The Last Snake Man Page 10

  My dad was quite choosy about the snakes he wanted. When I was around eight years old I used to hunt snakes close to my home and when I found one I’d get Pop to come and catch it, but he often put the skids under me because he didn’t want them. Just four houses from us there was a narrow rock ledge where two brown snakes lived. Dad never wanted them and let them stay there and enjoy themselves.

  On what is now Bilga Crescent on the ocean side of Long Bay Gaol, there were huge rock boulders where we regularly watched up to three browns sunning themselves close to ledges, but they would retreat quickly when they were disturbed. The rocks are long gone, to make way for more houses. I wanted Dad to catch one of those brown snakes, but he just grinned and said he didn’t want any. I was young and thought you should catch every snake you saw. I didn’t realise that most caught snakes were never taken home: the placid ones were released and the lively ones kept and used for the La Pa snake show.

  Despite having been bitten several times himself, Pop kept ‘fresh’ snakes for the La Pa shows. The more you handle snakes, the more placid they become and the less exciting for the crowds at a snake show, so you wouldn’t capture a snake for the show if it was already quiet. He also thought that if the snakes looked too quiet and calm it could give people, kids especially, a false impression of how dangerous they were—and that could get them into trouble if they found a snake and thought they could handle it.

  These days there are rules restricting snake handlers from continually catching and releasing their stock to find lively ones. Back in the day, some of Dad’s snakes would go to Taronga Park Zoo for display or be given or sold to travelling showmen, who would always hunt down Dad for fresh stock.

  I think I was about eleven when I started catching snakes again (after the incident when I was much younger). At first I caught a monster black but he was too large, heavy and cranky and I couldn’t handle him so I gave him his freedom. Around the same time I grabbed a 5-foot brown, which also scared me. I had some schoolmates with me, though, so I couldn’t back off! I ‘wanged’ it, as we used to say—grabbed it by the tail and spun it around in a circle above my head, spinning around with it.

  My mates ran to get a corn sack to put it in and by the time they came back the snake was giddier than me and I had no trouble bagging it. It was my first large brown and I was so proud, but unfortunately I couldn’t tell Pop because I would have been in big trouble. So we told him it was caught by my big brother George, who then happily collected the reward money from Pop to go to the movies on his own.

  Around this time, a newly migrated English family, the Hosmers, were living in a large tent and caravan about four doors down from us. There were two sons: Dennis, who was my age; and Bill, who was much older. We used to hunt together for snakes; Dennis and I would catch them while Bill held open the bag to drop them in. In later years Bill became an internationally recognised herpetologist, although as far as I know he never mentioned in his writings that he was inspired by watching Pop handling snakes in his backyard pit at La Pa, just 100 metres from where they lived.

  The family eventually moved away up north, where Bill joined up with Louis Robichaux, a friend of mine. Louis showed Bill Hosmer a new undocumented skink, which he said he was going to send—along with a few more creatures—to Eric Worrell to ‘describe’, and asked Bill not to tell anyone until he’d done so. In the natural history world, describing a reptile (or any other living thing) is what it says it is: you describe it in minute detail, including size, shape and distinctive markings, and then you get the description published, preferably in a peer-reviewed journal. After that you may have established a new species or subspecies.

  Bill had other ideas, though, and sent it to J.R. Kinghorn, who had recently retired from his position as assistant director and reptiles curator at the Australian Museum. Kinghorn described the skink and named it Egernia hosmerii in recognition of Bill. This was a sore point for many in the game because he’d broken his word to Louis, but we were just kids at the time and, to this day, the species is known as Hosmer’s skink.

  A great place to find snakes was east of the tramline along the high brick wall around Long Bay Gaol. The eastern side had a long billabong about 10 metres wide with large green reeds. There were plenty of frogs around in those days, which attracted both brown and black snakes, and they had no predators. There was a metre-wide track between the reeds alongside the wall, where black snakes used to lie, although they would quickly slither away when approached. Sometimes, however, they would go for the wall, making it possible to catch them, which was made easier by the fact that the foundations were decaying and cracks and holes meant you could often grab one.

