The Last Snake Man Page 12

  I never got bitten again but I had some close calls. Once I was hit on the glasses, right on the bridge. I was doing a show and a brown snake went for my forehead and the next thing I knew I felt the hit on my face and my glasses were hanging off the cord I had round my neck. The snake was hanging off the glasses, his fangs still hooked over the frame. When I got the snake back in the bag I went up to my mate Robert McLean, who was in the crowd and asked him if there was any blood mark.

  ‘No blood anywhere,’ he said.

  ‘Thank Christ,’ I said. ‘That was a scary one.’

  Some snake handlers think they’re too smart to be bitten, that they’re too good for snakes. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They just haven’t handled enough bad ones, that’s all. A good tiger, brown snake or any of the taipans can be impossible to hold safely. If it wants to bite you, it will get you for sure. All the old pros will say the same thing as me.

  When they want you, they’ve got you. And they all say the very same thing when they get bitten: ‘He got me.’

  CHAPTER 14

  SHOWTIME

  When my brother George and I took turns to run the snake shows at the La Pa Loop on Sundays after Pop passed away, we’d usually start around 1.30 p.m., but if neither of us could make it for some reason, I would put a sign up saying ‘Sorry, no snakes today’. Sometimes we’d come down to do a show and there’d be 50 people waiting for us, so when I was away I’d get someone to put the sign up to make sure no one was hanging around waiting for a show that wasn’t going to happen.

  When we did the show we’d start by showing all the lizards—blue-tongues, shinglebacks, bearded dragons, Cunningham’s skinks and always a water dragon—for the kids to pat and have a look at. The big water dragon used to just sit in the sun there with his head up in the air and stop there all day. He wouldn’t move. I love him. He lives in the yard now and is more than 40 years old. He’s a beautiful big animal, and they breed down there in my yard all the time. One of the babies that has grown up there, goes up onto the windowsill next door and scratches on the glass to alert Vanessa, my eldest son Paul’s wife, wanting food brought out to it. They eat most kinds of meat, although sometimes they will find a mouse and have that.

  After the lizard, we’d bring out a goanna and talk about the big goanna that bit me one time. I could never work out why he bit me, because he was a very, very quiet old goanna. The best reason I can come up with is that it was the day of the Bicentenary and there was a lot of stirring going on about politics and invasions and whatnot. The old goanna was a native of the country so he bit me. That was the only time he ever even tried to bite. Usually he’d lick your hands and do anything, but he got me that day and gave me 22 stitches. It hurt like hell, I can tell you, but I’ve had a lot worse than that.

  Next we’d get the diamond or carpet snake out (or both) and walk them around and let the kids touch them. Then we’d move on to the venomous snakes. Sometimes, but not always, we’d take a death adder, but we would always do blacks, browns, tigers and copperheads. They were the four main venomous snakes. When the brown snakes came out we would take the hat around for coins.

  The kids were always good. They always wanted to touch the lizards and even the pythons. Some of the parents would step back but the kids would want to touch them. That was really good, but I used to emphasise to them that not all snakes were like that.

  ‘If you’re not familiar with snakes, you can’t tell whether it’s a venomous snake or a non-venomous snake,’ I’d tell them. ‘There’s no indication in any way to say he’s got fangs or he’s venomous.’

  Then we’d talk about first-aid treatment. We started off by talking about tourniquets and how they found out the tourniquet was not effective but a pressure bandage worked, and so we’d talk about that. And we’d mention the research that was done in the bush by a couple of scientists from Darwin who found out that the ordinary 10-centimetre bandages were not as effective as a 15-centimetre bandage.

  You must have a good bandage, and not one of the cheap crepe ones, and go along the limb a little bit tighter than was previously recommended. Every first-aid kit that was for sale at the time included a pretty lousy 10-centimetre bandage, and even snake men had brought in hundreds if not thousands of cheap narrow bandages from China and were still selling them. But at least they were better than nothing.

