Meet Matt Wright, Australia's answer to Bear Grylls

AS A kid, Matthew Wright would catch snakes and spiders and keep them in his bedroom. That sense of adventure could be about to make him a TV star.

AS A kid, Matthew Wright would catch snakes and spiders and keep them in his bedroom.

Matthew Wright hauls an Italian wool jacket over his broad shoulders and then fusses with it a little until it's sitting comfortably  ... or, as comfortably as it ever will be for him. You see, he's not really an Italian-wool-suit kind of fella.

Minutes later he fumbles with a flame-orange silk tie, like a schoolboy on his first day, tossing the small tongue clumsily over the large, looking imploringly into the group for help. He's not much of a silk-tie fella, either.

Don't be fooled. He looks infuriatingly good - filling out wool jackets and crisp, cotton shirts opened just enough to reveal a tasteful measure of hairy chest and a hulking shark-tooth pendant.

It's just that a suit-and-tie fashion shoot with make-up and slicked-down hair is, well, just a little out of Wright's comfort zone.

Wright's a slow-walking, slow-talking Bushie - tall, tanned and broad, all moleskin and leather. But certainly not your average Bushie. His comfort zone is sweeping across the vastness of the Outback in a chopper, wrangling crocs, collecting their eggs, handling deadly snakes, negotiating with wild buffalo or cleanskin bulls.

Risking his life, basically.

Wright may have to get used to the suit-and-tie fashion shoot with make-up, slicked-down hair and bright lights, though. This swarthy boy from Queensland's Sunshine Coast with rugged, male-model looks and a talent for wrestling crocodiles into surrender could be about to enter the ranks of international TV star.

Wright is the new face of Nat Geo Wild - National Geographic's US-based wildlife channel. Later this year, his face is to be beamed into 90 million homes in 90 countries in 37 languages, his derring-do feeding our seemingly insatiable appetite for nature's wildest predators.

Not bad for a "shy" lad who spectacularly failed media studies at school.

And, considering the celebrity storm that could be about to hit, Wright's managed to keep everything pretty much low-key - Google or YouTube him and you're unlikely to find much at all, save for a single appearance on Channel 7 in 2009 showing him catching a 5.6m, 850kg crocodile in the Northern Territory.

Wright's been inconspicuous by design - over six years he's been gradually and patiently incubating his plan to hatch a wildlife TV career.

His early life reads like Ernest Hemingway meets Huckleberry Finn - a spinning mixture of manly adventure and boyish mischief.

Take one of Wright's earliest memories, for example, that of living in a humble shack - "more like a tent and a tin shed really" - on a beach in Papua New Guinea.

"My stepdad had this great dream of sailing around the world in this great big yacht, so we sold up everything, got across to Taipei to pick it up, tried to sail it through a hurricane and snapped it to pieces," he recalls.

"We got to PNG and got stuck there for nine months. We were living in this little shack on the beach next to a plantation.

"We started going to school with the (native children). We had a great time."

The family eventually returned to live in Cairns where he was mentored in the ways of hunting, fishing and handling wildlife by a bloke called "Jerry".

Even from early on, though, Wright says he was obsessed with anything that "crawled or slithered".

"It just seemed to grow and grow, and in school holidays with my mate Jono, we'd be out catching brown snakes and scorpions and bringing them home," Wright says.

"His mother and father were just havin' fits. Good times, full of adventure. We were ... up to mischief all the time. Back then we wanted to set up and run a wildlife park."

At 10, Wright's family moved to Mt Compass, south of Adelaide, where he shunned TV and computer games in favour of a rifle with which he hunted rabbits and roos, skinning and eating them. Dangerous snakes were still on the radar.

"I was still catching brown snakes and used to keep them in my bedroom, until the ol' girl bargained with me to stop ... but it didn't last long. Within a few months, I had this big carpet python. I used to take snakes to school - the teachers hated that. The kids loved it."

His mother also taught him about respect for animal life, a sensitivity for conservation, and to kill only for a purpose. "I was forever picking up injured animals with busted wings or legs and patchin' 'em up."

Wright loathed high school and so, straight after Year 12, he packed up his car and hit the road north, leaving South Australia in his dust.

While working at Kings Canyon Resort, in the Northern Territory's Watarrka National Park, he came to the attention of the local parks and wildlife staff for having "a few snakes and scorpions" in his room.

They soon enlisted his help with wildlife studies and catching venomous snakes. But he couldn't stay still for long, drifting from job to job - a ski resort in Victoria, a cattle station in NSW, oil rigs around the country and three years in the Army Reserves.

At 22, he left the Reserves. He realised, probably smartly, that a career of high-octane reptile-catching isn't something you can carry easily into your gentler years. He set about getting his helicopter licence.

"My mindset when I was younger was

I need to get a job I can do when I'm 60 or 70 and I thought flying choppers would be perfect," he says.

Mustering by helicopter in the Outback soon led him down a path of wildlife relocation - tracking, capturing and transporting a range of wild animals. He also became expert at collecting crocodile eggs for meat and skin production at croc farms - a pursuit considered one of the world's more dangerous.

