by Bob Irwin
When I managed to catch a male some time later, my mission became working out how to breed them. If we were successful, I could return them both to the wild, keeping only their offspring. Our project was off to a good start when the female perentie laid some eggs. I couldn’t afford to buy a proper incubator for the eggs so I made my own out of an old poultry incubator. It was a ghastly-looking piece of equipment, but it served its purpose and after nine long months, the first tiny perentie split the first egg and emerged magnificently into the world.
There were six tiny little babies in that first clutch, and they were the prettiest little things. Surprisingly they weren’t aggressive when they hatched like some of the other monitors. The perentie was a monitor that had it together. Eventually I made good on my word and returned those original perenties to the wilds of Windorah.
As the park grew, we became specialists in breeding perenties, and many other species besides, in that old incubator. There wasn’t anybody else out there trying to breed the large monitors, and so my findings became of interest to many others in the herpetological world. But I couldn’t write papers about it—I just didn’t know how all of that worked. In the end a researcher from Melbourne Zoo offered to publish scientific papers on my behalf, which was great; we could now share with others what we’d learnt about breeding native reptiles. We bred so many perenties in the end that it was embarrassing.
Vic had continued making his documentary, and now planned to film the world’s largest monitor lizards, the venerated Komodo dragons in Indonesia. We couldn’t believe it when he invited Peter and me to join him. We didn’t have to think twice. I had never been overseas and it had always been a dream of mine to see the dragons, the true dinosaurs of this world.
In the 1980s, Komodo Island was a destination for the intrepid, and tourism to the island was in its infancy. We arrived in a small town called Sape on the island of Sambawa. From there we caught a barge across to Komodo Island. But the water I had to wade through to get from the shore to the barge was full of rubbish, as though someone had emptied a garbage truck straight into the sea minutes before we got there. There wasn’t an inch of water visible. It was like nothing I had seen before: beaches back in Australia were pristine in comparison, especially in the more remote areas that I frequented. I wanted to get out there with a big scoop and clean it up; I was horrified by the devastation that rubbish would have caused to the marine environment. The boat finally took off for the island, and as the local kids threw rocks after it, I thought that we couldn’t get out of Sape quick enough.
Due to the danger the Komodos posed, tourists had to have a guide with them at all times. Although Komodos eat mostly wild deer, they’re renowned ambush predators, with a very stealthy approach, and most often go directly for the throat. They grow up to three metres long, and with no natural predators they dominate the island. The locals leave them alone: fortunately for the dragons, their skin is reinforced with armoured shields, making for terrible leather, so they’ve always been able to thrive.
To see the dragons with our guide, we first had to buy a goat to sacrifice. After this, the guide took us down to a creek bed where he strung up the goat from a large overhanging tree. Within no time, Komodo dragons came from every corner of the island. Having a fantastic sense of smell, Komodo dragons can locate a dead animal from up to nine kilometres away. It was a highly primitive thing to witness. They were a mighty impressive sight. They didn’t disappoint.
But I very quickly lost patience with being escorted around. Every time the dragons got close to us, the guards would chase them away, and if there was a snake on our path, they didn’t hesitate to smash it or beat it off with a stick. So I just started sneaking out. Catching Komodo dragons is of course a major no-no; we just wanted to get them on film. I also wanted to explore this new landscape for all kinds of exotic reptiles. I knew the island was alive with venomous cobras, the enormous Tokay geckos and Russell’s viper. I also wanted to interact with the Komodos, see how they lived. Our approach became that it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
But you can only do that so many times. One night, I had got as far as the beach and found these amazing snakes that I couldn’t identify, when a spotlight was shone directly in my face and I was quickly marched back to my cabin by armed guards. The next day I got caught down on the beach again and the island officials were waiting for me when I got back to camp. I was marched up to the commandant’s office and sternly warned that if they caught me again, I’d be kicked off the island.
