The Crocodile Hunter
Collision Course

Critics have loudly protested there’s no plot, but it’s right there in the title, akin to Gordon Douglas’s Call Me Bwana and impossible to miss. A falling CIA satellite sends a small capsule to Queensland, where Steve and Terri Irwin are in search of a large predatory crocodile, which swallows it. Agents from the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office travel to Australia after the thing.

There’s a satire of American intelligence, which mistakes the globetrotting Irwins for operatives, and of Aussie intelligence, which takes the real operatives for poachers, and ultimately there is a rebuke of litterers in the outback. The crocodile is captured and relocated to “another river system”, and eventually excretes the capsule, which could change the balance of power in the sweet wide world.

Along with this critical oversight came an animadversion on Stainton as incompetent, whereas the real collision is between his fluid and flawless style vs. certain notions of style countenanced by critics, and there is Brozzie, a cattle-raising shotgun-wielding sheila with a venomous hatred of crocodiles and a pack of hounds for the man from Fisheries and Fauna.

Steve Irwin’s Ghosts of War

The relics of war in the Pacific lovingly examined and in many cases uncovered by the gamest sonofabitch in Australia. Crashed planes, sunken ships, beach positions and Jap fortifications of the utmost interest, personally attended.