"Don't worry, love, I'll take care of this," he says. "Which way?"
I point down the corridor and Steve marches off, motioning for his sidekick, a skinny-necked youth, to follow. The youth hesitates for a second before jogging to catch up with his boss. I follow.
"Ah, there he is. Just a python. He's harmless," Steve says as we arrive back at the doorway, where the snake is still in its original spot, flicking its tongue lazily.
"I've been a Territorian all my life."
This last statement is meant to imply, "I know what to do with snakes," and I'm reassured until Steve reaches out for the snake and tries to pick it up by its middle. Even I know this is not the way to wrangle a reptile; the snake immediately writhes in anger, darting its head at Steve's face. Steve flings the snake away and backs into the shrubbery as the skinny-necked youth and I flatten ourselves against the glass door.
Harmless, huh? Steve doesn't look so cocky as he emerges from the bushes, clearing his throat importantly.
"Ah, didn't have my grip quite right that time. Go and get me a plastic bag, will you mate?"
The youth gladly runs off and returns with a bag, holding it out as Steve (gingerly, this time) picks up the snake around the back of its head. The python immediately winds itself round and round Steve's wrist, trying to strangle this strange attacker, and a very silly scene follows, as Steve unwinds it from one hand, only to have it coil tightly around his other hand. Steve's starting to sweat and the plastic bag is rattling as the skinny-necked one's hands shake. Eventually Steve manages to uncoil the beast and get it into the bag.
"Yep, handled a few of these in my time," he says, holding his trophy aloft.
"Been a Territorian all my life."
I suppress the urge to smirk - after all, he's a lot braver than I am. "What are you going to do with it?" I ask. "I'll take him home," Steve says. "Be good in the garden."
I am in Darwin thanks to Sky City Casino, which wants you to know it's celebrating the 10th anniversary of its taking over the Darwin casino - but really, the city is just a jumping-off point for the breathtaking glory of Kakadu National Park, a 20,000 sq km national park, so diverse and unusual it was added to the World Heritage List in 1984.
We have only one day to explore the park, and it's a tantalising, thrilling taste. Flying into the park from Darwin in a five-seater plane, we sweep over giant sandstone escarpments, paperbark forests, mangrove swamps, rivers wide and slow, slithering like the Rainbow Serpent towards the sea.
Columns of eucalyptus smoke rise from the ground, where rangers have lit backburns to clear the vegetation before the long, hot, dry season starts. It's the same kind of firestick farming Australia's Aborigines have practised for tens of thousands of years, to control the vegetation, promote new growth and limit the ferocity of summer bushfires.
At Jabiru airport, the setting-off point for exploration of the park's north-east corner, there's a helicopter that looks straight off the set of Skippy, all yellow and orange and 70s. I'm hoping for a sighting of the crafty kangaroo megastar herself, tutting and clicking urgent public-safety messages to her owners.
"What's that, Skip? You say the uranium mine's on fire? Well, we'd better get over there and save the women and children!"
In fact, Ranger uranium mine is one of the only parts of the park not on fire, but it is frightening nonetheless - a giant hole in the earth's crust, dwarfed by its own slagheap, a pile of low-grade ore that obscures the horizon. It's one of the most controversial parts of Australia; the area's Aboriginal traditional owners lease Kakadu back to the Commonwealth Government to run as a national park, and also lease the Ranger site to mining company ERA. Another uranium deposit has been discovered at Jabiluka, about 10 minutes' drive away, but has not yet received Aboriginal approval to be mined. We drive past the entrance to the Jabiluka site, an anonymous dogleg dirt track. I've only seen it on television before, surrounded by environmentalists blockading the way to the site. I can see their point - we are just a couple of kilometres from one of the most astonishing sights in the world: the rock art of Ubirr.
Here, in the cool of overhanging rock ledges, the ancient people of these lands documented their stone-age lives, up to 20,000 years ago. The art reflects their passions; food, mainly. A giant turtle swims across the cave-wall; fish and sea-creatures are frozen in its wake - reminders of meals past. On a cliff-face, just a metre from the wooden boardwalk, some ancient has drawn a thylacine, the carnivorous marsupial better known as the Tasmanian Tiger.
"Tasmanian Tigers have been extinct up here for thousands of years; they were pushed south when the dingo came down from Asia about 6000 years ago," says our guide, Yuri Mucenieks. This painting is incomprehensibly old, and as our little tour party stands goggle-eyed, Mucenieks gives us a mental-picture metaphor for the age of the country we're standing on.