  Years later the wall fell down is some places and eventually a new brick wall was built. There were always a few locals inside as inmates, usually for some minor offence, and they trained to become bricklayers by building the new wall. The gaol rewarded them with a packet of tobacco for any snake they caught or killed while they worked. So they got us to leave a small, 30-centimetre or so long snake in a bag or box at night, usually with a small wad of tobacco for their use, hidden either under one of their mortar boards or some bricks. They would find the bag the next day, gingerly remove the snake and claim a reward for its capture and killing.

  Not far from the main buildings in Prince Henry Hospital, near the northern end of Little Bay Beach, was the Leper Home, a large low building with a high rusted iron fence. As the name implies, it housed sufferers of leprosy and was remote from the hospital because of the supposed risk of contracting the disease through contact with the sufferers. All the authorities knew then was that it was infectious and hard to cure. Now we know it’s not that easily transmitted and can be cured with antibiotics.

  We were young and fearless, though, and happy to mix with the patients. We played billiards with them and they gave us loaves of freshly baked bread. We had a lot of sympathy for these blokes and suggested to the old retired soldiers living on Bare Island at La Pa that they visit them and play billiards. This happened more than once, and everyone was happy. About 100 metres up the hill from the Leper Home, Dad showed me the remains of the hut his old friend ‘Snakey George’ had lived in, and told me how he’d become a second father to him (much to the irritation of his grandfather).

  Along the ridge towards Little Bay, there were stacks of rusty iron that were very happy hunting grounds for Pop and me. Strangely there were no tiger snakes, just browns and blacks. The hospital staff had signs erected near the beach steps warning people of the brown snake danger. A few years ago, Randwick Council erected a similar sign near Malabar Beach, but I just happen to know that you’re more likely to see a black snake there.

  The Chinese market gardens at Botany were home to probably the biggest tiger snake colony in all of Sydney, although there were also a few swamp or marsh snakes there. A friend caught one enormous swamp snake that Dad displayed at the La Pa show. He made great play of its size and probably even pretended to have been bitten by it.

  On the western side of the gardens was what we called Death Adder Hill. Ray Mascord, the author of numerous books on spiders, caught two death adders there. Adders weren’t that common, and it was tigers that really predominated on the low lands. These days the locals will tell you they’ve never heard of Death Adder Hill. I suppose the name wouldn’t have done much for real estate values and was just allowed to die. There aren’t so many snakes around the area these days. Poor buggers, their food has gone—the waterholes have dried up so there are no frogs.

  In later years, one of our main reasons for catching snakes was to give them to Eric Worrell’s reptile farm, where he used to milk them for venom that the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory used to make antivenom. Eric had grown up to be a good friend of Pop’s, and opened the Australian Reptile Park near Gosford in 1959. It has since been moved to the main north–south freeway, where you can’t miss it—there’s a huge model dinosaur on the western hill. We also kept a few snakes at home for Eric,
and he used to come and milk them every fortnight. It’s a bit stressful for the snake but they would live for a few years, and it was all about saving human lives.

  Everybody has their own system for catching snakes. Half of it is knowing where to search in the first place. On the way there, you look 10–15 metres ahead, depending on the terrain. And then you look closer to the ground and, when you get to the spot, you look again. It depends on the situation, but my mate Jimmy McGregor and I once caught 163 tiger snakes in nine hours on Sylvester Smith’s property at Lake George near Canberra. Jimmy was the spotter and I was catching and bagging them up. I remember saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, slow down, let me get them in the bag before you pin down another one.’ I even caught a stack of tiger snakes on my honeymoon. Helen was less than pleased and retreated to our caravan.

  A couple of funny reptile stories spring to mind. One weekend in 1949, when I was eleven, Pop took me by train to Bomaderry near Nowra and then we walked 15 kilometres to a favourite campsite near Greenwell Point. He recalled being there twenty years earlier with his mate Frank Rodgers. Frank owned the roundhouse shop at the La Pa snake pit. It was Frank who drove Pop to hospital on his truck that time he was bitten by the brown snake. Many years before, Frank’s father had persuaded Professor Fox to set up the snake pit to drum up business for the shop (which has long since burnt down).