  Each show used to take us about 40 minutes, except if there weren’t many people because the weather was too hot or too cold, when we might take 30 minutes. No other snake men did a show that lasted as long as 40 minutes.

  We never had any trouble with members of the public. Pop said snakes used to attract drunks at the sideshows, but the only trouble I ever had was from a really nice lady who was a bit of a drunk. She had the bladder from a wine cask in her hand and she was drinking and singing out and being annoying to the other people.

  ‘If you don’t go, I’m going to toss your grog away,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t do that, Johnny,’ she said. But she kept on going and going, so I grabbed the flagon, spun around and threw it over the bank towards the beach. She went after it but she never came back.

  The only other trouble I had there was with an ice-cream seller. They can be very, very annoying gentlemen. We used to like the ice-cream truck being there because people could get a drink and an ice cream while they enjoyed the show, but the drivers would pull their vehicle up right alongside the snake pit with their generators going to keep their fridges working. We used to say, ‘Look, could you move away a bit? People will walk twenty metres for an ice cream,’ but they didn’t care. They wanted to be right on top of us and I didn’t have a PA system so the crowd couldn’t hear us over the engine noise.

  One time this fella was in very close, probably about 2 metres from where I was working and I said to the crowd, ‘He must be annoying you people,’ and they all agreed with me about the noise, so I asked him to move. He just laughed at me, saying, ‘You can’t move me.’ So I took a copperhead by the neck, stepped over the pit fence, grabbed the bloke by the shirt and said, ‘Do you want me to fasten this on your lip?’ and gave him a shove.

  Well, he shot through but I’d say within ten minutes three or four ice-cream trucks pulled up, along with the police. He’s got on his two-way radio and all the other ice-cream trucks in the district and the coppers had come to protect him. The police walked over alongside the wall and the crowd let them in.

  ‘Can we have a yarn with you when you’ve finished your show?’ a policeman said to me.

  ‘Oh no. We’ll have a yarn now, mate,’ I said, ‘so I can keep working.’

  ‘This man said you grabbed him by the shirt and was going to put a snake on his lip,’ the policeman said.

  ‘A snake? You’ve got to be kidding,’ I said and I bent down and I picked up a blue-tongue lizard. ‘That’s what I had in my hand and I never touched him,’ I said. ‘Ask the crowd here.’

  ‘Yeah, he never touched him,’ the people were shouting. ‘He never even got out of the pit.’

  Then the policeman said, ‘Why don’t you want him parked here. What’s the problem?’

  I was buggered for a split second but then I looked up and there was a sign there. ‘There’s a big sign on the pole here,’ I said, pointing to the light pole on the corner. ‘It says “No Parking”.’

  So the policeman went to the ice-cream seller and said, ‘Hey, can you see that sign?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Well, on your way before I book you,’ says the copper, and away went the ice-cream bloke and all his mates.

  That was the only trouble I had there at the La Pa loop in the 45 years I worked there. It was all pretty good—especially when you consider what all the old-school snakeys went through in their day.

  CHAPTER 15

  TURTLES

  If my interest in snakes was inevitable, the beginnings of my passion for turtles was almost accidental. I first encountered turtles in Chinamans
Creek near Botany Cemetery about 900 metres from my home in Yarra Bay. There are possibly no common long-neck turtles there anymore, but they may have returned now that contamination by the oil refinery run-off is no more. The first turtle I brought home was from east of Nowra, about 160 kilometres south of Sydney.

  On the very snake-hunting trip where I pulled my father’s trousers down, we walked the Pyree swamp and dams, near where we lived during the war—God, he could walk! I caught three long-neck turtles to take home, and I put them in a bag. There was often a bus to the Bomaderry train, and I would mind the bags with the tent, camping gear and snakes while Pop had a well-earned beer in a pub.

  While I was waiting, an old Aboriginal man asked me what was moving in the bag. I let him look inside and he said he’d give me sixpence for each of the turtles. A done deal! I was horrified when Dad later told me the old man was going to cook and eat them. That was the last time I made that mistake. Later I collected a long-neck turtle at Chinamans Creek and put it in my father’s frog pond.

