Australia is home to an astonishing number of animals, plants, and insects that can kill you, and Queensland feels like the epicentre for those natural hazards. One of them is the saltwater crocodile. Before visiting Port Douglas in Queensland, I wanted to do some research.

The saltwater crocodile, or "saltie," as it's called here, lives in northern Australia. Characterized as a "living fossil," the saltie has remained nearly the same for 100 million years. It's the largest, most aggressive crocodile on earth. An average male is 17 feet (5 meters) long and weighs half a ton (450 kilograms).

In Queensland, a state about 2.5 times the size of Texas, there were 35 croc attacks between 1985 and January 2018. Nearly one-third of the attacks were fatal. To keep the numbers in perspective, horses and farmyard animals account for more deaths than crocodiles each year in Queensland, and those deaths are due to falls or collisions.

In 2014, the government of Queensland started a public information campaign called "Be Croc Wise." The guidance can be distilled into two tips. The first is to know the area. In Queensland, visitors should expect that ALL waterways have crocodiles. Pay attention to the warning signs and don't assume areas without warning signs are safe.

The second tip is to understand how saltwater crocodiles operate. Salties are opportunistic, patient predators. They will eat anything and wait underwater for prey to come by, staying submerged for up to four hours without taking a breath. Salties are most active at dawn, dusk, or during the night and most aggressive during their breeding season from September to April.

So, stay away from the water where crocs are known to be, particularly at dawn, dusk, and night time. Easy-to-follow advice, right?

Apparently not for everyone. A riverboat operator we met on the Daintree River said, "Most people who are the victims of croc attacks are stupid. I think it must be Darwin's way of getting rid of stupid people. To stay safe, all you have to do is ask yourself three things: Are crocs known to be here? Is it dawn, dusk, or night time? Are you within three meters of the water's edge? That's it—all sorted."

His three questions became our mantra for the rest of the trip, and we added one more: Are we being stupid?

One of the things I admire about Australians is their ability to accept danger. They don't kill all the crocodiles or forbid swimming and boating. Instead, they manage the risk by giving people information and expecting them to be responsible. Plus, they keep their sense of humor about sharing the land with dangerous animals. Plums that are marketed to children are called "croc eggs."

Armed with sensible information about how to avoid crocodiles, we had fun in Queensland—and enjoyed the croc eggs too.

In the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) this year, 28 May is the first Reconciliation Day Public Holiday. It’s an opportunity to focus on reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians and to come to terms with Australia’s history. As Kevin Rudd, Former Prime Minister, noted: “There comes a time in the history of nations, that in order to embrace fully their future, they must fully reconcile with their past.”

When European colonialism began in the late 1700s, thousands of indigenous Australians were forced from their land. They died from disease or were killed by the colonists. By the 1850s, what was left of the indigenous Australian population was confined to reserves (similar to the experience of Native Americans in the United States). Between 1910 to 1970, government officials removed many indigenous children from their families, placing them into state care for “assimilation” into white culture. These children were known as the
stolen generations.

In the 20th century, a civil rights movement in Australia led to a referendum in 1967. More than 90 percent of Australians voted to remove clauses from the constitution that discriminated against indigenous Australians. In 1993, the Native Title Act allowed indigenous Australians to claim land when they can establish unbroken occupancy of an area. In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a national apology to the stolen generations.

Despite these advances, there’s still a long way to go. Indigenous Australians still struggle with basic inequalities in healthcare, education, and housing as compared to the rest of Australia’s population.
 
ACT’s new Reconciliation Day public holiday is another step in a long road and part of a National Reconciliation Week in Australia, which runs from 27 May to 3 June.

When I imagined living in Australia, I pictured kangaroos and sunshine and eucalyptus trees. Cooking never crossed my mind. If I had given it any thought at all, I probably would have expected endless, easy dinners of shrimp on the barbie. Instead, I found unexpected cooking challenges. Even simple recipes became complicated by substitutions and conversions. 

For example, we have a recipe from my mother-in-law called “Million Dollar Chicken.” It’s about as easy as a recipe gets and my go-to comfort food here as we leave autumn, heading toward a chilly winter.

The first four ingredients are no problem, once I've chosen from the five different kinds of paprika in the grocery store.

The one stick of butter? That’s a little harder. Butter comes in blocks here rather than sticks, and it’s measured in grams. (I knew I should have paid more attention in third grade when we spent maybe a whole day and a half on the metric system.) With some research, I discovered that one stick of butter as sold in the States is equivalent to 113 grams. My block of butter is 250 grams. Using my handy kitchen scale that will measure ounces or grams, I figured out what portion of my butter block equalled 113 grams. 

The next three items are easy—no challenges there.

Now the cooking sherry. My local grocery store doesn't carry it. Or cooking wines, for that matter. If you want to cook with wine, you buy a bottle from the liquor store. I looked for something we had on hand instead and ended up substituting cognac for the sherry.

The juice of one lemon? No problem. We have a lemon tree in our backyard, and the lemons continue to ripen, despite the colder weather.

Cans of condensed cream of mushroom and cream of chicken soup? Time for another substitution since I couldn't find condensed cream of mushroom soup. I used a chicken and mushroom blend of ready-to-serve soup instead and combined a portion of it with cans of condensed cream of chicken soup, trying to achieve the approximate consistency I remembered.

The next step was to mix everything together in a casserole dish and bake in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. That required another conversion, because my oven here is fan-forced and heats by Celsius degrees. Luckily, I’ve downloaded a table to do temperature conversions.

And that's it: two conversions and two substitutions later, I've made a facsimile of Million Dollar Chicken. It doesn't taste exactly the same, but we still call it comfort food.

There are even electric ant detection dogs. The ants emit pheromones that the dogs can track to find the ants.

The electric ant eradication program has been successful in eliminating the ants from nearly 70 acres in six areas in Northern Queensland. The program is scheduled to finish next year.