The Last Snake Man Read online

  I was over the moon, although two long months passed before I was given the name I’d been searching for—John Greenhalgh from Maryborough, Queensland. I wrote to John, also sending him a couple of my publications. Receiving no reply, I phoned him. He was quite polite and finally gave me a location for short-neck alphas in the bore drains around the town of Bollon in south-west Queensland.

  The main waterway there is Wallam Creek. I had never heard of it, but maps showed me it’s a 240-kilometre run of intermittent water that begins in Queensland and soaks about 100 kilometres into New South Wales in times of heavy flow, when it may even get as far as the Darling River. Of all the locations visited in my long search, this one excited me the most. It was in Queensland, in dirty water, and it was in the region where little research had been carried out. John Greenhalgh simply had to be telling the truth.

  Since annual holidays are never long enough, I arranged some unpaid leave. Interest in the project was by now so great that Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney allowed its turtle expert, Chris Dorrian, to join me. John Legler was now back in the United States and, I allowed myself to think, would be informed of my triumph by fax. That was the plan but it was not to be the case.

  After 2500 kilometres of hard driving I knew I’d have to be much more convincing before John Greenhalgh would pass on his long-treasured knowledge. On our way home, we visited the Condamine River, which John had mentioned in our conversation, but the water was clouded, it was approaching winter and water temperatures were probably too low for turtles. The Condamine would have to wait for another trip.

  Meanwhile, I’d made arrangements to spend late September to early October of 1989 checking out as much of the Gulf and Cape York as five weeks would allow. With me was Graham Meredith, one of the few people who’d shown an interest in the short-neck alpha back in the early 1960s. The highlight of our trip was our meeting with John Greenhalgh, a big man of 76 years. I could instantly see he’d been around, and best of all I liked him immediately.

  For weeks, I’d rehearsed this meeting in my mind. I couldn’t afford to bomb it! When we introduced ourselves, and got over the formalities I asked John if I could do the talking, and at the nod of his head I had the floor for five minutes. When I’d finished he simply nodded once more and said, ‘Okay, it’s here in the Mary.’

  John then told his story, and the more he spoke the more I realised he knew about this turtle, which he called a ‘black head’, referring to the dark cap on its crown. Since it was morning we decided to go straight to the river and have a dive, while John said he would show us some eggs. That said, John had already mentioned the eggs’ incubation period was eight weeks, but I also knew the turtles hatched near Christmas and it was now only 30 September. As well as that, I still had my reservations about the Mary River. I’d dived there earlier, as had Gary Stevenson, John Legler, Patrick Couper of the Queensland Museum and Steve Swanson, who used to buy pet-shop turtles even though he actually lived on the Mary.

  Nevertheless, my adrenaline was pumping as Graham and I arranged our diving gear. The water was extremely cloudy, as the river was being sand-dredged for industry further upstream. John had already gone down to the eroded riverbank in search of a nest but was back within fifteen minutes, telling me we were a month too early. He advised us to come back on our return from the Cape.

  We dived the river for about an hour, but in vain. Visibility was down to about 60 centimetres and we found only the northern snapping turtle (Elseya dentata) and Krefft’s turtle (Emydura krefftii). After we’d driven John the 30 kilometres home, we returned to the river and checked another location, still with no results. After three hours of fruitless search I became convinced that John was playing games with us. He wouldn’t have been the first naturalist to give a perceived rival a bum steer to protect a resource that only he knew about. We headed north.

  On our way back, on 30 October, we were diving the Mary River again, but we didn’t call in on John or check the nesting sites he’d shown us. Instead, we spent a couple of hours diving in adverse conditions, set a number of traps with various types of bait and settled down by a good camp fire.

  As we reflected on the distance we’d travelled on this trip and the number of possible locations we’d eliminated from our search, I felt that no one else but us deserved to locate alpha. But, boy, they were trying! While we were up north, Chris Dorrian and a companion were checking out my next location on the Condamine River, just over the ranges!