  Twenty years earlier they had chopped away a knothole from a fallen tree so they could catch a giant red-bellied black snake. Sure enough, the tree and the axe marks were still there, and so was another 2-metre black, which Pop quickly bagged.

  We spotted another giant black slipping into the reeds around the dam, so Pop rolled up his trouser legs and walked into the 15-centimetre-deep water in pursuit. Holding the 2-metre monster by the tail, Pop realised his legs were unprotected and yelled ‘Pull down my pants!’

  He meant for me to pull down the folded trouser legs, in case the snake curled back round and bit him. But before he knew what was going on I had his pants undone and floating around his ankles. It was a while before he could see the funny side.

  Years later, when I was working on the powerlines, I used to catch snakes and sometimes goannas for Dad and Eric. I’d crate them up and bring them back on my occasional trips to the city. Times were different then and I was always picking up hitch-hikers; it never ever bothered me in the slightest. One day I stopped for a bloke who told me he was going to Central Station in Sydney to get on the midnight paper train to Goulburn.

  ‘Hop in,’ I said, glad of the company.

  It was a hot night and we were driving along, when ‘Paaarrrp!’, he broke wind and it was a stinker.

  ‘That was a beauty,’ he said, blithely.

  ‘Yeah, wasn’t it?’ I replied, as I rolled the window down, wondering if this joker had any manners at all.

  Half an hour or an hour later, ‘Paaarrrp!’ again, and the vehicle smelled like something had crawled inside it and died.

  ‘Oh, another beauty,’ he said, shameless.

  ‘Yeah, wasn’t it,’ I said, thinking to myself that if he did that again I’d kick him straight out of the car.

  We were coming down onto the Harbour Bridge when ‘Paaarrrp!’, off he goes again. I’d been planning to run him all the way to the station, but after this I thought, ‘He can find his own way!’ As soon as I got through the toll gates I pulled over and said, ‘I’ve got to go this way.’

  ‘Okay, thanks mate,’ he said, got out and off he went.

  I only went around a couple of corners more, wondering what kind of bloke it was who stinks out his ride to the city, when ‘Paaarrrp!’ It was the goanna. I felt like chasing the bloke through the city to tell him it wasn’t me.

  CHAPTER 12

  SNAKEBITES

  There’s probably no line of business in which the phrase ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is truer than snake handling. If a snakey survived a slight bite and no antivenom was given, then pulled through okay with a few more bites and scratches, there’s a slight possibility that they’ll build up resistance to future bites. And they did get bitten. If you’re in this game long enough, it doesn’t matter how experienced or careful you are, sooner or later a snake will get you.

  Pop was always turning his snakes over—getting fresh ones once the others had calmed down. The one exception to this rule was red-bellied blacks. Pop had a passion for these creatures and spent a lot of time on the south coast trying to find the biggest specimens he could. He captured a large one that ended up more than 2.4 metres long. It lived in captivity for eighteen years, but it could have been 40 years old for all we knew. Its shed skin stretched to 2.75 metres and was sent to the Australian Museum, where for many years it was displayed in a glass case.

  Pop was bitten throughout his career, including on the day he was photographed for the newspaper taking a tiger snake out of a tree. His technique was tried and tested: he grabbed each snake by the tail while the other hand flashed down to seize it behind the head, which he did successfully sixteen times. The seventeenth snake was sunning itself in a tree that Pop had to climb. Because Pop was restricted in his movement, the snake got him, but he just poured some antidote on the wound and continued as if nothing had happened. The pressmen were suitably impressed.

  There had been times, however, when he’d suffered considerable pain and discomfort, such as when a large brown bit him on the nose at the 1924 Adelaide Show. When people asked if he was sick, Mum replied, ‘Of course he was sick. He was always sick from snakebite.’ He was once blind for three days after a tiger snake bit him on the knee. And many other times I watched in horror as the effects of venom became all too clear and he had trouble breathing normally and sat slumped in his chair drinking cold tea.