By that stage, I had become so ill that being escorted off the island was starting to sound like a good idea. Almost as soon as I set foot in Indonesia, I had started to feel unwell, and it had worsened as the trip went on. My stomach wasn’t used to the cuisine, and that, combined with my usual fussiness about food, meant that I was pretty much surviving on white rice. I became so sick that I couldn’t keep anything down. Peter was so concerned that he made his own spear gun by fixing a nail to the end of a broomstick and in the middle of the night speared a beautiful reef fish for me to eat. He thought that if I could just get a bit of food into my system I’d turn the corner. But I was too sick to eat anything by that stage.
In the process of catching that fish for me, Peter had planted his hand right on top of a venomous sea urchin, getting toxic spines deep into his hand. His hand was painful for days and he couldn’t remove the spines until he turned his knowledge of biology to the problem: he knew the spines were made of calcium, and that calcium dissolves in acid, so he used acidic seeds from the tamarind fruit on the island to extract the spines. That’s what I loved about Peter: there was always something for me to learn. It made him one of my favourite people. He was endlessly interesting and made those adventures that much more fascinating when he was around. It doesn’t get much better than being in that kind of company.
‘We have to get you home,’ Peter eventually said. By that stage, I was so weak that I completely caved in. But I had no money left to get back home, and neither did Vic, so Peter gave me fifty dollars, which would get me most of the way home. He offered to come with me, but I didn’t want him to miss out on the journey ahead, which would be the experience of a lifetime.
I caught a boat ride from the island which left in the middle of the night. The journey was horrendous, the rough seas throwing our tiny fishing boat around like the inside of a washing machine. I was just so ill on that voyage home. Then the engine failed in the middle of our passage and we got caught in a whirlpool. There was nothing on board to paddle with and so we had to pull timber boards off the cabin to paddle out of it, and then all the way to shore. There was another tourist on the boat, who told me that eggs would set me right, so when we arrived in Labuan Bajo, a fishing village on the island of Flores, he kindly bought me some from a local market stall. I got them down, but vomited them back up almost instantly. I was as sick as you could get while still being able to walk.
From Labuan Bajo I flew to Denpasar, and then on to Sydney, and finally Brisbane. I was skin and bone by the time I stepped off that last plane, and I’d already been pretty slight. Lyn eventually booked me into a health clinic, I was that ill, and it took me a fair while to recover.
Peter went on to have the most wonderful wildlife adventure, filming all kinds of exotic species, including a close encounter with a Komodo dragon, the bats and swallows’ nests in the caves of Kuching, the orangutans of Borneo, slow lorises, tarsiers and giant jungle pythons. I was thrilled to hear all about it and of course I wished I could have been there to finish the expedition, but I couldn’t have been happier to be home.
***
In his late teens, Steve wanted to go off and be an independent young bloke for a while. I knew he had a gift for wildlife, but I also knew he had to get the normal teenage thing out of his system first and give himself the chance to find his feet. Although Lyn and I knew he’d had a really unique childhood, growing up in a reptile park and travelling to remote parts of Austra
lia, Steve had yet to realise that. He just wanted to be more normal for a while, more like the kids at school. You know, the grass is always greener on the other side.
He decided to head off to Bali on a surfing expedition with a couple of mates from school. He’d played all kinds of sports—rugby, cricket and soccer—but as a young adult, surfing had really become his outlet. Out on the ocean he could push himself to the point of exhaustion. With surfing, no two waves are ever the same, your improvement is slow, and it’s a lot of physical exertion for the chance at riding a wave that lasts only seconds of elation, so he found it a great way to challenge himself to get better and better. But being out on the ocean could also be very calming—a place to quiet his endlessly busy mind.
Lyn was quite concerned about him travelling in a foreign country, far from home, with no way to communicate with us apart from a telephone. But I wasn’t worried. That boy could jump on crocodiles. I was confident that he could look after himself.
