by Bob Irwin
Bob did all of the talking, Steve didn’t say much. He seemed reserved, although in hindsight we now know this was mostly out of respect for his father, because generally Steve only had one setting and that was full noise.
Bob told us that they wanted not to hunt crocodiles but to save them by catching them as part of a government scheme to remove nuisance crocodiles from our creek. But what intrigued us most of all was their planned method: they were planning to catch the crocs with slightly adapted fishing nets and by hanging homemade weights in trees.
It was certainly an oddity. Nobody relocated crocodiles. When there was a rogue crocodile lurking around, people generally took matters into their own hands. In our part of the world, people either shot them or took them to croc farms. And yet these blokes had driven sixteen hours from the Sunshine Coast in order to catch monstrous crocodiles with their bare hands and then drive sixteen hours back to their park each and every time they caught one, and all to save crocs’ lives?
‘So, you’re experienced at this?’ Dad asked. ‘I imagine you’ve caught a lot of salties before.’
‘We’ve only caught one wild salty before, but we’ll manage. It’s a bit of an apprenticeship. We’ve got room for fifty or so crocodiles back at the park,’ Bob said alarmingly.
Irrespective of their unusual idea, we wanted to help them out. ‘Do you know where you need to go?’ Dad asked, interested, getting down to business.
They knew precisely where they wanted to access the creek, right down to where they wanted to set up camp on our property; it was an uninhabited area that we used solely for running cattle.
‘Okay, then, you can set up your camp here. We’ll come and see you in the morning and see how you’re getting on,’ Dad said, granting them permission.
‘We’ll be completely self-sufficient. You won’t even know we are there,’ Bob said. Those famous last words still ring in my head to this day.
The pair of them then set off excitedly to get their camp established. As they disappeared down our driveway, we all just looked at each other, slightly amused.
‘They’re going to get eaten for sure,’ Dad said, and we all burst out laughing.
The subsequent years spent listening to Bob and Steve talk about wildlife had a deep and profound effect on our family and our way of farming. When our land went from cattle grazing to cane farming, we left wildlife corridors along our creeks. We’ve left a couple of hundred acres to the environment and waterholes along the way to provide natural water sources for the animals. And that wasn’t because of a government department regulation; that was all because of the Irwins. Dad and I immediately felt a connection with Bob and Steve. As a father and son who also worked together in our family business, it was apparent that they shared a real closeness, working away and bouncing off each other without having to give each other instructions most of the time. I knew that a bond like that only comes through working with someone over many years. That stood out like a sore thumb.
These days, when I come across the authorities putting a trap out for a croc in Cattle Creek, I have to force myself to stand back. I listen to them talking, ‘Don’t come close’, Don’t do this and that’. And I just stand there listening and looking and thinking to myself, ‘Yeah you were in nappies when this was all being designed.’ But I don’t tell them, of course. Understandably they haven’t got a clue who I am or the years that I’ve spent on this creek with the people that I’ve had the pleasure of having here. They think I have no idea what I’m talking about or how those animals operate. But I know exactly what they’re talking about. You know why? Because I was taught by the fella himself—Steve Irwin. I was with Bob and Steve back when it all began.
I’m a bit wiser now, and a bit sorer. But I still remember vividly what it was like thirty years ago. With Bob and Steve we were gifted some of the best times of our lives.
The Accorneros became our closest friends in Ingham over the next few years and ever since, though when we first knocked on their door they thought we were a bit different, that we weren’t the full quid. But I think you’ve obviously got to be a little bit different to do what we were doing.
Park rangers had initially surveyed Cattle Creek by sight and used the number of crocodiles they observed to calculate the total number of crocodiles we were required to remove for the duration of our permit. But we very quickly realised that there were nearly triple the number of crocodiles than the permit outlined.