  Once when we were snaking near Albury, Pop got bitten by a tiger snake but he didn’t have a blade to scarify the wounds and bleed the venom. I remembered having seen a beer bottle a couple of miles back so I ran back and got it, broke it (after several failed attempts along the way) and he used the broken glass to cut a line between the puncture holes. I remember being embarrassed when we got on the train and he fell into a deep sleep and snored all the way back to Sydney.

  Graeme Gow, who succeeded Pop as curator of reptiles at Taronga Park, recalls that in the late 1950s he borrowed a 1.3-metre tiger snake from Dad for a display and that the snake continuously struck at the wall of the glass tank where it was housed. When the time came for its return it took 90 minutes to get it safely bagged (partly because they didn’t have a hooped bag).

  When Graeme returned the snake to Pop, he warned him it was an angry one, earning him a look of ‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’ before Pop tipped the snake from the bag. The tiger immediately flattened its head and struck at Pop’s trouser leg. When he then moved it with his foot, the snake struck back, sinking its fangs into his Achilles tendon, and had to be forcibly removed.

  Even so, Pop refused all offers of help and merely said to Graeme, ‘Don’t tell the missus.’ His only ‘treatment’ was numerous cups of tea.

  But a much more serious bite occurred in 1961, when a large brown snake bit Pop on the hand in front of a crowd at the Loop. He ignored it and carried on with the show, but 45 minutes later, while he was working with tiger snakes, Pop collapsed. The crowd thought it was all part of the act, but a friend, Frank Rodgers, realised there was something up and, with the help of onlookers, lifted Pop onto the back of his truck and quickly drove him to Prince Henry Hospital.

  Frank told the doctors that the bite was probably from a tiger snake, as that’s what Pop had been handling when he keeled over. For the first time in his life, Pop received antivenom, but there was no response. He was put on a respirator and his condition deteriorated rapidly. The antibodies that had kept him alive for almost 50 years were letting him down.

  Luckily, a health inspector from Bathurst had seen the brown snake bite Pop but had left the show temporarily before Pop collapsed. When he came back and h
eard what had happened, he went to the hospital and told them the bite had been from a brown snake. When the correct antivenom was administered, Pop’s body responded immediately and he was allowed to go home the next day. It’s possible that Pop helped to some degree to save his own life, given the brown snake antivenom had only recently been developed and he had regularly provided Eric Worrell with brown snakes to produce venom for the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories.

  Even after he retired from the zoo, Pop was still working with snakes and was constantly seeking an opportunity to return to the country around lakes George and Cowal, or the Murray River. Every September he and Eric Worrell would take a bushmen’s holiday together to go snaking.

  A few days after he suffered a stroke in August 1965, Pop rose from his bed in Prince Henry Hospital and disappeared. He was found two hours later, walking through the nearby bush looking for snakes where, nearly 60 years earlier, he’d gone snaking with Snakey George. He passed away a couple of days later at the age of 68, one of the longest lived of his trade, at least before antivenom was developed.

  For about a year before this, Mum had been asking me to take over the shows from Pop but I had never done snake shows before, and neither had my brother George. We just hunted snakes and caught them. But we realised once he had gone that if we didn’t do it, an important old tradition would die with him, so, two weeks after Pop’s death, George and I performed for the first and only time together at the La Pa Loop. After that, we worked the snake pit on an alternating roster basis on Sundays and most public holidays.

  Although catching snakes can be a lot of fun, it has a serious side—and that’s helping to provide venom for the labs so that they can create antivenom. That stuff isn’t just for snakeys—there are plenty of people who live and work in the bush and find themselves on the wrong end of an angry snake. About two or three people each year die from snakebites in Australia, most of them from brown snakes, although Australia has the five deadliest land snakes in the world (based on how much of their venom it takes to kill a mouse). But there are a lot more people getting bitten than die—and that’s because we have antivenom and we know what to do when someone gets bitten.