I also knew that if we didn’t let him go, he’d always be wondering what might have been. I believe that if you really feel you need to do something, then you should get it out of your system. Many people never do and I think it chips away at them. I was really confident that a break would give him that time to refocus, and realise what he really wanted to do, whether that was wildlife or working in another industry altogether.
He was gone for many months on that trip. But when he came back, he was a transformed young man—he knew what he wanted to do. Steve never did anything by halves, and now he was absolutely certain. Being away from the familiarity of the park, the unique world in which he lived, had shaken him up, smacked him awake and made him realise his true direction. It was almost as though he had followed the herd to ‘normal-ville’ but eventually reached a fork in the road and decided to take the sign leading him exactly back to the road he’d already been paving for himself. You have to find your own niche. That’s the best reward you could ever hope for: taking the road less travelled, not the well-trodden path.
‘Dad, I really want to work for you in the park,’ he said. ‘I’ve got so many ideas about what we can do together. I want to help you to build the Crocodile Environmental Park.’ And that was that. I don’t think he ever took off that khaki uniform again. Steve was never going to shake the wildlife factor. It was in his blood.
Travel log: Bob and Amanda on the road
CAPE YORK, QUEENSLAND, AUGUST 2015
AMANDA
We were out on the river in pitch darkness, with just a few torches to light our way. Bob had assigned me the task of looking for crocodiles. I was nervous, not knowing what to look for and if I would be observant enough. At first, to my untrained eye, there was no difference between the reflection of spiders’ eyes on the bank and crocodiles’ eyes on the surface of the water. Bob didn’t hesitate to show me the ropes. ‘No! Crocs’ eyes reflect red, spiders’ reflect white.’
It was my first time in croc country. With Bob at the helm of the aluminium dinghy, my job was to find a croc’s red-eye shine on the water’s surface with the powerful spotlight he’d handed to me. Then, instead of calling out to Bob and frightening them off, I was to silently point him in the right direction with an up-and-down motion of the torch beam.
Bob was taking our group of young wildlife enthusiasts for an evening of spotlighting on the water to allow us our first glimpse of a wild crocodile. We’d each driven for days, from different parts of southern Queensland, to experience this. When you see Bob out in a place like this, he suddenly makes sense. You understand why he bypasses the cities and tourist traps in favour of such remote settings. Bob is the bush, and the bush is Bob. There’s no other way to describe him. You get to really see him in his element out in the wilds of Far North Queensland.
I finally caught a glimpse of some eerie red eye-shines illuminated by my torch. It doesn’t help the reputation of crocs any that their eyes glow demon-red, I thought. I won’t lie, I also worried briefly that we might be approaching a crocodile bigger than our boat and I realised how much trust we’d put in Bob at this point. But then our boat pulled up beside a tiny freshwater crocodile on the surface of the water, just thirty centimetres long and well camouflaged among sticks and other floating debris. The little guy was floating in the water, completely still, with his legs splayed out like a frog. We three novices on board were ecstatic to lay eyes on our first wild crocodile. It may have been the smallest in the river, but I suspect our animated reaction would have been the same whether it had been twenty centimetres long or two metres. Bob killed the outboard motor and reached over the side of the boat to pick it up.
‘Do you want to hold it?’ Bob asked me, as if he were about to let me in on a little secret. I knew he was full of knowledge about what I was about to experience, but he wasn’t going to tell me—I had to experience it for myself.
I nodded excitedly. I nodded so hard, in fact, that I nearly sent my head torch flying off my skull. I held out my hands and he carefully placed the crocodile into my upturned palms. As I sat frozen, not knowing the etiquette for handling baby crocodiles, Bob busily repositioned my fingers so that I had one hand around the neck of the crocodile and the other tightly around the top of its tail. Once he was confident that the animal was relaxed, and that I had it comfortably in my grip, he sat beside me on the seat of the boat and together we admired its exceptional evolutionary design.