  During the following months, I kept in touch with John Greenhalgh and a bond seemed to develop between us. We certainly had some interests in common. ‘Next season you’ll get him,’ he told me on the phone. Since John had told me of up to 15,000 hatchlings being incubated each year, with about sixteen to the nest, I agreed there had to be enough adults in the river for me to find one.

  In August 1990, Helen and I left Sydney on a twelve-week round-Australia trip to photograph turtles and their locations. I’d planned to reach the Mary River in late October and keep in touch with John while we were on the road. There was a note waiting for me when we arrived in Humpty Doo at Gow’s Reptile Zoo.

  ‘I’ve got one,’ John had written. Accompanying the letter was a photograph of what I thought to be an adult male alpha. One of John’s many friends had caught it for me. We cut a week off our itinerary and headed straight for Maryborough. By the time we arrived I was as excited as it’s possible to feel while still harbouring some apprehension. A search that had lasted for more than a quarter of a century was coming to an end. John greeted us, took me to a large drum in which he kept the turtle and removed the lid.

  My heart sank. Inside there was just a medium-sized northern snapping turtle. My mind flashed back to the photograph I’d seen in Darwin and I thought of all the kilometres I’d clocked up over so many years—including more than 22,000 on this trip alone. I was speechless with disappointment and it must have showed. John held a straight face for about ten seconds then, with a grin, said, ‘Well, if that’s not him, look in this drum.’

  It’s hard to convey my feelings when I first looked at an adult pet-shop turtle. At last I was able to pick up one of the creatures I’d been searching for since the early 1960s. But although I never mentioned it to John, I still wondered if the old fox had had it sent from another river. I had to check.

  By late afternoon we were on the river again, at another location, walking along the road, when John found a nest that contained sixteen smallish eggs. The first tracks of the female, probably made the previous night, and the depth at which the eggs were deposited indicated that she was large. The only turtle I knew of that size on the Mary River was the northern snapping turtle, but these eggs were obviously from a different species. In fact, I’d never seen eggs like them before. We buried them again, but I planned to return to them if I had no more success on the river. No diving was attempted that day as the water was cloudier than on my previous visits and I had ear trouble from weeks of constant diving.

  Next morning, we were back on the Mary. John rowed while I dived, my depth restricted to 1.5 metres, where visibility was only about 80 centimetres. Still, I caught a number of other Elseya and Emydura species, much to John’s surprise. My worries that the pet-shop turtle came from elsewhere still nagged me and, sitting in the boat, my ear aching, I was tempted to ask John to come clean. But I could see that he too was becoming frustrated. He said that he had reservations about catching one in these murky waters but was sure I would meet with success if I stayed for another couple of weeks!

  After a late lunch, I walked a few hundred metres downstream with a pair of binoculars. I could see two large turtles basking on a log, but I was too far away to distinguish them. I crawled forward another 30 metres to a better vantage point and, sure enough, made a positive identification. The pet-shop turtle—John Greenhalgh’s ‘black head’—was native to the Mary River. Helen videoed the sighting and my reaction. The search was over.

  The turtle really should have been ‘di
scovered’ years earlier, since it’s found so close to Brisbane. The main north–south highway crosses the Mary River drainage system at a number of locations and is never far from the river itself.

  Not only that, but the much-studied Queensland lungfish (Neoceratodus forsteri) is found only in the Mary River and the Burnett River immediately to the north. First described by Gerald Krefft in 1870, the lungfish can only be effectively caught with set nets, so it’s likely that many pet-shop turtles were also netted. If so, they must have been released undescribed, since none had been registered at museums.

  It had taken 25 years for a little curiosity to evolve into a search, then a quest and, ultimately, a race to discover the origins of arguably the best-known turtle in the country. It must have been my competitive instincts coming through, but I was glad it was me who both started the race and finished it.

