb ’80s butt-floss bodysuit before he jumps out of nowhere to put a knife through the skull of a croc that’s suddenly hanging off the end of her water bottle.

There’s no '80s butt-floss bodysuits out here, of course, but the place reminds me, just the same.


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