From the very first moment we set foot in that environment we fell in love with Cattle Creek. It was an impressive tidal system, adorned with rich mangrove and wetland ecosystems fed by the luscious ancient rainforests of the Great Dividing Range. Cattle Creek was such a large expanse that it was more like a river than a creek. This picturesque waterway nourished a wealth of wildlife, from the top of the food chain, the saltwater crocodile, to the smallest members of that intricate web of life, the agile wallabies, the fruit bats, and all of the microscopic marine life below the water’s surface. Every animal we encountered, gigantic or minute, was just as vital to the balance of that environment as the next. Nothing was insignificant. The mangroves—plants that specialise in growing in excess salt and moist airless soil—provided shelter and food, operating as a creche for every organism to breed.
It felt like a playground for Steve and me, this uninhabited landscape teeming with wildlife. We started scanning the riverbanks on the low tides, by day and by night, hoping to glimpse slides left by the crocs we’d come to find. We were entering Cattle Creek via a smaller, winding tributary that hugged the bush; our camp was right at the end of it. But getting our boat in and out proved difficult at times. If the tide was out, we would be dragging our boat across sinking mud that was more like quicksand. You’d be walking along when suddenly you’d sink down to your waist. And the sandflies and mosquitos were a constant hindrance; we welcomed the gusty nights when the sandflies took a night off work.
But as much as we disliked everything that nipped, stung, pricked or prodded at us, they became part of our daily life. If the creepy crawlies got really bad during the day, we’d go down to the creek and cover ourselves head to toe in mangrove mud, which offered some relief. But then we’d have to consider how we were going to remove that thick dark grey muck, now dried and binding to our skin, when we wanted to climb into our swags at night. There were no showers, and we couldn’t exactly get into the creek when the crocodiles were out hunting under the veil of darkness. Although I admit that occasionally we did.
Steve and I made all of our own traps out of trawler mesh. Embarrassingly, the first ones I made were too small, so I chucked them away and began again, fine-tuning them as we went along. We also had to consider the tide as we set the traps: if we got it wrong, we risked having a crocodile drown if it got tangled in a trap below the water.
But the most significant thing we learnt was just to think like a crocodile in everything we did. If I live in this river system, do I really want to go up there and get a piece of pig? Does that trap look too intimidating? We had to camouflage our traps meticulously, making them look like just another part of the riverbank.
Sometimes it took an entire day to set up a trap correctly, and then we’d wait for low tide to trudge through the oozing mud and position it on the bank, tying it to overhanging branches to keep it in place. When we were happy with how it was assembled, we’d always go back out on the river to take a look at it from a distance. If it didn’t look right, we’d get back to work. We weren’t satisfied until our traps looked just like another part of the river.
The time spent perfecting the traps paid off. One sign of this was when we caught the same undersized crocodile again: he was too small so we released him, but there was real satisfaction in outsmarting a crocodile that knew the creek better than we did, even more so when we caught him for a second time.
Mary was one of the first really memorable crocodiles Steve and I caught at Cattle Creek. She was special because she was a really big girl, just over three m
etres long, and we didn’t think females even grew that big. She was also a grand old dame: you can tell a croc’s age in part from the darkness of its skin, and she was completely black.
We had first seen Mary as we scoped out her territory in our little dinghies. We were thoroughly exploring the entire river system to see what might be around in the way of crocs. We’d just idle along each bank, looking for claw marks, head indentations or slide marks from their heavy bodies. It’s easy to track crocodiles in tidal areas like Cattle Creek because you can see their imprints better in the mangrove mud than on a sandy bank. I’d mark the signs we’d find on a hand-drawn mud map and then at night-time we’d return to those spots we found with torches, looking for the red-eye shines of the saltwater crocodile.
We observed Mary for quite a while, working out how we’d catch her. As she sunbaked on the bank, I watched from the boat hidden in the mangroves opposite. Belly slides showed where she’d come in and out of the water; she’d obviously been doing this for years, judging by how much undergrowth she’d flattened over time. As I had to return to the park, I marked all this on a map for Steve, as well as everything I’d witnessed about her behaviour and the areas she frequented. Steve then set the trap and caught her just days later.
