by Bob Irwin
But although Lyn and I were initially not on board, I couldn’t help but notice that the entire dynamic of the park had shifted. People were excitedly making their way around the crocodile ponds. This level of audience participation was something we hadn’t seen before in the park. Nobody had lined up for anything except for buying a can of Coca-Cola from the kiosk.
Patrons went from vaguely interested at seeing a large stationary reptile, to captivated and awestruck, witnessing firsthand the latent power of a prehistoric animal exhibiting its array of natural behaviours you would only otherwise see in the wild. And, I could see that Steve’s unorthodox approach was actually a really effective way of getting across our message about the importance of these colossally misunderstood apex predators.
So I had to suck eggs and admit that to Steve. Those demonstrations were useful in showing why we needed to respect crocodiles. We wanted to show what crocodiles were capable of out in the wild, and this was the perfect way to do it. Mind you, there were no doubt people watching who were just there in case things went wrong. They always had their cameras poised, ready for disaster. But that was human nature. You had to start by getting people interested, and I always liked to be optimistic that we could eventually win those people over too.
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Meanwhile, away from the park and out in the wild, the odds were increasingly stacked against the crocs. I was only just starting to figure out that despite being the ultimate survivors, it had taken humans just thirty short years to decimate these ancient animals, the largest reptile left on earth, with commercial hunting. While Aboriginal people had long hunted crocodiles for their meat using traditional methods, the impact of hunting on crocodile populations had been minimal until the advent of .303 rifles in the 1940s, in the wake of World War II. Prior to this, crocodiles had been respected for their supremacy—humans simply couldn’t contend with the sheer power of a crocodile. But with the introduction of these weapons there was now a reliable method to gutlessly shoot our apex predators. With the pull of a trigger, crocodiles were now targeted for their skin. Cairns became an international hub for this lucrative new trade in hides, which attracted commercial and professional hunters and other recreational enthusiasts from far and wide.
It’s a sobering fact that by the time our family opened our reptile park, a mere thirty or so years later, saltwater crocodiles had been nearly hunted out of existence. And when they became scarce, we humans couldn’t help ourselves: hunters moved on to target the smaller freshwater species of crocodile. As a result, the freshwater crocodile species numbers then declined dramatically too.
In 1974, the slaughter was halted when both freshwater and saltwater crocodiles were declared protected fauna in Queensland. But it was almost a case of too little, too late, as crocodile populations had dropped to critical levels when Queensland finally became the last of the Australian states to implement this legislation.
Fortunately the thing about Mother Nature is that if you give her a chance she’s incredibly efficient at healing herself. Crocodiles were testament to this, as their numbers slowly began to recover when they were finally left alone. Like earthworms, crocodiles don’t overpopulate their environment; they have a distinct hierarchy and manage their own populations accordingly.
Of course in dealing only with captive crocodiles, I wasn’t privy to most of this until around 1985, when the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services implemented the East Coast Crocodile Management Program in response to the rising number of crocodiles in inhabited areas. In my view, it wasn’t so much a case of crocodiles encroaching on populated areas as it was humans encroaching on the crocodile’s territory. The east coast of Queensland was one of the fastest growing urbanised areas in Australia. These areas weren’t remote locations where people were few and far between; these were areas tourists frequented, and where fishermen and farmers worked.
The department didn’t have the manpower to monitor the vast areas crocodiles inhabited, nor the expertise to remove them. As a result they decided that crocodile farms and zoological facilities were best equipped to handle the animals that were deemed to pose a risk to humans.
While crocodiles now had greater protection in the wild, our state’s crocodile protection service was now legislating and managing the commercial side of the industry. Crocodile farms had started popping up all over the far north. Crocodile meat was introduced onto the market as a by-product after their skin had been turned into wallets, bags, shoes or belts.
I have always been vehemently against this industry, because I believe we shouldn’t farm and destroy any native wildlife for profit. To me, the term ‘sustainable use’ seems to give people an excuse to impose our will on native animals that we have a responsibility to safeguard. I don’t care whether it’s crocodiles, kangaroos or emus, I don’t think we have the moral right. I have many friends in the crocodile farming industry, and they know my views. I think it’s very un-Australian to eat our own special, endemic, native wildlife.
And while my opinion was formed long before I ever visited a crocodile farm, when I did I was disturbed by the conditions. In those days, large numbers of animals were crammed into small pens, competing for space. Crocodiles simply don’t live like that in the wild; they’re a highly territorial species that competes for its domain and has a well-defined social ladder. The welfare of those crocodiles didn’t seem important to those people running the farms. There was a total lack of care about how the animals were kept, and how they may have felt.
But for now the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services was focusing on trouble spots where humans and crocs were coming into close contact. My brother-in-law Graeme and I decided to venture up to the Gulf of Carpentaria to help the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers capture a particular saltwater crocodile, which had been demonstrating a lack of fear towards humans. It was frequenting a boat ramp; thereby causing concern about a potential attack, so it had been marked for removal. If we could trap the crocodile, I had approval to give him a home back at the reptile park. So Graeme and I set out on the thirty-hour drive north, towing a tandem trailer full of materials so I could build a transport crate for the crocodile on-site.