  Back then, these turtles were called tortoises. They’re now known in Australia as turtles, because the term is more widely accepted round the world, and mainly because they live in water.

  When I worked in the bush and the rivers were clear I would go snorkel-diving as often as I could. I have never dived in a more enjoyable waterway than upper Macleay River, where I used to swim when I was working on the powerlines in the area.

  There were dozens of short-neck turtles in every waterhole, and sometimes platypuses and water dragons too, swimming near me. Water dragons—Australia’s largest dragon lizard—would close their eyes under water, which was their way of hiding. It’s a different story today in the majority of eastern water systems. Having survived and thrived for tens of thousands of years despite natural predators, human activities have led to a significant decline in the number of turtles and other river creatures.

  The first interesting-looking turtle that I thought might be a new species or subspecies, I found on the Macleay River. It was similar to a Macquarie turtle (Emydura macquarii), the ones most commonly found in eastern Australian rivers and dams, but it was smaller. John Goode, the author of the 1967 book Freshwater Tortoises of Australia and New Guinea and considered by many to be the father of Australian turtle study, travelled with me to this river and was impressed with this small turtle. I sent one specimen to Hal Cogger, then curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Australian Museum, who wasn’t sure what it was but agreed it was a form of Macquarie turtle.

  Then I sent a photograph to Dr Archie Carr, the leading turtle and tortoise expert in the United States. He suggested I contact one of his students, Peter Pritchard, who asked me to send a pair of the turtles I’d found as well as a pair of Macquarie turtles for comparison. Fortunately, permits to send turtles overseas were easy to get, so I sent the specimens, despite the expensive postage. Later on he asked me to send more specimens but I was working on the powerlines and saving for a house at the time so I couldn’t do it.

  In the 1970s, Professor John Legler from the University of Utah was working in Australia on our turtles, and he travelled with me along the New South Wales coast looking at turtles. When we returned to his base camp at the University of New England, I asked him if he was going to describe all the coastal river Australian short-neck Macquarie turtles we’d seen as subspecies.

  ‘You’re joking?’ he said. ‘They’re all different species.’

  Sadly, Professor Legler never published that opinion and twenty years later I described them as subspecies, but some scientists to this day go to the other extreme and say they’re all the one species, Macquaries.

  Of all the turtles I’ve named or discovered, the one that may be my proudest achievement is a turtle that was utterly commonplace, yet took me on a quarter-century-long quest to reveal its origins. This was the so-called ‘pet-shop turtle’, hatchlings of which I’d first noticed in Sydney shops in the early 1960s. I later learnt that it had also been sold in shops in Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide for years before that. In some hobbyists’ collections, they were beginning to acquire their own distinctive colours and form as they reached a carapace (shell) length of 100–130 millimetres. Meanwhile, hatchlings were to be seen every year scooting around Sydney’s commercial aquariums.

  Its natural habitat remained a mystery, however, and a puzzle I was determined to solve. When I first began my inquiries into their origins I was told they were imported from Torres Strait. This seemed possible but unlikely, and after seven or eight years I rejected that theory.

  By the late 1960s I was sure the pet-shop variety was not closely related to saw-shell turtles (Elseya latisternum), as most experts and shopkeepers claimed. In 1974 I brought these turtles to the attention of John Legler, and for working purposes we gave it the name ‘short-neck alpha’. It was only a matter of time, we reckoned, before its natural location was found and we would describe it in a scientific paper.

  It would in fact be decades before the mystery of alpha’s habitat was solved. Up until the time I spoke to Legler I had told only a few close friends of my search for the undescribed turtle. When my book on Australian turtles was published in 1976 I still made no mention of it. By this time, we were both convinced that alpha came from Queensland and we concentrated our efforts there (although Legler later considered it to be a possible native of Papua New Guinea).

