by Bob Irwin
Food was eaten on the run with rarely any downtime to rest. After they’d already worked for eight or ten hours solid, if there was still another two hours to go, the team would rise to the challenge. You’d say to them, ‘Who’s available to set that next trap?’ And they’d all put their hands up. And yet you’d take one look at them when they were setting that next trap and you just knew they had reached their threshold. They’d physically had it. They’d been taught from day one, you can always do more and you can always do it better. That was the kind of work ethic they had been shown, and they continued to raise the bar.
The method of capture was a methodical process, choreographed precisely with each individual knowing their specific role. If you could liken crocodile catching to a dance, everyone knew their position, movement and footing for this daring routine. Crocs explode, tire, build up, and explode, so we’d work between those explosions. ‘Building up,’ the people holding the back legs of the crocodile would call out as they sensed a strong vibration through the hind legs warning that the crocodile was about to put up a good struggle. All ten participants would hang on for dear life and it was always a test of your ability to not be tossed around like a ragdoll. We’d all taken it in turns at some point to go hurtling through the air. Steve would kill himself laughing if it was me, but would find time a few hours later to seek me out and ask if I’d been hurt in any way.
The six-mil rope had one simple job at the release stage of the capture: it was the final process in setting the crocodile free. When you secured the head in order to process the crocodile, you had to first tape the crocodile’s mouth shut, ensuring that the most dangerous part of the animal was secure. Once you had that tape in place, you’d cut off all of the others, leaving only one rope running along the head of the crocodile: the six-mil. You’d tape the jaw again securely over that rope, and at the same time, you’d tape an elasticised blindfold over the eyes of the crocodile to help minimise any stress on the animal. The rope ran underneath it. Everything would be set in place. It was then tied to a small polystyrene float and held by a member of the team who was a safe distance away from the crocodile.
It was only when the whole procedure was finished and we’d taken the necessary measurements of the crocodile for research and attached the satellite tracker that the crocodile would be positioned so it had a clear path to the water on its own. When everything was perfectly in position, the team would start to methodically and carefully climb off the crocodile.
Usually the first team of people to go would be the two people at the very rear of the crocodile, then the next team would go and so on until just two people were left holding the crocodile down. You’d wait until you could feel that he was settled, and then you’d instruct one of those people to go, leaving just one lone individual at the head of the crocodile with another person holding the rope in position. That last person had the job of cautiously cutting the tape on the jaw and the tape on the eyes three-quarters of the way through so that only a fraction of the tape remained. This, of course, had to be done in record time. That last person would finally leave the crocodile, and whoever had hold of the rope, the last thread that connected our team to that crocodile, would give it a firm tug and it would peel off along the jaw of the croc, taking with it the tape from around the jaw and the bandage from around the eyes. The crocodile was finally free to make its way back to the water, to again be a wild animal and possibly contemplate its alien abduction. The poly float was attached to the rope just in case things didn’t go to plan and the rope fell into the water so it could easily be retrieved. That modest little six-mil rope was one of the most significant pieces of the crocodile-capturing procedure.
First, someone would hand it to the person who was on the head of the crocodile, known as the ‘Head Hunter’, the most hazardous position, so close to the powerful jaws of the animal. Usually that person was Steve. The rope had to be a certain length, spliced perfectly on the end so that it was neat and tidy. No daggy bits were acceptable, and the team had learnt that we were quite particular about this because it played such an important role for the crocodile to return to the wild where it belonged; we worked hard to make it as unobtrusive as possible. The team would prepare these six-mil pieces of rope at night by the fire and keep them in their pockets so that at any given time whoever was nearest to the Head Hunter would be able to promptly hand it over so that everything would run smoothly. It was a tried and tested method everyone was well versed in.
But today, with Steve at the head, I had a different plan. I had another piece of six-mil rope where I’d cut the burnt end off with a knife and had teased it out at the end so that it had frayed into individual segments about one foot long. Steve was getting impatient, still not looking up, holding out his hand and shouting again. ‘Six-mil! Are one of you blokes going to pass me that six-mil, or what?’
I couldn’t help myself; I passed him this piece of frayed rope, knowing very well he might not react favourably. Seeing it in his hand, Steve saw red. He looked up as if to say, ‘Well, you are going to pay for that.’ He was shocked to think that any one of his team would do that to him in the risky position he was in. But I knew that everything was under control; it was just one time I felt it was possible to take some of the heat out of the moment because we still had more crocodiles to process and the day grew tenser as it went on and the team grew increasingly tired.
The kind of pressure that people are placed under in those situations can make it a very risky and dangerous job. If one person in the team doesn’t do their job correctly, it can have a really adverse effect on the whole team. From time to time, those things would happen and Steve would let people know in no uncertain terms that they had mucked up, that they hadn’t performed as well as they should have. In these kinds of settings, Steve couldn’t afford pleasantries like ‘Would you mind’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. It had to be fast and accurate because in those jaws is enough power to kill twenty men. He felt that if anybody got seriously hurt while we were processing a crocodile it was his responsibility. Obviously, with ten or twelve people in that team who Steve was responsible for, this caused tension.