In my naivety, I had also arranged in advance a place for the croc aboard a Douglas DC-3, a fixed-wing propeller aircraft, to transport him back to Brisbane. With its large double cargo doors, it was the only way to transport something so large that far. But unfortunately the croc wasn’t interested in my flight schedule. After a week we still hadn’t trapped the animal.
We knew we were in the right place because we could see the very large slide marks where it was coming in and out of the water. I’ll admit the size of those marks made me a little apprehensive. And I was right to be, because when we finally caught sight of him he was the biggest crocodile I had ever seen in my life. It was immediately obvious to me that my equipment and methods weren’t adequate to lure and trap an animal of that size. The crocodile was the better part of five metres long.
But the most alarming aspect of the whole expedition was meeting the person who was the catalyst for the department’s relocation of the animal. I was astounded when we arrived to find the very fisherman who had lobbied the department for the croc’s removal standing waist-deep in murky, croc-infested water, casually casting out his fishing line and reeling in catfish.
‘Aren’t you concerned about getting eaten?’ I asked him.
‘I’m concerned about him all right—concerned about him destroying any more of my flamin’ fishing nets, that is! That crocodile is costing me a bloody fortune,’ he replied. ‘But no, I’m not worried about that old bugger bothering me personally. He’s been around here for years.’
It all started to piece together in my head: this river was a smorgasbord for that crocodile. There was such an abundance of food around for him, he wasn’t interested in interfering with something that might pose a threat to him, like a human. Crocodiles in these parts are incredibly wary of people, having survived th
e bullet of many a hunter—the bullet casings lining the banks wherever we went were evidence of that. And I couldn’t lure him into my little old net trap because there were hordes of thirsty agile wallabies wandering down to the water’s edge for a drink every day, an easy feed for a lazy old crocodile. That, coupled with the tempting freshly caught fish in fishermen’s nets, meant the bait in my trap was not an attractive option.
It was also clear to me that this croc was being persecuted because that fisherman had unintentionally habituated him by setting his traps in the same place every day over many years. He’d worked out that he didn’t have to do much but turn up every day. But just as that crocodile had learnt where that fisherman put out his bait, there would likely also come a time when he’d work out that the fisherman himself would make for an easy target. The crocodile would know what time he put in his boat, where he cleaned his fish, and exactly where he fished, waist-deep in water. That’s what crocodiles do; they’re a highly skilled, calculating ambush predator.
While Peter and I returned to the reptile park empty-handed, it wasn’t long before I got my first hands-on experience with a wild saltwater crocodile. I had again been asked to assist the department by removing a rogue animal from Ninds Creek near Innisfail in Far North Queensland. It had been bothering a cattle farmer, pinching his livestock as they came down to drink from the river. So we went up to have a look at the spot. We could see the slides showing where the crocodile was coming in and out of the water. And we realised that the riverbanks were so muddy that any livestock drinking there would be getting stuck in the mud, making them sitting ducks for the crocodiles.
It was again a case of man encroaching on the crocodile’s natural environment. The livestock had access to the creek because it hadn’t been properly fenced. Farmers were clearing land, cattle were grazing on riverbanks, and crocodiles were interacting with people because we were moving into their territory. That farmer might have paid his money to the government to own this particular patch of grass, but deed titles don’t mean a thing to crocodiles. That old territorial croc had probably fought tooth and nail over decades to claim his patch of that river. We spent a great deal of time on that trip pulling cows that had wandered down to the water’s edge out of the mud.
We spent the remainder of our time carefully setting my net trap. This time I had made sure it was a lot larger and lined it with fresh bait, both in the trap and near the entrance to entice the croc in. Then we sat back and waited for time and tide to deliver us a croc. I checked it every morning and after a few days the crocodile was finally in the trap. But there I was stuck: I had a three-metre saltwater crocodile in my trap but no clue how to get him out.
I called the ranger, and when he came down we all worked together to untangle the crocodile from the trap as it thrashed and death-rolled. Every part of my body surged with adrenaline whenever I got close. There’s nothing that can quite prepare you for the force of a prehistoric predator in its own environment. There was no particular best way to get it done; we had to work it out for ourselves. While the department ranger knew a little bit more than I did, it wasn’t much; we were both learning together.
It was a bit of a procedure, firstly to secure its jaws, and then to secure it with ropes to get it into a ready-made crate I had built for transportation. As the crocodile lay there on the ground, I put my hands on its head and tried to imagine my way inside its mind; to visualise how a species could survive close to one hundred million years with very few physical changes, and also how it’d coped with everything humankind had thrown at it just in the last decades. I sat there thinking how we’d nearly brought this species to the brink of extinction. If we’d managed to kill them all—and let’s face it, we came pretty close—then that would have been the end of it. There’s no going back when that happens; nature simply isn’t an unending resource. Extinction is forever.