  In an effort to get more information, I tried to break the pet trade ‘code of ethics’ in New South Wales and Victoria. Pet shops rarely if ever revealed who supplied them with animals, partly because they didn’t want anyone to set up in competition and partly because the legality of some animal trading was dubious. After I offered any two reptiles from my collection in return for information, I received a number of phone calls, but the leads turned out to be false.

  John thought it better from a scientific point of view to seek help from museums and government wildlife departments. In 1980 the Victorian fisheries and wildlife department contacted me with inquiries of their own. New legislation regulating the trade in reptiles was being prepared, and the people framing it needed to know whether the pet-shop turtle was native to Victoria, from elsewhere in Australia or was introduced. I wished I knew for certain, but I told them I was reasonably confident it came from Queensland. The following year I reluctantly broke my silence on alpha when I mentioned it briefly in an article on Australian turtles for GEO: Australian Geographic magazine.

  The search was sure to hot up now that dedicated herpetologists came to realise they had an interesting undescribed turtle in their collections. It only made it more intriguing that this turtle had been living right under our noses for years. It was totally familiar and yet, from a scientific standpoint, unknown.

  Not long after my article, I received a letter from Ric Fallu, the aquarium inspector for Victorian Fisheries and Wildlife in Melbourne. Still referring to the turtles as saw-shells, he told me that new state regulations had greatly reduced the number of hatchlings for sale, but that in earlier years, sales in Victoria had ranged from 3000–10,000 a year. Ric also gave me the name of a Melbourne aquarium owner he believed was the distributor for the state. I contacted the dealer, but he was as short with me as he had been with Fallu and told me nothing of any value before terminating our conversation.

  Reluctantly, I pushed my hopes of discovering alpha’s habitat to the back of my mind. It seemed my annual holidays of four or five weeks weren’t long enough for a thorough search, although a number of three- and four-day trips allowed me to eliminate some possible locations nearer the ocean. A friend from Victoria went to Queensland, confident of making a discovery, while a number of Queensland contacts (some of them ex-traders) worked the pet shops looking for clues, all to no avail. Maybe Legler was correct and the turtles came from Papua New Guinea.

  When one of my contacts gave me a likely location in Far North Queensland, I wasn’t able to check it out. Legler did, but the 4000-kilometre round trip failed to locate
any turtles. By the early 1980s my search was twenty frustrating years old. A breakthrough finally came, however, when wildlife enthusiast Gary Stevenson found a largish short-neck alpha in perfect shape and condition in Sydney’s Centennial Park.

  Approximately 200 millimetres long and obviously released sometime earlier, it appeared to be a subadult that had grown as nature intended rather than with human-supplied food. Having a turtle of this size to examine for the first time prompted me to phone the Melbourne aquarium proprietor once more, and this time he was relaxed and cordial, suggesting I try searching a lake near Swan Hill in northern Victoria. It was another false lead, but this time the round trip was only 2000 kilometres!

  In 1984 the Victorian government passed legislation making it illegal to sell freshwater turtles with a carapace length of less than 100 millimetres, effectively stopping the import of hatchlings. This pleased me greatly, and I asked a friend to call in on the Melbourne dealer, who now had no reason to keep his information so close to his chest. Sadly, however, he had moved on and we couldn’t locate him. By this stage the map I was using of Australia’s drainage system had been almost obliterated by scribbled comments, crosses and question marks. Legler suggested I continue my search in North Queensland, but the area had been searched pretty thoroughly. As the list of possible habitats was reduced, however, I slowly became convinced that the short-neck alpha was from southern Queensland, west of the ranges. It seemed likely that alpha had not been found because it came from sandy-soil country where the rivers were perpetually clouded.

  In 1987 I finally managed to track down the Victorian pet-shop owner. Since he was now out of the trade, he gave me the name of the Sydney contact from whom he received the turtles. Rather than phone, I wrote a long letter and sent him copies of my book and the GEO: Australian Geographic article. A fortnight later we spoke on the phone and he told me that the turtles were sent from southern Queensland as I suspected, they arrived around Christmas each year, and he would be back in touch after he’d spoken to his supplier.