Bob talked me through all the amazing features this crocodile was equipped with in order to survive in the water-world beneath our dinghy. This was the closest I had come to holding a dinosaur, and I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. Microbats flew directly at us as they feasted on the swarm of insects attracted to the light from our head torches; whichever way I turned, life was just teeming around me. I kept saying, ‘Wow.’ I’m not sure exactly what I had been expecting to feel as I held a crocodile in my hands, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have been the affection I was feeling now. The croc’s skin was exceptionally smooth on the underside of his body. He had a strong, streamlined tail. And his exterior was well designed for battle, equipped with armour-plated shields across his back. Then within seconds he revealed his fear about this abduction and cried like the little baby crocodile he was, a sound so endearing that my heart just melted. He sounded like a human baby crying for his mum. In an instant, my perception of crocodiles evolved from fear to absolute amazement. A surprising thought emerged: a croc could actually be considered cute!
Bob looked on affectionately at the crocodile in my hands and laughed along with me at my childlike excitement. ‘I love him, Bob. I absolutely love him.’
It was as clear as day, despite the darkness that engulfed us, that Bob got a real thrill out of sharing that kind of experience with us. The fact that I had been able to feel a tiny iota of his passion for crocodiles seemed to really electrify him. Bob spoke to the rest of us, beaming. ‘And that’s exactly my point. If you can touch it, you will love it. These little guys are just so misunderstood. They’re an animal just like any other animal. They feel pain, experience stress and they’ve got a right to survive like any other animal on the planet. The more you get to know about them, the more you understand them.’
He let me hold the crocodile for a moment longer before becoming concerned about stressing him out. ‘Come on, little guy, let’s put you back. You’ve got to go and catch yourself some tucker.’ Bob took him gently from my hands, gave him one last lookover and then bent over the side of the boat to place him back in the water. Like a flash the little croc was off.
Bob then set off again with a new spotter, ready for another encounter. His excitement was unwavering as he allowed each person on board the opportunity to experience what I just had. We weren’t going home until we’d all had a taste of it.
As the boat eventually motored home to camp and the warm tropical breeze blew across my face, I was buzzing along with the thousands of moths attracted to my torch beam. What a kick! I knew how raw and personal encounters with
nature could be contagious. I could see why it was important for Bob to break down the barriers we seem to have built up, where the animals are over there and we’re over here. Bob was right: people will fear what they don’t understand; conversely, once they can understand something they’ll ultimately want to protect it. That was certainly now true of me and the other passengers in our vessel. We were the newest crocodile fans in Cape York.
Later, as we sat around the fire in our camp chairs talking excitedly about that hour on the river, Bob explained how his first experience with wild crocodiles was exactly like ours, on that trip to the Leichhardt River with a nine-year-old Steve to relocate crocs. ‘Steve was jumping off the front of the boat, on little freshies about that size, over and over, until he started to get in with bigger and bigger crocs as he grew more confident in what he was doing. That was it. We were hooked.’
In my opinion, there is no better storyteller to have beside a campfire than a man who has spent a lifetime capturing some of this country’s largest crocs. Over the next few hours we all sat wide-eyed, enthralled by his stories from the early days, of a father and son with no previous experience, equipped with just a net trap, a contract to catch crocodiles and a passion to save them at a time when they were loathed and feared. That had been the beginning of something really quite impressive: the making of the Crocodile Hunter himself.
4
The crocodile hunters
When Steve said that he wanted to work for me in the reptile park, he clearly hadn’t thought that it might involve some sort of apprenticeship first. In 1984, Lyn and I took our first holiday together in fifteen years, reluctantly handing our kids the keys to the park. To our horror, but not surprise, we’d only been gone some fifteen minutes when Steve decided to handfeed Anvil, a large resident salty, in front of a thrilled group of patrons. These live crocodile demonstrations continued until we returned six weeks later, horrified to find that not only was he doing this outrageously dangerous thing, but he was also charging people extra for the privilege of witnessing it.