The Last Crocodile Hunter

by Bob Irwin

  ***

  I’m all for laws to protect our rapidly diminishing wildlife, but when that expands to protecting animals that are already dead as a doornail, I start to question the people who wrote the rulebook. Up at Cattle Creek, Steve and I had realised that the best bait for our traps was either feral pigs or roadkill wallabies that we’d collect from the side of the highway. Feral pigs were not always a sure thing, but the roadkill was sadly a plentiful resource.

  There was a particularly long stretch of the Bruce Highway near our camp on which agile wallabies, a species native to Far North Queensland, were struck by vehicles throughout the night. By morning the roadside would be carnage: every couple of metres there’d be another obliterated carcass strewn across the bitumen. So Steve and I decided to make the best of a bad situation. We figured that the more we could clean off the side of the road, the less chance there’d be of large birds of prey coming down to feast on the remains and also becoming roadkill. We’d travel along the highway early in the morning and retrieve what we needed to line our traps.

  But we found out very quickly that we were in fact breaking the law by using these dead animals. It didn’t even cross my mind that that’d be the case. The only thing that interested me was whether I was doing the right thing by the animals themselves. And they were dead. In fact, they were barely recognisable and most had not a skerrick of hair remaining.

  But the authority’s beef was that they couldn’t prove whether we were collecting them off the side of the road, or whether we were in fact killing these animals for our traps. We’d already explained our approach to the Ingham-based officers from the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services. Their take was that they preferred we didn’t do it but they weren’t going to prosecute us for it, and offered a few alternatives: ‘Can we suggest instead that you use chickens from the local chicken farm, or you can take as many fruit bats as you want.’

  I was dumbfounded. White-feathered chickens are of course foreign food to wild crocodiles, and neither Steve nor I could fathom the idea of going to a roost of our beautiful native fruit bats and shooting them out of the trees. They weren’t protected at this time, but there was just no chance we were going to kill any native wildlife.

  So we kept collecting the roadkill, and somehow the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries got word of it. Two notoriously efficient officers were on the job and keen to prosecute, as they made clear when they paid us a visit at our campsite one morning.

  I was fined for using protected fauna in our traps. They weren’t interested if those wallabies were dead or alive when we found them. The officers handed me a notice to appear at a court hearing in Ingham. I wrote a letter to the magistrate explaining that we were in fact using dead wallabies found on the side of the road, and even offered to take the magistrate to the very road we collected them from to prove it. In the end, the magistrate was as lenient as he could be under the legislation. I was fined just four hundred dollars, one hundred dollars for each wallaby they had observed in the traps. The upper limit of the fine was closer to four thousand dollars per animal, so I got off reasonably lightly.

  I paid the four hundred dollars, but Steve and I had to come up with an alternative for bait, as the fisheries officers were constantly on our backs after that, visiting our camp and launching a boat into the river to check our traps. But the locals were on our side.

  Over the years of exploring this environment, Steve had met nearly everyone in the area. They’d be minding their own business, working on their paddocks fronting the creek, and get the fright of their lives when Steve would appear out of nowhere, just walk right out of the creek and ask, ‘Where am I?’ They’d tell him where he was, and then get to talking, and he’d get a lift back to camp having made a new friend. After so many years of doing that, there wasn’t a farmer or fisherman on that creek who didn’t recognise Steve—the crocodile hunter from Cattle Creek.

  When word got around that the fisheries department was giving us grief, the locals, unbeknown to us, took it upon themselves to pay these particular officers a lesson. We found out many months later that the next time the officers launched their boat at one of the local boat ramps to come and monitor our traps, they returned to find their vehicle and boat trailer at the bottom of the river. Someone had released the handbrake and the car had reversed off the boat ramp and sunk to the bottom of Cattle Creek, trailer and all. The officers were transferred out of Ingham after that.

