Will Chaffey

Review: Swimming With Crocodiles by Will Chaffey.

This is a true story of adventure and survival. The first half of the book was slow pace and not really exciting as the second half which was worth the read. Will Chaffey starts his story about the last two years of high school and how he liked to pull pranks, joke around, and just getting fair grades to be able to graduate. He had sent applications out to many colleges but didn’t get any response, which the reader will find out why near the end of the book. Many of his friends were accepted and were all heading to different colleges after the summer break. Will wasn’t really in a hurry to go to college and his parents were disappointed especially when he announced he was going to Australia hoping to find a purpose in life and have some fun along the way.

Once he got to Australia he worked odd jobs for spending money and after a couple of months he met Jeff, an enigmatic older wanderer, who was an expert on reptiles and plants. With funding from an Australian Geographic magazine, Will and Jeff devised a travel plan to explore the remote Prince Regent River, Australia’s Grand Canyon, on a dangerous expedition to photograph animals of near distinction and try to find a King Cobra, known to man but never photographed before. Their journey took them to the hard outback of Australia where Rain Forest is so dense and vast with death looming around every corner, between every step, hanging from trees and vines, and whatever lingers on the saltwater shores and what submerges secretly in the river beds may be the cause of the last breath they take. They needed to be well prepared for the climate, the terrain with provisions as; water, food, clothing and foot gear. However, Will was not taking this journey seriously until the second month when they were lost, running out of food, and having a hard time finding good water.

Will Chaffey style and twist of humor does enhance the story at times. They always tried to stay near water but sometime they got sidetracked. Will loved the water and every chance he got he went swimming with the crocodiles like the title of the book says. However, a large saltwater crocodile will kill you given the chance but freshwater crocodiles are not man eaters, but they might bite you just out of curiosity, but rarely molest a human. So, this was new information for me but I still won’t swim with the creatures….

Will was also informative about Aboriginal life that once inhabited this area, the information on the herpetology, botany, the Australian history, and his perception of the beauty of life and the natural world was fascinating to read about. However, the story should have started with the second half because of adventure through the Outback’s of Australia was exciting, intriguing, and a straightforward seriousness of being prepared to take a journey of this nature. Will Chaffey went back to America after a year in Australia.


… (més)

Swimming with Crocodiles is an interesting hybrid: a coming of age story, mingled with travelogue and Nat Geo styled adventure tale. Eighteen year old Will Chaffey was rejected by a number of universities after completing his High School diploma at the prestigious Milton school, and decided to take a trip overseas to Australia. It was there he met Geoff Cunningham, adventurer, nomad, and herpetologist, who took him along on a trip deep into the Kimberleys in Western Australia. It's a good story, gripping and thoughtful. Chaffey manages to successfully toe the line between providing the reader with a good deal of information on the flora and fauna – some of it magnificent – of the area, and creating an engaging plot with a deeper underlying theme.With all the skills of a fiction writer, Chaffey presents a cast of interesting characters – students, scientists and hippies, from Bill, the grad student biologist from Berkeley who led his team of trappers and data collectors, to Peter, the South African farmer giving his land back to the forest. But the most interesting character is Geoff, the strange herpetologist who convinces him to join in and split the petrol for an exhibition into the remote Kimberly, ostensibly to find new reptile species, take photographs, and become the first white men to walk the headwaters of the Prince Regent River to the falls of the King Cascade. If they had succeeded without a hitch, it would have been an interesting story, full of Geoff's extensive knowledge of the land and its inhabitants, particularly reptilian and of Chaffey's observations and sometimes wide-eyed wonder. But there was a hitch. After forty days in the wilderness, they reached their end-point – The King Cascade. Then they sit down to wait for a boat to come in and collect them, but nothing comes. After weeks of waiting, no boat arrives, and they end up having to walk another 70kms to get out. The adventure becomes a life or death story where starvation is just around the corner, exhaustion threatens to overtake them, and the pair almost end up as croc food. What Chaffey discovers about himself and about the world he lives in during that close shave makes for an exciting read.Throughout the book, Chaffey punctuates his rich descriptions of the land he is discovering, with his fears, his sense of the future, and his growing self-development. His sense of time and space changes, and he begins to see, everywhere, the bigger context of his role in the world and of its fragility.This sense of both the fragility of nature, and the fragility of man within nature, becomes an underlying theme that carries the book beyond simply a travelogue. We begin to identify with Chaffey as a character, and his development becomes meaningful, but we also put his experience into our own context, and it therefore becomes meaningful to us. Not all of us will have to reach into crocodile infested waters to retrieve a lost fishing rod – our only means of obtaining food, and not all of us will come to the brink of starvation and death in an environment both beautiful and unforgiving. But most of us will experience things that will change us, force us to grow, and question what we knew about ourselves. In this way, as readers, we can identify with Chaffey's experience, and enjoy it as both a story and as an informative foray into one of Australia's most forbidding, and compelling landscapes.… (més)

Swimming with Crocodiles is an interesting hybrid: a coming of age story, mingled with travelogue and Nat Geo styled adventure tale. Eighteen year old Will Chaffey was rejected by a number of universities after completing his High School diploma at the prestigious Milton school, and decided to take a trip overseas to Australia. It was there he met Geoff Cunningham, adventurer, nomad, and herpetologist, who took him along on a trip deep into the Kimberleys in Western Australia. It's a good story, gripping and thoughtful. Chaffey manages to successfully toe the line between providing the reader with a good deal of information on the flora and fauna – some of it magnificent – of the area, and creating an engaging plot with a deeper underlying theme.With all the skills of a fiction writer, Chaffey presents a cast of interesting characters – students, scientists and hippies, from Bill, the grad student biologist from Berkeley who led his team of trappers and data collectors, to Peter, the South African farmer giving his land back to the forest. But the most interesting character is Geoff, the strange herpetologist who convinces him to join in and split the petrol for an exhibition into the remote Kimberly, ostensibly to find new reptile species, take photographs, and become the first white men to walk the headwaters of the Prince Regent River to the falls of the King Cascade. If they had succeeded without a hitch, it would have been an interesting story, full of Geoff's extensive knowledge of the land and its inhabitants, particularly reptilian and of Chaffey's observations and sometimes wide-eyed wonder. But there was a hitch. After forty days in the wilderness, they reached their end-point – The King Cascade. Then they sit down to wait for a boat to come in and collect them, but nothing comes. After weeks of waiting, no boat arrives, and they end up having to walk another 70kms to get out. The adventure becomes a life or death story where starvation is just around the corner, exhaustion threatens to overtake them, and the pair almost end up as croc food. What Chaffey discovers about himself and about the world he lives in during that close shave makes for an exciting read.Throughout the book, Chaffey punctuates his rich descriptions of the land he is discovering, with his fears, his sense of the future, and his growing self-development. His sense of time and space changes, and he begins to see, everywhere, the bigger context of his role in the world and of its fragility.This sense of both the fragility of nature, and the fragility of man within nature, becomes an underlying theme that carries the book beyond simply a travelogue. We begin to identify with Chaffey as a character, and his development becomes meaningful, but we also put his experience into our own context, and it therefore becomes meaningful to us. Not all of us will have to reach into crocodile infested waters to retrieve a lost fishing rod – our only means of obtaining food, and not all of us will come to the brink of starvation and death in an environment both beautiful and unforgiving. But most of us will experience things that will change us, force us to grow, and question what we knew about ourselves. In this way, as readers, we can identify with Chaffey's experience, and enjoy it as both a story and as an informative foray into one of Australia's most forbidding, and compelling landscapes.… (més)