  CHAPTER 16

  COLLECTING IN IRIAN BARAT

  In 1972, when Vic Dalton and I were installing car-wash equipment in petrol stations between work on the powerlines, we were travelling up and down the eastern seaboard from Queensland to Tasmania. We were in Hobart on 25 June in what would turn out to be the coldest day ever recorded there (close to –3 degrees Celsius in Hobart and –13 degrees Celsius elsewhere on the island). We were working at a wind-blown place and one of the garage attendants came over.

  ‘One of you blokes John Cann?’ he asked. ‘You’re wanted on the phone.’

  ‘Who could ever be ringing me out here?’ I thought. Helen and Vic’s wife were staying in a boarding house we’d rented at Battery Point in Hobart, and I didn’t think it would be either of them.

  ‘It’s the USA calling,’ said the garage hand.

  I was really concerned, so I quickly jumped on the phone. It turned out to be my mate Doug Kirkness. I used to work with Doug’s brother on the powerlines and he’d introduced us because of our common interest in snakes and wildlife generally. Doug had done an apprenticeship as an electrician, and when he got his papers he’d asked me to help him find a job. I had a look around but all I could see was work in Papua New Guinea, so he ended up finding work in Port Moresby. Doug would go on to build his own electrical business and have a chain of health studios, but that was all to come. Why was he calling me? And what was he doing in the United States?

  ‘I’m ringing from Houston, Texas,’ he said. ‘A chap who used to get some reptiles and animals off me in Port Moresby has flown me to America in payment. Now he wants me to go to Irian Barat to collect more specimens. Do you want to come with me?’ Irian Barat is now known as Irian Jaya or Papua, and is the other side of New Guinea island from Papua New Guinea, and under Indonesian control. (Although I have to admit that at the time I thought it was somewhere in the Middle East!)

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, looking outside where it was freezing, but then I thought about it. ‘No,’ I added. ‘I’ve got a contract up in Goondiwindi.’

  ‘Well, I won’t take no for an answer,’ he said. ‘When are you going back to Sydney?’

  ‘Four days.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll ring you at seven o’clock when you get home.’

  ‘Ring me, but I can’t go. We’ve got this contract on.’

  Doug said he’d ring anyway, because it was the chance of a lifetime and he was sure I’d change my mind. When I told Vic about the call he said I should go, but he had no one else to work with him and he didn’t want to lose the contract. I’d resigned myself to telling Doug I couldn’t make it when the very next day, Vic’s son, a competent fitter who’d been in detention at Puckapunyal army base as a conscientious objector against the Vietnam War, was released.

  ‘Well, my son can take over,’ Vic said when he heard the news. ‘Do you want to go to Irian Barat?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. All I had to do was explain it to Helen. Bindi, our youngest, was only a few months old so Helen, unsurprisingly, wasn’t too keen. But she realised this was, as Doug said, the chance of a lifetime—and the money on offer was good too.

  Doug, the bastard, didn’t ring until nine o’clock. I was anxious by then because I’d made up my mind. He told me he was just teasing me, because he knew I really wanted to go. He asked me how much I was earning. At the time I was making about 50 bucks a week, tops.

  ‘What do you reckon if we give you 150?’ he said.

  I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘You’ve got me.’

  ‘I knew you’d change your mind,’ he said. I didn’t tell him he hadn’t needed to try.

  We were supposed to be going for six weeks. As it turned out, I got back six months later. The idea was that we’d be bartering dollars, salt, trinkets, coffee, tobacco and sugar with some fairly isolated tribespeople, to get their help in catching rare animals for a dealer by the name of Leon Leopard (yes, really!) who supplied animals to United States zoos. Apart from the adventure, the financial rewards would be pretty good. It was a win-win.

  Okay, there was a risk involved. This was only a few years after Michael Rockefeller, an adventurer and anthropologist—and the son of American multimillionaire Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York State and US presidential candidate—had gone missing on an expedition in the area.

  Before we went, Leon Leopard gave us photos of the animals he wanted for the United States zoos, and for which they had permits. The idea was that we’d show the locals the pictures and they’d go and get the animals for a reward.