  In the end, I wasn’t upset at having to pay the four hundred dollars, as poultry would have cost a lot more than that. I was angered by the stupidity of the whole thing. We were advised to shoot native wildlife rather than use a carcass already rotting by the side of the road; it just made no sense. I was more interested in saving the native animals that were still alive. But it wasn’t just in the far north that we had to contend with the authorities. Back at the reptile park, we also had to comply with rules and regulations that were constantly changing in those early days of native wildlife protection.

  Two officers from Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services visited me one day to do a stocktake of our animals, to make sure I was complying with my permit. One of them was a really good bloke I’d worked with over many years. We got along like a house on fire and from time to time he’d helped me deal with frustrating situations when the department was being inflexible. The other was a young rookie who was clearly just learning the ropes.

  We went through the entire park together, with no stone left unturned. They went through the bother of counting every single one of the big crocs, from the safety of behind the fences. They also wanted to see a behind-the-scenes enclosure full of juvenile saltwater crocodiles I’d bred at the park and raised from hatchlings. As they grew to be over two feet long, I’d built an outdoor enclosure for them. They had a natural earth pond, which they could use to regulate their temperature. Crocodiles are highly sensitive to cold, and they don’t naturally occur as far south as the Sunshine Coast. Their preferred body temperature is between thirty and thirty-three degrees Celsius. My hope was that if I could raise these little guys from hatchlings and they could adjust to the temperatures then they’d hopefully cope better when the winter months rolled around.

  ‘How many crocs have you got in there?’ the younger guy asked in an authoritative tone. I showed him my records confirming that there were twenty-five, and listing the number I’d bred, and any losses I had suffered after incubating that clutch.

  ‘I’d like to count those ones too,’ he said.

  Well, I just looked at him. I knew exactly what was going to happen next. These were confident little crocodiles, despite their smaller size. ‘Well, how are you gonna do it? How do you plan on counting them?’ I asked. It was quite clear he didn’t really have a plan.

  ‘We’re going to have to catch them all by hand,’ he decided.

  I just looked at my friend and we both shook our heads. I was tempted to explain how I got my scars, but I kept my hand in my pocket instead. ‘If you want to catch them, go ahead and catch them. But I’m telling you right now there’s no way to do it and I’m sure as hell not going to do it for you. You’re going to either have to accept what I’ve got on paper, or get in there and count them yourself.’

  ‘Oh no, we’ve got to do this properly. We’ve got to get these numbers accurate,’ he insisted.

  In the end I grudgingly brought over some large plastic tubs to hold the salties as this young fella caught them. I couldn’t believe it when he began by removing his socks and shoes. In the clay-bottomed pond, the water was so muddy that you couldn’t see a thing below the surface. Crocodiles are equipped for these conditions with a transparent lid that closes over their eyes, allowing them to see very well underwater.

  He waded out into the pond, feeling for the invisible crocs by putting his hands in the water. And of course one bit him almost straightaway. It was just a little salty, about a metre long, but they’ve got needle-sharp teeth and it drew a fair amount of blood. And
furthermore, it wouldn’t let go.

  ‘It’s not going all that well so far,’ I observed from the safety of the water’s edge.

  ‘I think I’ll just take your word for it. Twenty-five crocs, you said?’

  ‘Twenty-five, indeed.’ But I couldn’t control my smirk and the next thing me and the other guy were in hysterics.

  When it comes to crocodiles, there are some things you can do and some you can’t. And getting into a murky pond with twenty-five sets of needle-sharp teeth is definitely one of those things you can’t do.

  ***

  After our first trip up to Cattle Creek together, Steve and I took it in turns to be up there because we couldn’t both leave the reptile park at the same time. But for the duration of our permit, one of us had to be up north catching crocodiles. We weren’t there all year round; we were up there at the whims of the weather. In a flood or the wet season it was a lot harder to find the crocodiles. And the crocodiles weren’t all that interested in food in winter.

