Confronting the crocodile that mauled the Barefoot Bushman

As a rule, Australians hate to think of themselves as part of the food chain and we generally aren't.

How could we be when 75 percent of us live in big cities far from the rigours of the natural world?

We are the most urbanised people on earth but we claim ownership of a huge, empty continent. Yet when some of us are taken by predators after venturing into the ocean or into a tropical river, what outrage we vent against the natural world!

We so easily forget that more Australians have died or been hospitalised every year from bee stings than from crocodiles and sharks. And that 1200 people died on our roads last year.

On average, three Australians are killed by sharks every year and about the same from crocodiles. So, why the hysteria?

The days I spent shooting this story with Barefoot Bushman Rob Bred reminded me again that we share our vast continent with an extraordinary population of wonderful creatures great and small and that they have every bit as much right to the tenure of these lands as have we.

It's us who are the newcomers to this country and indeed to the planet, while crocodiles have been on earth unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

Our fear of such awesome predators must have been hard-wired into our genes, as I immediately realised when I heard the loud, sharp and almost metallic clang of a crocodile's jaws snapping shut at close quarters.

I leapt and made comments that couldn't be broadcast.

Each time those awful jaws snapped shut I reacted to the primordial horror. Certainly, according to Charlie Darwin, I was only alive now because my ancestors had the better sense to stay well away from that terrible sound.

For me, almost 30 years of reporting on 60 Minutes has conferred some scary moments and getting into that croc enclosure in Queensland this week should have been one of the scariest.

But in this business, you calculate the odds and as an inveterate coward I figured you couldn't get up close with a monster crocodile in safer company than that of Bredl.

He has been bitten many times and has survived until now.

So sensibly I made sure to keep Rob between the crocodile and myself. After all,  I had to survive to tell the tale.