Dreamings came with the affiliation to clan. Mine is Yawk Yawk, or Baby Spirit (sometimes called Mermaid as well, or Young Woman), James' is Nogadjodj or Pied Heron, and Amber's, like Peterson's, was Boloko.

Their dreamings came about because of mine. A Yawk yawk woman usually married a man who had Pied Heron Dreaming and their children had Python Dreaming. Simple as that, or so it seemed at the time, and back in those early days I thought it no more important than a football team having a particular name.

Then some nine months after catching the snake I discovered I was pregnant.

How Gunyok and her mother found out I don't know, but they came around hardly before I knew myself. It was hard for me to understand all of what they said; it was all so foreign, and we were all so nervous that talking was made harder.

The women patiently phrased and rephrased the words and I asked myriad questions, trying this way and that, time and time again to claw our way across the cultural gap. And when the tension got too much we did the British thing and had a cup of tea.

By that night my mind was caught in a maelstrom of confusion, hanging somewhere between two worlds. I learned that day that I hadn't simply inherited my dreaming. The women knew I was a Yawk yawk person, and that I was pregnant the day I caught the snake.

During the Dreamtime baby spirits were left behind in embryonic form as the spirit ancestors crossed the country. In this form Yawk Yawk live at the bottom of pools but adult Yawk Yawk, tiny, silver-green creatures with fish tails, can emerge on dry land as dragonflies, and at this time they enter women who became pregnant.

There are two signs a Yawk Yawk woman is pregnant.

Firstly, baby spirits call food to their mother. And how else would I have caught a snake in that huge billabong.

Secondly, baby spirits also protect their mother. And I hadn't been attacked by a crocodile.

Kohlanj Stephanie' told me later, "In Aboriginal way before you get pregnant baby very small can call out to animal; kept crocodile away from hurting you so you come home safe".

And the baby spirit had actually been responsible for the snake's capture, not me. It "called out to snake to be caught,"

Dje dje Peterson agreed, "Yo that snake. What we say in our way is my son caught that snake for me."

Four years later, while fishing at the East Alligator River in Arnhemland my relatives asked me to catch live bait. with my cast net. But the bank was quite high and well-vegetated; I would have to enter the water. No way! Two big crocodiles (3 and 4 metres in length) lived on this corner of the river, and a man had been taken only 200 metres downstream, at Cahill's Crossing only two years before.

"You are safe," Dje dje told me. The man had been attacked by a rogue crocodile which had since left. And the two resident crocodiles? Dje dje knew them and they were unlikely to attack.

But there was another reason. Kohlanj's sister-in-law was pregnant, and her baby spirit would protect all of us.

I caught the bait fish without incident. We also got, in Kohlanj 's words, "a really big barra and Warradjan (pig-nosed turtle)."

I was also told that when I caught Boloko, the snake, its spirit entered my body. And so my baby is related to pythons as certainly as he is to Amber, me and his father.

He must never kill python for that would be murder, and eating python would be cannibalism. He must look after snake country, protect the wetlands and forests that nurture his relatives.

He would feel pain when pythons were hurt or died. And, yes he did. On seeing his first injured python, Rowan, aged five, cried as if his heart would break.