  And every time one of us caught a crocodile up there the other would have to drive up from the reptile park to collect it. Sixteen hours is a long drive and you’d have to turn around and drive straight back as that crocodile needed to be settled into its new enclosure with food and access to water as quickly as possible. We’d switch places whenever we got tired, because when you got tired, you got careless, and that was one aspect of workplace health and safety we did pay attention to.

  ‘Dad, I need a pick-up,’ Steve would say when a crocodile was ready to go to the park.

  ‘All right, son, I’ll be up there soon,’ I’d say and make hasty arrangements to drop everything at the park and set out.

  On this particular occasion, I was travelling home with a croc with her jaw tied. I’d made a rare exception to my rule because the croc was in the cabin with me in Lyn’s small Honda Accord hatchback. I couldn’t fit the crate in the back of the car so she was lying diagonally across the folded back seats and the boot. It was a small space for a big old girl.

  ‘You going to be right with her?’ Steve asked, as we closed the boot.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ I said, and I drove off with her wrapped snugly in a tarpaulin, her snout unnervingly close to the back of my head.

  I knew that she was struggling with the tarpaulin so I stopped to check her a few times. But when she seemed to calm down I decided to push on. I’d almost reached the Sunshine Coast when I sensed that something wasn’t right. I looked out of the corner of my eye and there was this crocodile with her head next to mine, right up at the windscreen, so close that the warm breath from her nostrils had left fog on the glass. She was a matter of inches away from my face, just looking at me as I was looking at her, while doing everything I could to keep from swerving across the road at one hundred kilometres per hour. Well, this is not good, Bob, I thought. If she’d clouted me on the side of the head, as crocodiles do in the wild, that’d be the end of me. And I’m not sure that the authorities called out to the crash site would have been equipped to handle a salty trapped inside a small car. They’d probably have left me in there.

  Very slowly and carefully, I pulled over on the side of the highway, and got out. The hard part seemingly over, I went around to the boot to pull her back. But she objected and finished up loose out on the road with me. She had escaped her tarpaulin. There we were, just standing on the side of the Bruce Highway, an eight-foot crocodile and me. And then the eight-foot crocodile started walking off.

  I had such a job then of trying to wrap her up, hold her down and lift her back up into the car. I’m a little bloke, and she was heavy. I couldn’t lift the whole crocodile, so I attempted one limb at a time: I’d get the head in, then go around and lift the back legs, then another bit of her, and then her head would come out again and I’d have to start the process once more.

  It would have been quite the sight. You don’t see crocodiles as far south as Gympie, and here was a man wrangling a sizeable crocodile while standing on the side of the main state highway. I drove back to the park, hoping to get home without being pulled over. Although I had a permit to remove this croc, I was certain that the Honda Accord wouldn’t have been judged an acceptable method of transport in the eyes of the law. The police would also have been shocked to pull over a driver chaperoning a crocodile as his passenger.

  I eventually got home at an ungodly hour of the morning and woke Lyn to help me get the crocodile out of the car.

  ‘My car! What on earth happened to my car?’ she shouted, pointing at a dent in the front bumper. Lyn was more concerned about some damage from a stone thrown up off the road than the large saltwater crocodile squeezed into the back. That last part didn’t even cause her to bat an eyelid. That was just how normal that kind of thing was in our household.

  ***

  When we’d first started heading north to catch crocodiles, Steve had gone on a side mission to collect green pythons and taipans from Australia’s largest remnant lowland rainforest in the exquisite Kutini-Payamu (Iron Range) National Park on the east coast of the Cape York Peninsula. He had been camping on the snow-white sands of Chilli Beach when a timid female Staffordshire bull terrier wandered into his camp, searching for a feed. She was skin and bone, and had clearly been mistreated. And that was it: the two became inseparable, sleeping out under the stars together every night afterwards. When Steve left, he decided to take her with him, and from then on Chilli became his shadow, going everywhere with him.

