The Norman rises in the Gregory Range, about 200 kilometres southeast of Croydon, and runs 420 kilometres northwest until it empties into the Gulf of Carpentaria at Karumba. Along the way it gathers the Carron, Clara and Yappar Rivers and drains a catchment of more than 50,000 square kilometres - a basin the size of a small country, almost all of it flat. For most of the year much of that channel runs low or sits in disconnected waterholes. The river's character is defined less by what it does in the dry than by what it does when the rains arrive.

When the monsoon is heavy, the Norman stops being a river and becomes an inland sea. The savannah has almost no relief to channel the water, so it spreads. In 1974 the river rose to 8.8 metres at Normanton and ran straight through the town, the worst flood on record. The same floods that year, by local accounts, washed away the only photographs the hunters had kept of the great crocodile - which is partly why Krys lives on as much in story as in proof. To manage the flows, two modest structures hold water upstream: Belmore Creek Dam and Glenore Weir, together storing some 4,350 megalitres, a small leash on a very large river.

The hunter was Krystyna Pawlowski, a young Polish-born woman the outback came to call "One Shot Krys." She and her husband shot thousands of crocodiles across the Gulf, yet even during those hunting years they established Australia's first experimental crocodile farm at Karumba in 1956, studying breeding and conservation. By the late 1960s they had left the trade entirely and committed to protecting the species. The animal she shot here in 1957 became "Krys the Savannah King," and a full-size replica now lies in a park at Normanton, drawing travellers who stand beside it and struggle to believe the scale. Whatever the exact measure, the legend marks a real truth about this water: it grows crocodiles to a size that commands respect.

The estuaries near the river's mouth are dense with life - pelicans and brolgas wading the shallows, barramundi moving with the tides, and saltwater crocodiles holding the top of the food chain. These are not the river's villains but its keepers, predators that have ruled these waters far longer than any town on the bank. People here read the river accordingly: they fish it, photograph it and respect its edges, but they do not swim in it. The Norman is beautiful and it is wild, and on the Gulf those two things have never been separate.