Krys the Savannah King

The measurement has been questioned over the years, as extreme crocodile lengths generally are, and no skin or skull survives to settle it. What is not in doubt is that saltwater crocodiles in the Gulf country reached sizes that modern populations rarely approach, because the largest animals were shot out during the unregulated hunting decades before protection came in 1974.

Krystina Pawlowski and her husband Ron hunted the Gulf rivers commercially and later became conservationists, which is a trajectory a good many crocodile hunters followed once the populations collapsed.

The replica is therefore a monument to an animal that was killed, made by a town that has since built its identity partly on the crocodiles still in the river. That tension is present in the object and is not resolved by it.

Normanton sits on the Norman River in the Gulf of Carpentaria, at the end of the Gulflander railway line, and also holds a six-metre barramundi.

The record does not carry the date or the maker's name.