  In those isolated years he spent camping up at Cattle Creek, Chilli was his greatest companion and crocodile-catching canine accomplice. Out on the boat, her place was right up the front, head high, with the wind in her fur. You could almost have sworn that she was smiling, her big open-mouthed grin meaning saliva flew everywhere. You had to look out if you were downwind of her or you’d end up wearing it. He’d talk to her constantly as he pulled crocodiles from traps into the boat, a running commentary on what he was going to do and how he wanted her to behave. She was fearless and knew exactly when to get her paws out of the way of the jaws of a big croc.

  When it was cold, Chilli would curl up in the sleeping bag with Steve because he didn’t want her feeling cold. And Chilli always got the best cuts of his meat and rode in the front passenger seat of his truck while the humans took a back seat. I contested that, of course.

  We’d often use feral pigs as bait for the crocodile traps. Wild boars had been brought over from Europe to Australia in the 1700s, and quickly caused havoc to the natural environment, one of the most widespread invasive pest species in Queensland. So Steve was welcome to catch feral pigs on lots of local properties for croc bait, and of a night he and Chilli were regularly out there with a spotlight. Chilli was such an exceptional pig hunter that Steve didn’t like to use guns; they had their routine down to a fine art. On his command, she would race ahead of him and grab the biggest boar by the ear, holding it until Steve could catch up with her.

  One night Steve’s local friends wanted to show him a spot chock-full of pigs. As Chilli had hold of a pig, one of the other shooters impulsively shot at it and the bullet passed right through the pig and hit Chilli, killing her instantly.

  Steve was inconsolable. He scooped her up and carried her for kilometres, sobbing, all the way back to his camp. He refused offers of lifts from the others; he didn’t want to be around people. He buried Chilli right where she had loyally sat beside his camp chair night after night, and then stayed up all night grieving. He grieved for that little dog as much as he’d grieve for any human because in his eyes she was no less of a companion. In his isolated world out there at Cattle Creek, that little dog became his whole world.

  I was already on my way up to Steve when Chilli died, and I arrived the night afterwards. He was an absolute mess. He had lost any motivation to keep doing his work with crocodiles, and given that he had more get-up-and-go than anyone around, that told me the depth of his loss. So we hung around the campsite for a good while, after first dismantling the
croc traps. It was troubling to see him in so much pain. So I found a piece of wood lying in the grass, and shaped it, and then heated up a thin piece of metal and etched into it the words Camp Chilli. I hung the finished sign at the entrance to our campsite. ‘Now Chilli will always be here with you at Cattle Creek,’ I said.

  Steve cried, but it was more cathartic this time. That night, as we sat under the stars around a campfire, he told me how he’d nearly lost Chilli once before. He had been out bush with her one night when she’d run off after a pig. After searching for her for hours, he’d returned to camp alone, beside himself with worry. He’d then headed straight up to Stephen and Danny’s house to ask their advice on how to find her. They told him to go back to where he’d last seen Chilli and leave some of his clothes there. She would find them via his scent and stay there until he returned for her.

  They meant for Steve to leave a shirt, but Steve didn’t do anything by halves: he took absolutely everything off, including his jocks, and went back to camp stark naked. He barely slept a wink and was back to check the spot at the crack of dawn. And there was Chilli, sitting dutifully beside his dirty clothes.

  ‘How did you get back to the spot without your clothes?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘I drove the truck,’ he said.

  ‘What would have happened if someone had pulled you over?’

  ‘I would have been naked,’ he said matter-of-factly before breaking into his first smile in days.

  He slowly got his groove back for crocodile catching, but every inch of that creek continued to remind him of Chilli, and it all remained pretty raw for a good while. Our campsite on Cattle Creek became widely known as Camp Chilli and that sign hung on our lean-to for the remainder of his croc-catching days and beyond. Steve eventually found a new love, Sui, another female Staffie. She quickly became his next crocodile-hunting canine and companion. But she sure had big paw-prints to fill.