So it seemed like a good time to lighten the mood, to get Steve in a better frame of mind and to break some of that rigidity. Steve was also battling with a lot of physical pain, working with a broken neck and other injuries. While he was working with crocodiles, he tried to hide it. But anybody who was the slightest bit observant could tell that he wasn’t going so well.
As soon as he saw me grinning back at him and recognised that it was my wrinkly scarred hand connected to the other end of that rope, his expression changed immediately and his frown morphed into a defeated but mischievous and childlike grin that made the stunt all the more worthwhile.
‘You old bastard,’ he huffed and threw the frayed rope right back at me before making a light-hearted comment to the team. ‘That’s the problem when you’re working with the oldest living fossil.’ He was, of course, referring to me and not the dinosaur he was working on.
It was a good feeling at that moment because I knew damn well that I was getting away with something nobody else would. Steve would have been thinking, It’s my old man, there’s not much I can do about this. I just have to wear it.
I knew I wouldn’t get flattened, I knew I’d get away with it, but the thought had crossed my mind that he might lash out without looking first. None of the croc team laughed out loud, but behind his back they were exchanging glances and sniggering, clearing their throats to disguise any laughter. Of course I had another six-mil rope prepared and immediately gave him the real one. I tucked the frayed one back into my pocket as we continued on, a little lighter on our feet. It made the day a lot easier to get through with much less intensity.
I was camped at Camp 19, tucked up a little bit back in the scrub. In the evenings, I’d walk down and join Steve for a meal. We camped apart from the rest of the team, who were over at Camp 20, to get a bit of space, so that we
could concentrate on preparing for the next day. My camp was set among the melaleuca trees with a green ants’ nest I’d brush up against every other day and pay the price for. Never learnt my lesson. I almost got to know those green ants on a personal basis.
It was a comfortable night after a typically hot day in the Cape. Earlier in the night, there were a lot of people moving about in the light of the campfire as normal, cooking dinner on the camp oven, using the cooler temperature of the night to pack up as much gear as they could before the scorching heat set in by morning, when we were moving on.
Steve usually went to bed much earlier than me, but on this last night at camp he’d decided to join me around the campfire. By this time, it was just Steve and me who were up; everyone else from our camp had retired to their tents, exhausted by the events of an action-packed day. Although, he normally slept on Croc One anchored out in the river, Steve had been sleeping in the camp while he’d battled with constant pain. Sleeping in his swag in the camp meant that he could get up at his leisure and fuss about in the darkness without disturbing anyone on the boat when the pain became intense. But he never slept all that well; he was renowned for that. And although he was constantly battling with all of that pain, he still worked through it as if there was nothing wrong. He continued to set traps, climb trees and be as physically involved as before. And he would never, ever complain. But as someone who knew him like the back of my hand, I saw that no matter what he did to fight it off, the pain was written all over his face. I took this time when we were alone to bring it up.
‘You know I can see you struggling. It’s as clear as dog’s doovas.’
Steve owned up to it. He knew he didn’t have to keep up his guard with me. ‘I think I’ve nearly reached my used-by date.’
He was struggling physically because he’d really knocked himself around and he rarely gave himself any reprieve from his injuries. In his lifetime he’d been snapped, gnawed, clawed, bitten, savaged, jumped on, whacked—you name it. He had scars all over him. No two fingers were the same; each one had either been broken, split or chomped. His hands were virtually scars on scars. In the end you couldn’t tell where one scar started and another finished. But every single time, he knew that those injuries had been caused by his own blunders. Growing up, I’d always taught him that if he got bitten, it was through no fault of the animal but his own error. He knew what he was up against every single time. It was all a giant learning curve for him as he kept pushing the envelope with his research and natural curiosity about wildlife. And he was good at that too. Exceptional.
As the two of us took it in turns to stoke the fire from our folding camp chairs, he talked about how badly he’d treated his body and how much this was weighing on his mind with his upcoming filming schedule. In his life working with wildlife he’d had everything but the kitchen sink thrown at him. And in the end he had the kitchen sink thrown in there too. Because of this, Steve was constantly working with a lot of pain, and we sat discussing how physically demanding these last four weeks in particular had been on him, and mentally it was challenging him no end. He acknowledged that he’d knocked himself around badly and had got away with it up to a point when he was young. But it had started to catch up with him.
‘I want to cut back on the filming, on all of it. I want to spend more time getting Bindi into it and being home,’ he said.
I didn’t get much involved in that side of things; Steve kept me pretty protected from all of that because he knew being in the public eye was never my thing. But Steve told me that he was facing an almost endless series of television projects in the months ahead. He was due to leave the bush to work on several big television specials and fly to the US to promote his shows. It was an unrelenting schedule which he told me he had little enthusiasm for despite the fact that he was aware of what it enabled him to do for the conservation side of things and spreading his message. He was physically drained already by the end of this trip, having worked at full capacity over a long time, without a break and in a very unforgiving environment. The mud, mosquitos and physical endurance of the last month had just about finished him. He made it very clear to me that he wanted a break, that it was getting to a stage where he didn’t feel he had a life of his own. He wanted more time to get back to the things he really enjoyed, being a dad and being hands-on in the conservation field.