  We travelled all over the country by plane, canoe, steamship and foot. I still have nightmares about swimming in crocodile-infested waters too muddy to see more than a few feet in front of me. But it was, indeed, the trip of a lifetime, maybe several lifetimes, with a bit more adventure and a bit less reward than we’d planned for.

  The trip didn’t get off to the best of starts. I’d put both of our air tickets on top of the fridge but when I went to look for them the night before our departure, they were gone. I thought my brother George had taken them as a prank and I went mad at him, but he denied all knowledge. We hunted high and low, tore the house apart looking for those tickets, but couldn’t find them anywhere, and the next day we had to beg the travel agent to issue new ones. Years later I moved the fridge to discover they’d dropped down behind it.

  Losing the tickets wasn’t the worst of it. When we left, we had to take a stack of cash with us for all our expenses. This was long before internet banking and the like, and we probably broke the law by taking so much money out of the country, but it didn’t matter so much in those days. Doug came over here from the United States with US$25,000 in his bag to pay for the expedition, and the police arrested him in Los Angeles because there’d been a lot of money stolen in a big robbery there. He missed his flight, of course, and he had to convince them that it was all legitimate. But a couple of phone calls to the bank where the money was withdrawn, and bingo, he was on the next plane out of there.

  The next issue was taking so much money into Jakarta, where you were only allowed to bring in a small amount of foreign currency. But there was no such thing as body searches, so I had money in my shoes and socks and in my pockets. All this money was to buy animals, to hire planes to transport them, for our own airfares on little planes, and hotel expenses when we were in towns.

  As we spoke no Indonesian, we had great trouble convincing government officials used to highly organised scientific expeditions that we were not only serious but genuine. Tourists weren’t allowed into Irian Barat and anyone given an entry permit was thoroughly screened. We had to undergo more interrogations than you’d believe possible. By the time the run-around was over, two weeks of our original six were gone.

  When I got there, I’d posted back home a magazine from the plane, with a feature about cannibals in it. It was weeks before it arrived, and I didn’t realise we’d be gone for months with weeks between communications, so at one point everyone was convinced that we’d been killed or taken. One of my kids saw the magazine, looked at the picture on the front and said: ‘Is that the man who ate Daddy?’
>
  In fact, there was cannibalism but it was neither random nor widespread. By that time, river travel was reasonably safe, as the missions and the Indonesian Government had banned headhunting and cannibalism. When cannibalism was practised at all, as it still was in some remote areas, it was usually part of an elaborate religious revenge ceremony conducted when an enemy who’d done some harm to the tribe was executed then at least partially eaten. And that’s what I believe happened to Michael Rockefeller.

  A lot of books and magazine articles have been written about this, but I met an indigenous chief who was there and part of the whole thing. In fact, he gave me the bone that he, the chief, had through his nose, and it’s hanging on my study wall right now. The story goes that Rockefeller had been in the country collecting specimens and photographs and shooting films. He was doing a lot of filming in the highlands but the one thing he didn’t have was film of a battle between two tribes. They’re very warlike people but it just happened that at that time there was no feud going on so there was no battle to film.

  So, according to the missionaries who talked to me, Rockefeller paid two tribes to have a battle with spears, bows and arrows and clubs so he could film it. At this point the story gets a bit confused. Some said there were a lot more injuries than they’d anticipated, others say that Rockefeller said he’d only agreed to pay so much for so many men but a lot more turned up and he refused to pay the extra ones.

  According to the bloke who told me, Rockefeller headed off with his film and artefacts and left the tribes to deal with it. Now, in Asmat, on the island’s south-western coast bordering the Arafura Sea, the tribesmen were already angry because some time before, Dutch soldiers had come through and shot up a village and killed a few locals. Rockefeller had nothing to do with that but his catamaran, built from native canoes, capsized a few clicks offshore from the village. He used some jerry cans as floats and swam for the shore, telling his mate that he’d get help.