Wright has since expanded from reptiles and herds of buffalo and wild horses to polar bears in the Arctic and grizzlies in North America.

He's also just back from an elephant relocation in Malaysia, which coincidentally involved a brief altercation with a 3.5m-long king cobra.

("Yeah, he was angry. Had a bit of fight about him, that boy.")

Wright's aim is, wherever possible, to remove and relocate problem animals rather than kill them, any animal, anywhere, anytime.

Chopper pilot Luke Kingsley knows Wright from mustering days at Wrotham Park Station, in far north Queensland.

"He's a good pilot, but a bit of a mad bastard," Kingsley says. "He's not afraid to have a go at anything."

Variously, Wright's a "ball of style", got a fair bit of "swagger" about him but, above all, implausibly courageous, says Kingsley, who last year also helped film some episodes in the Outback.

"I couldn't see myself being dangled into a croc nest with the croc in the nest, with nothing but a stick and basket," Kingsley says. "Nah. That's bloody dangerous. He's just gonna keep going forward, Matt. If he wants something he just does it. He'll go a long way."

Wright's the breed of bloke who sees nothing extraordinary in the ridiculously extraordinary - wrangling crocodiles, catching snakes or staring down a mad-as-hell bull.

"Crocs? Nah, not worried about them. I'm more worried about (mechanical failure in) the chopper," he says.

"I don't see it as being dangerous. It's not dangerous if you know what you're doing.

Coming into work isn't dangerous is it?"

Yet Wright could see the raw excitement on the faces of Wrotham Park guests when he took them on chopper joyrides, fishing, bull-catching or running brumbies.

"They just loved it," he explains, with a hint of surprise. "They loved seeing the muster and the crocs, the impact of the wildlife and especially egg-collecting from the crocs."

Wright began filming his exploits and got the same reaction from his friends who would sit spellbound as they watched the shaky, but enthusiastic footage.

"That's where it started, and I thought this might be something I could do at a national level. But certainly not a global level."

Wright's early attempts were naive, clunky affairs - camera in one hand while he wrangled and poked and tussled with the other, narrating his way through it all as best he could.

Over six years he kept filming, editing on his days off, filming, editing, slowly moulding a basic pilot to show TV production types.

The first major exposure, though, came two years ago when Seven filmed him catching and relocating a huge 5.6m croc in the NT.

The phones went into meltdown, explains Wright's agent, Nick Fordham.

They signed with a US production house, which billed Matt and sidekick Jimmy as modern-day, wildlife superheroes saving the children of Australia from marauding crocodiles and sharks who'd had a whiff of blood.

Despite its huge budget, that relationship was, perhaps not surprisingly, brief.

Nat Geo Wild stepped up, offering an authentic reflection of what Wright does and - with the support of Screen Australia, Screen NSW and production partner Freehand - Wright will be catapulted on to the world stage in spring.

The excitement - and brash marketing - in a statement by National Geographic Channel's supremo, Geoff Daniels, is palpable.

He describes Wright as a "wild-world action hero". "He's like the Lone Ranger, riding in to save people and animals in distress but his horse is a helicopter and he uses a rope instead of a gun," Daniels says.

"Matt Wright makes the dangerous business of doing good for wild animals exciting and cool."

Certainly, when you consider the impact Aussies such as Steve Irwin, Jamie Durie and Curtis Stone have had on US audiences who warmed to their laid-back, egalitarian Aussie spirit, Nat Geo can probably sense the potential return in a personality such as Wright.

T HROW in the rugged good looks, the Aussie Outback authenticity and other-world accent, he may well go orbital.

Wright could be the next big thing from Down Under - just don't suggest to Wright he's the next Steve Irwin.

The comparisons are inevitable, and there's a degree of respect there for the late croc hunter. But Wright clearly wants to make his own mark.

"It's always going to happen as soon as you start dealing with crocodiles - `You're the next Steve Irwin'. Maybe, maybe not.

"I'm not trying to take his place. He made his mark and, hopefully, I want to do the same.

"But I want to be me."

Above all, Wright wants to be genuine and have an authentic voice on conservation issues. He wants a say on the environmental balancing act between man and beast and on the wrongs of croc culling (for now, at least).

He's not one to be tied down. Two years ago he bought his house on the Sunshine Coast "to settle down" and reckons he's spent a total of three months there since.

As Wright heads home, his mind isn't on TV stardom. He's thinking about his next contract - shifting a croc or moving a troublesome bear.

"It hasn't hit home yet. At the moment I'm still looking for (chopper) jobs in PNG and Canada," he says.

Stardom or no stardom, Wright is determined to keep his day job - collecting crocodile eggs and mustering cattle for Outback station owners.

"The guys up north really rely on me.

I can't just chuck it in and say: `I'm now doing this TV show, fellas, and can't do the work for you' and then have some Joe Blow come and take my place."

But you know the world's TV audiences - hungry for wildlife action heroes - will ensure he probably won't have to worry about his pennies for a while.