Philosopher Val Plumwood survived a crocodile attack while paddling in a canoe in Kakadu nine years ago.
I was in a canoe on a side channel of the East Alligator River in Kakadu, looking for an Aboriginal rock art site. I had been out the previous day and it had been idyllic. This day began with drizzle, which progressed into torrential rain. By early afternoon I had a strong feeling of being watched and suddenly the canoe seemed flimsy. I had a sense of danger or vulnerability and decided I wanted to go back.
I started paddling back down the channel and hadn't got far when I saw what looked like a stick ahead of me. As I was swept towards it I saw eyes and realised it was a crocodile.
I was almost past it when there was this great blow on the side of the canoe. I paddled furiously but it followed, bashing on the canoe. I looked for a place to get out, but couldn't see one. I felt sheer terror. I saw a tree growing from the water near the bank and thought maybe I could leap into it. I got ready to jump and as I did so, the crocodile came up close. I looked straight into its eyes and it looked straight into mine. It had beautiful golden-flecked eyes. I remember those vividly.
I did the thing you're advised to do, to try to look fearsome: I waved my arms and shouted. It might work with tigers but it doesn't work with crocodiles.
Then I jumped, but it got me in mid jump. I saw this blur, a flash of teeth and water as it grabbed me between the legs and took me down for a death roll. I thought: "I'm not food, I'm a human being; I don't believe this."
There was searing pain, but the worst thing was the roll, which seemed to last forever. It pushes water in your lungs and it felt like my arms and legs were coming off. When it finished, my head came clear of the water and I coughed the water out of my lungs and started to howl with pain. Then the crocodile pushed me into the second death roll.
We came up again, and this time right next to me was a big, solid, branch so I grabbed on to it. I hung on grimly, thinking I'd sooner let it tear me apart than go through another death roll.
Then, suddenly, I felt the pressure relax and realised the crocodile had let go. I tried again to jump into the tree. This time it grabbed me around the leg - the upper left thigh, which was badly damaged.
It took me down for a third death roll. Again I thought I was going to die. I just thought it was going to take a long time over it, which seemed worse than having it kill me straight out.
But a minute later it let me go, again. I gave up on the tree and tried to throw myself at the mud bank. After several tries, I got to the top and stood up and couldn't believe it; I was still alive. It was an incredible rush of elation. Because I was still in danger, I flopped away, finding my leg was in bad shape. I had shock right through my body and was feeling pretty sick; I tried lying down but felt worse, so continued to walk back in the direction of the ranger's station. I felt just a glimmer of hope that I might survive.
The rain was still torrential and it took me hours to reach the lagoon between me and the ranger station. At this stage, I started to black out and had to crawl. But then the rain stopped and it was still, abnormally still, and so the ranger heard me shouting.
Then I had a 13-hour trip to Darwin hospital. I almost lost the leg in hospital but I recovered after almost a month in intensive care and another month of skin grafts.
It was really a life-changing event for me. Those final experiences have an incredible intensity - that's why they have such a life-changing power. You see things at that point which you wouldn't normally see; it strips away a lot of your illusions about life and death. It was quite a while before I took in the full extent of how it changed my way of looking at the world. It left me with a strong sense of gratitude about being alive, which has faded but never really gone, and a feeling that life is not to be wasted.
The experience also changed my overall theoretical outlook and had a big impact on the direction of my work. It forced me to rethink a lot of things - life, death, being human, and being food. Before the crocodile, I wrote about the value of nature, but after the crocodile, I started writing about how we see ourselves as outside nature, about the power of nature and our illusions that we can control it, that we're not embodied beings and are apart from other animals.
During the encounter I had a sense that it was all a dream, that it wasn't really happening. But I now think it's ordinary life and consciousness that is the dream. We don't understand ourselves as ecological beings that are part of the food chain - we're still fighting that knowledge.
During the attack, it seemed as if I'd entered a parallel universe where I didn't count for anything, I was just a piece of meat. So I've had to develop a different idea of eating and being food, where we must honour our food and the more-than-food that all of us are, including other life forms. I don't believe we do this when we treat other animals as no more than food.
It also changed my view of death. I used to be a conventional atheist, thinking that you live your life and the story ends completely with death, that there's nothing at all after that, no immaterial world you go on to without your body. Now I still think there's no other world, but I don't think the story ends with your death. The story passes on to the other life forms you nurture with your death, nurturing those who have nurtured you, in a chain of mutual life-giving.