Twenty years after Crocodile Dundee convinced the world Australians were all fearless crocodile wrestlers, life has begun imitating art Down Under.
Last Saturday, an Australian man punched a shark which had been munching on his right leg, sending the stunned white pointer on his way with an empty stomach.
Jason Cull, 37, was swimming off Middleton Beach in Western Australia when the four-metre shark moved in for what it presumably thought was a quick snack.
Instead, Cull ignored the normal conventions of the food chain and gave the giant predator a good, hard smack in the head.
"I sort of punched it," Cull said from his hospital bed.
"I just remember being dragged backwards underwater.
"I felt along it, I found its eye and I poked it in the eye, and that's when it let go."
On April 3 in the Northern Territory, home of the mythical Crocodile Dundee, a man jumped on a crocodile after it began eating his wife.
Wendy Petherick, 36, was standing on a river bank washing her face in Litchfield National Park when a 2.5-metre saltwater crocodile lunged at her, locking both her legs in its giant jaws.
Her husband, Norm Moreen, 39, a firm adherent to the "A Man's Got To Do What A Man's Got To Do" school of thought, immediately jumped in the water to join the fracas.
"I just jumped on top of it," he told journalists as he was treated in hospital in the Northern Territory capital of Darwin.
"There was no time for fears -- when you want to save someone, especially someone you love."
For her own part, Ms. Petherick wasn't going quietly.
"I grabbed him by the jaw, on top," she said of the croc.
"My finger just ripped on the top (as I) was trying to open his mouth.
"I was in the water and he was pulling me under."
The couple, like Cull, emerged from their bout suffering serious but not life-threatening injuries, and Australians were cheered immeasurably.
From the taipan snakes and red back spiders of the inland to the crocs and sharks of the oceans, this continent has always offered its inhabitants an open menu when it comes to ways of getting yourself killed.
Of course, the average Australian has better odds of dropping dead from a peanut allergy than being attacked by a killer shark
And Science Daily tells us fatal shark attacks worldwide dipped to their lowest levels in two decades in 2007, with the sole casualty involving a swimmer vacationing in the South Pacific.
Australians get off lighter than the U.S. when it comes to sharks, with about half of the world's attacks occurring in the United States mainland and Hawaiian waters.
But, like Canadians whose skills at diplomacy may owe something to the presence of grizzly bears in their country, the very fact that animals that eat people share our favourite bathing sites has created an uneasy relationship between European Australians and the sea.
Celebrities like Steve Irwin (the croc hunter) and Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee) who were fearless in the face of sharks and crocs had great currency with the locals.
We've used them to demonstrate to the rest of the world our admiral physical courage while all the while paddling cautiously in the beach shallows, trembling at the first sign of a dark, darting shadow in the surf.
In the book 100 Years Between the Flags, about the surf life-saving movement, writers Nancy Cushing and Leone Huntsman suggest the ocean has played merry hell with the Australian psyche since settlement, even without the sharks.
"In the early days, the beaches constituted a sea fence for the convicts, one wall of the prison constraining and confining them...
"For new settlers, the sight of the sea, with its limitless horizon, was a piercing reminder of their isolation."
The new arrivals left the beach largely to the original inhabitants -- the Aborigines -- who knew and understood the ocean.
Today, our beaches are often more far more crowded than our streets and every so often they throw up genuinely horrific stories which don't involve sharks being assaulted by swimmers with serious attitude.
On April 15 a teenager who "lived to surf" was fatally mauled by a suspected bull shark while bodyboarding at Ballina in northern New South Wales.
Peter Edmonds, 16, was bitten twice on the left leg and died from blood loss, despite the actions of Brock Curtis, who bravely dragged his best mate to shore.
Brock's sisters, Kylie and Shelley, told a funeral two days later of their "big little brother" who brought laughter and sunshine into their home.
"He died doing what he loved," Shelley said.
Michael Madigan is the Winnipeg Free Press correspondent in Australia. He writes about politics for the Brisbane-based Courier Mail.
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