That became our way of working: when I was there I would observe the crocs, and then Steve would often hunt them down and trap them. Setting traps became Steve’s thing. We worked together as a team, not talking a lot, both knowing what needed to be done. He would always climb the trees to set the weight bags for the traps, because his arms were strong like an orangutan’s. And I’d do the preparatory work on the ground, filling the bags with mud and tying them up, throwing the ropes up to him.
After Steve caught Mary, I drove straight up to collect her and bring her back to the park, stopping to have her processed before leaving the far north. When you caught a crocodile, you had to take it to the nearest place to be processed, which in this case was the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services office in Ingham. Every crocodile we caught had to be measured, sexed and tagged, and issued with a permit to transport it back to the park. It was quite a process: we’d catch a very large crocodile, get it out of the trap, get it back to camp, restrain it, get it in a crate, and then get it out of the crate all over again for the department’s records.
Mary continued to breed for us every year thereafter. I’d provide her with all the material she needed to build a nest, and she’d rake it all up and construct it. Then she’d lay a clutch of fertile eggs. The amazing thing is that a female saltwater crocodile builds a slightly different nest depending on whether she wants to have baby male or female crocs. A difference of just one to two degrees Celsius changes the sex of the baby crocs, and she can regulate the temperature of that nest to suit. It’s up to her, and she decides what to do in tune with the requirements of her river system.
I always really regretted taking Mary’s eggs away from her, but I couldn’t leave the hatchlings in that enclosure. They would have just walked out through the fence, out into the park, and no doubt ended up somewhere in the wilds of the Sunshine Coast. It was always really hard on Mary when we’d come to collect her eggs; females are fiercely protective of their nests in the wild. I’d apologise each time as I collected them all, undoing all her hard work.
Saltwater crocodile babies are nurtured by their mum. In the wild, as the eggs hatch, the mother listens for their cries and then digs them out of the nest with her claws. Then she’ll carry the hatchlings ever so gently in her mouth to the water. There, she’ll continue to watch over them, creating a protected creche amid floating debris in the shallows in which to hide them until they’re old enough to fend for themselves. I was sad to know that Mary, once queen of Cattle Creek, couldn’t live as she had in the wild, but I suppose she still had her life.
Of course, when you think like a crocodile might, then you have to wonder if life in a zoo, where you’re safe and nurtured, is truly better than being in the wild and taking your chances. We can’t ever know, of course, but it was always in the back of my mind with every crocodile we removed.
***
Steve enjoyed taking photographs at Cattle Creek. He was having the time of his life and he desperately wanted to share it all, so he’d take photos of everything: the captures, where he’d found the crocodiles and the new methods he’d designed to process them. He’d hurry to have the rolls of film developed, impatient to show family and friends when he got home. But he was always dissatisfied with the uninterested reaction. You could almost see yawns as he showed them photo after photo, with a lengthy story attached to each. But the animation was missing: you couldn’t hear his thrilled voice as the trap was sprung, the roar of the crocodile as it growled in protest, the clunk in the hull of the aluminium boat as it thrashed about. Photos simply didn’t do it justice.
Lyn and I eventually decided to buy him his own video camera. It was one of the first that came onto the market in Australia—a big Panasonic National M7 that was a nuisance to lug around. We weren’t sure how long it would last in the rugged terrain, but it surprised us all; that robust camera survived the mud, the boat, the sun and the salt water, not to mention Steve’s famously heavy hand.
That camera changed everything for him: he’d stick it in the boat or hang it in a tree or sit it in the mangroves and just let it roll. He shot hours upon hours of footage, of just whatever he was up to. It never ceased to amaze me that he’d be in the middle of getting a crocodile out of a boat all by himself and he’d remember to jump out to pause the tape while he moved on to the next location. Then he’d hang it up in the tree to record the next instalment, and so on until he captured the entire process of catching a crocodile from trapping to transportation. He didn’t miss a beat.