"If one man's lifespan is about 100 years, and you think of that as 1mm, you can imagine that humans have inhabited Australia for 50,000 years - that's 50m," he says.
"Then think about the age of this land mass, which is 1.6 billion years. That's 1600km."
Feeling rather insignificant, we head off on a half-hour drive east to the East Alligator River, a broad stretch of brown water which separates Kakadu on the west bank from Arnhem Land on the east - a vast expanse of Aboriginal traditional land. We're hoping for crocodiles, the bigger the better, and it's only a few minutes before our boat-driving guide, Joel Stacey of Aboriginal-owned tourist venture Guluyambi Cruises, points one out, lying on the Kakadu-side riverbank, half in and half out of the water. They're hard to spot, crocs - usually lurking just below the surface with only eyes and nostrils visible, but Stacey is ultra-vigilant, not surprisingly; this is his home.
"That one's about 10 foot long, I'd say," he says. "When I go fishing I use a rod and reel, but I'll always take a spear. I just don't feel safe with all the crocs around, unless I've got my spear."
We get out and stand on the Arnhem Land-side bank while Stacey shows us some of his tribe's ancient handicrafts: various spears, women's digging-sticks, delicate shoulder-bags for huntsmen to carry spare spear-heads. The bags, all made by women, are gorgeous; woven in coloured stripes from the soft fibres of a local riverbank plant, they stretch both sideways and lengthways and last well through a few years of heavy hunting. As we watch Stacey flick a spear at least 30m with barely a half-step to gain momentum, another group of tourists are peering across into Arnhem Land.
"That little creek down there looks really nice for a swim, doesn't it?" muses one stout lady.
"They should really put up a sign about the crocodiles, otherwise someone might just dive in. If I didn't know there were crocs around, I'd be in there as quick as anything."
Her companions look slightly hopeful.
Puttering back up the river, we pass a few blokes fishing in tubby little tinny-boats. In one, a beer-bellied fisherman hunches over his rod as his girlfriend reads a novel. In any other circumstances, she'd be dangling her feet in the cool water for a bit of heat-relief (or at least idly brushing her fingers over the boat's edge). He doesn't have a spear. She has all limbs firmly in the boat. Sensible.
Back in Darwin, we spend a few days inspecting the city's sights. Darwin is obsessed with its own history - not surprisingly; the city has been twice under attack. First was Japanese warplanes in World War II, and then in 1974, Cyclone Tracy, a ferocious storm packing category 5 winds, which killed 71 people and left a further 20,000 homeless.
At Darwin Museum, visitors can stand in a darkened room and hear a recording of Tracy howling over the city. The ABC taped it on that terrifying night in 1974. It's a chilling experience. Above the whooshing roar of the wind is another sound, a cold, metallic dragging noise - deafening. It is caused by giant sheets of corrugated iron, ripped off the rooftops, dragging along the bitumen roads, smashing into cars and colliding with other buildings. "I can't, I can't," says an elderly woman, wrenching open the door after only a few seconds in the room and rushing out into the light. She was in Darwin during the cyclone, says her son.
The other passion of Territorians is tucker. At the Mindil Beach sunset markets, stallholders fry up noodles, curries and wild-food delicacies including crocodile, emu and buffalo. There's the usual smattering of hippies selling the usual array of tie-dyed gear and slightly dubious silver trinkets. The market also has a few Aboriginal artists selling their carvings and paintings, complete with certificates of authenticity. The atmosphere is barefoot and slow-paced, and it's the same feel at the city's five-star restaurants (although the food is anything but casual).
At Pee Wee's At The Point, a beachside restaurant on Fannie Bay, five minutes' drive from the CBD, we eat steaming piles of soft-shell crab, all crunchy and savoury, and nori-rolled salmon, deep-fried and crisp. Within the SkyCity casino, there's another special restaurant, Evoo, where the degustation menu offers course after course of local treats. These dishes aren't the usual tiny degustation mouthfuls - each plateful is enough for a decent main meal. After four courses, I'm exhausted and have to retire to my room, leaving my travelling companions to finish the remaining three meal-sized "tastes". I check the giant bathtub very carefully for snakes before hopping in.
DARWIN
* SkyCity Darwin is located on Mindil Beach, only moments from the Darwin CBD.
* Kakadu National Park is 250km east of Darwin.
* For general information on tourism in the Northern Territory, see www.tourismtopend.com.au or northernterritory.com.
Claire Harvey flew to Darwin and Kakadu courtesy of SkyCity.