Very quickly the conversation turned to the current trip. We talked about the good times we’d had and appreciated the time we’d spent together as a family.
‘How about you and that six-mil rope! You’re lucky ’cos I just about flattened you.’ We had a good laugh and suddenly the mood had shifted again.
Capturing a large number of crocodiles in such a short amount of time had taken us over thirty years of practice and learning from our mistakes. With the success of this milestone expedition, we reflected on how far we had come since that time way back in the 1970s when we set out to combat the stigma attached to man-eating crocodiles in order to save their lives. It was years of learning on our feet, fine-tuning our self-taught techniques, and years of our lives spent knee-deep in the mangroves and swamps of northern Australia. Steve was so chuffed to have gone from a two-man croc-catching band to a mammoth research expedition with a well-oiled team. These days he had more than his trusty Toyota Landcruiser ute and a croc-catching net. His worldwide TV success had afforded him a multitude of four-wheel drives, dinghies, a seventy-five-foot purpose-built research vessel, helicopters and the partnerships he’d nurtured so well with the government and universities he’d valuably collaborated with. This could only mean better outcomes for the animal he loved most in the world, the crocs. The experience of this team, in my eyes, was unsurpassed by anyone. He had established the best croc-catching team in the world.
‘We’ve come a long way pretty fast. How good are we?’ Steve said.
‘I always told you by the time you’d reach forty you’d have probably grown a brain!’ I teased in return. I’d always driven home the fact that that kind of finite direction for a young bloke doesn’t come until much later in life.
We kicked back for hours longer, one of those nights I wished would go on forever. We reminisced over the early days of mishaps, close calls and belly laughter along the track. Modest times when we’d tie our clothes to a rope and leave them out in the turbulent whitecaps of the creek rapids to be washed in our makeshift bush washing machine. We remembered the animals he grew up with, like Brolly the Brolga who used to steal his marbles and he’d have to wait for them to be digested before he could play with them again. We laughed out loud remembering the time he released a taipan in my camp—and I couldn’t be sure whether my venomous bedfellow had exited the tent as I crawled into my sleeping bag—and the many times he really tested my patience when he approached me in the zoo as his irritating alias ‘Glen Glamour’ with hideous fake buck-teeth and wig to move about unrecognised by fans. Every single time he’d get me with that bloody disguise.
In some ways I might have given Steve experiences and knowledge over the years, but by the same token I got as much back as I gave. It was never just a one-way street. In these later years, I was learning a lot more from Steve from what he had achieved with the zoo, the team and the research side of things. He’d taken our humble reptile park’s message global. I probably got a lot more than most parents got out of their children. To have those memories of sharing in really unique experiences to me was pretty special. I can’t think of another dad in the world who might have had an opportunity quite like that.
The hours had really got away from us as the moon shifted across the night sky, and before too long the fire had turned to coal. With a long drive ahead of me in the morning, we decided to call it a night, folding up our camp chairs before I bid goodnight to the green ants one last time and made my way to my tent guided by the light on my head torch. But before we went our separate ways, Steve and I shook hands. It was a routine thing we always did at the end of every day or night.
There was some kind of unspoken acknowledgement whenever we did that. An electricity, as two individuals became physically connected. It was a standard greeting for us, something we did constantly. If a moment was stressful or we’d had a hard time doing something that hadn’t gone to plan or it was a harder day than usual, we’d just shake hands. It was always something I looked forward to.
And each time, without fail, he’d try to break my fingers. He probably could have if he wanted to, because he was gifted with arms like an orangutan from the day he was born. At the same time he’d give a satisfied smirk while crushing the bones in my fingers with his giant hands. I’d just look at him, not uttering a word. We’d go through this routine every time. There was no way I would ever give in or let him see my discomfort and yet it hurt like hell. That was always our little thing and something we shared from when he was a really young bloke. He grew to have the strength of ten men as he wrangled eleven-foot crocodiles solo that these days took a team of men to hold down.
As the early morning sun rose over the Kennedy River, the camp inhabitants began to dissipate as the team rose under the shelter of darkness to load their makeshift homes of the past four weeks onto the trucks. Over the coming days, our exhausted group would look forward to making the long journey home for some well-deserved rest, but it was only the beginning for Steve. As we’d finalised the research project and were able to make a break for home, Steve’s demanding months of filming were just starting. Together with his close friend and manager, John Stainton, his film crew and his lead croc keeper, Briano, he was to continue on to the Great Barrier Reef onboard his mother ship Croc One. I’d packed up the last of my gear, leaving ahead of the rest of the team, doing one final check of the ropes, securing everything on the back of the truck when Steve came over to say goodbye.