It isn’t until you put your hands on such a large predatory animal that you feel the underlying power they possess, that you can grasp their sheer muscle, energy and supremacy. Sitting on the back of one when you start to feel it tense and shake, well, there’s nothing you’ll ever do in your life like that again. It’s like sitting on a volcano that’s about to erupt.
What stood out to me was that these two crocodiles had been targeted for removal through no fault of their own. Like many wild animals, generally speaking crocodiles don’t want to have an interaction with a human. Nine times out of ten, at waterholes tourists and fishermen frequent you’ll hardly see a crocodile, because they don’t want to be observed. They just want to stay out of the way and not have anything to do with humans at all.
And yet people get complacent, lulled into a false sense of security once the biggest, baddest croc is removed. But he was just the one you could see. Below the surface of the water, with their exceptional underwater vision, in their own aquatic world, there are more crocodiles just waiting for the chance of an opportunistic feed. They know about you, but you don’t know about them. That dominant croc we removed, he kept the balance. So, really, even though he was now gone, would you really want to get back in the water?
In 1987, the East Coast Crocodile Management Plan asked for expressions of interest from external subcontractors to remove from certain river systems crocodiles deemed to pose a threat to people, dogs or livestock. Steve and I signed up almost immediately. These crocodiles labelled as a problem were those most likely to have had some kind of negative interaction with a human. In my opinion they were wrongfully accused, but whether we agreed or not, removing them was what we were contracted to do. Steve and I felt our participation in the program was a way to make the best of a bad situation. Our aim became to catch and relocate the crocs before people took matters into their own hands. Saving these magnificent crocs from this hatred and slaughter became our motivation. I had always wanted to display more saltwater crocodiles in the reptile park but I didn’t want to buy them from crocodile farms.
I started up my faithful backhoe and began digging crocodile ponds almost immediately, turning our undeveloped five acres into a home for the crocodiles we were likely to catch; it became a new section in our park that we named the Crocodile Environmental Park. I built a series of enclosures with clay bottoms and nice murky water for them to hide away in and grass pens in which they could bask out in the sun. It was basic to begin with, but I knew the crocodiles would be comfortable enough.
I started to visualise making crocodiles the centrepiece of our facility. It wasn’t about stocking the park so people could be intimidated by their size or menacing looks: our objective became to bring these crocodiles into the heart of every visitor and help them appreciate the importance of our most significant apex predators. We strongly felt that our participation in the crocodile management program was the best way to protect crocs from humans.
We knew that out in the wild the unjustified hatred for crocs by humans could be reduced by instilling common sense in people, and getting them to exercise greater caution in croc territory. There’s no point sugar-coating the predatory nature of a saltwater crocodile: if you get in the water, you run the risk. It wasn’t crocodiles that had put us in danger, it was in fact our own species that had put the crocodiles in danger. The Crocodile Environmental Park would be a place where creatures that were feared and wronged because of basic misunderstanding would be respected and valued.
For ten dollars, we purchased from the department a permit to remove fauna under the Fauna Conservation Act. This was one of five permits allocated at that time. All but one of the other contractors were from crocodile farms, where the crocs they removed would go into their facilities as breeding stock, and their young would be raised and slaughtered for their skin.
We all had to supply our own equipment and manpower and there was no financial compensation whatsoever. In fact, we had to pay a royalty to the state government for every crocodile we took out of the water. Thankfully the park was earning enough money that I could afford to pay Steve a
wage and he enthusiastically signed on to be my apprentice.
Although it actually became an apprenticeship for both of us; we learnt as we went along. There was no crocodile-handling course we could take, no Crocodiles for Dummies handbook. We would learn at the hands of the crocodile itself.
The first permit we were assigned was to remove every crocodile from Cattle Creek, just on the outskirts of Ingham in Far North Queensland, a sixteen-hour drive from our reptile park. Cattle Creek was a vast tidal system popular with locals for fishing and boating. Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services gave us a map of the creek showing the private properties that accessed it. From there on, it was our responsibility to build relationships with the owners so we could access their properties and base ourselves where the crocodiles lived.
So we did our research, loaded up the truck, donned our best khaki shirts and went door-knocking around Ingham.
Stephen Accornero, Cattle Creek:
Dad, Mum and I were having our regular 3 p.m. ‘smoko’ break on our family sugarcane farm when we noticed a mysterious vehicle approaching the back of our house, loaded up with camping gear, nets, tarpaulins, large wooden crates and an upturned dinghy. In our small town of Ingham, we knew pretty much every local farmer and sugar-mill worker by name as well as their work truck. The two fellas got out of the truck and made their way up to us and extended out a hand to shake. ‘I’m Bob Irwin and this is my son, Steve. We’d like to catch crocodiles on your property, with your permission,’ the older bloke said. From the looks of these two men, this was not at all what we were expecting to hear. The father wasn’t built like any crocodile hunter we’d ever known and his son was just as slight, and only in his early twenties, the same age as me.