Now when he brought those movies home, he got a very different reaction. He could finally show his wild life at Cattle Creek: every hilarious, outrageous, gory or simply unbelievable occurrence of a day in the life of a young crocodile hunter. Suddenly, everyone’s interest grew and they wanted to hear more about Cattle Creek.
Although those recordings nearly gave his mother a heart attack, they became a help to him too. He’d watch everything he’d recorded back in Stephen and Danny Accorneros’ lounge room and learn from it, meticulously noting how he could improve on every capture. His goal was to make the whole process less stressful for the crocodiles. And as time went on, he got it down to a very fine art.
That was really important to both of us, because whatever we did, we were always thinking about the welfare of the animal. Most people think of crocodiles as robust, bloodthirsty animals. And physically they are. But they’re also supremely sensitive creatures. When crocodiles are under stress, lactic acid builds in their bodies, and if the level climbs too high the crocodile will die from exhaustion.
It’s a delicate balance, because you’re also dealing with such a physically powerful animal. The big ones are so incredibly strong that they can even do themselves a lot of damage without realising it. The kinds of things we were doing—sitting on top of them to hold them down, using ropes to restrain them, and just fundamentally taking them out of their familiar environment and moving them into captivity—were all so foreign to the crocodiles. It certainly wasn’t pleasant for them. If you muck up, you cost that crocodile its life.
On occasion, we didn’t do as well as we would have liked. What happened when we caught one of the very first crocodiles at Cattle Creek showed our inexperience, and afterwards it was never far from our thoughts, always a reminder to us of what not to do.
We had caught a seven-foot crocodile, small enough for one of us to handle alone if we needed to. In the trap we had tied its jaw tightly closed with a piece of tape and were ready to get it into a crate and back to the park, when it suddenly escaped back into the river.
Steve and I were beside ourselves with concern that it would die out there in the wild. So we spent hour after hour diving into the water in the middle of the night, trying t
o find it, to no avail. When you consider that there were a lot of big crocodiles in that river system, it was a crazy thing to do, but we were just so frustrated with ourselves for allowing it to happen. Not only would that crocodile be unable to catch food, it would be unable to regulate its temperature. To avoid overheating, crocodiles lie with their jaws agape, allowing cool air to circulate over the skin in their mouths. Finally we admitted defeat, and went back to camp. Neither of us went to bed, we just sat by the fire and cried, stricken with guilt.
We hoped that the tape might have loosened and come undone, or the croc might have rubbed it off on a log somewhere and survived. In the weeks that followed we never saw a body, so we hoped that it had been a happy ending for that crocodile but still, it didn’t make us feel any better.
We never spoke about it after that, and we didn’t tell anybody else what had happened either. We just felt so stupid that we’d made this kind of basic mistake. It showed us just how easy it was to do irreparable damage any time we interfered with nature in this line of work. It took us a long while to get over it. And of course it made me question what we were doing, and if we’d ever become experienced at it, or if we should just pack up and call it a day. But your best teacher in this life is always your last mistake. So Steve and I constantly strived to get better and faster and to minimise stress as much as possible. Every catch was a chance to make improvements.
During this time, Stephen and Danny Accornero, the property owners, had quickly become our friends. They’d regularly come down to see what we were up to and join us by the campfire, telling all kinds of lies the way blokes do whenever they have a chance. And they’d also muck in and help out. We could always rely on them. When catching a crocodile, there’s nothing worse than giving a bunch of people directions, saying, ‘I’m going to jump on the head of this crocodile and I want you guys to jump on right behind me,’ and then thirty seconds later finding out you’re the only one sitting there. That’s just embarrassing. So after a while I could count on just one hand the people I would ask to help with crocodile wrangling—and Stephen and Danny were among them.