The Last Snake Man Read online

  After I got my visa, I went straight back to New Guinea to help Doug finish the job. There were some specimens that we hadn’t obtained yet, but I had to build crates and transportation cages for the others that were being kept in Irian Barat and, I thought, in Jakarta Zoo. When Doug and I returned to Port Moresby, we got some shocking news—none of the protected species had arrived at the American zoos. There were reptiles, small freshwater crocodiles, brolga cranes, rare long-beak echidnas, lizards and birds of paradise in the second shipment, and they were supposed to be looked after by the zoo. Doug jumped on a plane to Jakarta and asked the zoo’s director where all the animals were.

  ‘They died,’ he said, implying it was our fault. Doug knew he was lying, something that was confirmed when he contacted the Bogor Museum. Our permits said that any animals that died in transit had to be sent to Bogor for examination. So Doug contacted Bogor and they said they’d received no animals from the zoo and they didn’t know what Doug was talking about.

  Needing to go further up the food chain, Doug went to see the Governor of Jakarta’s secretary and discovered a pile of letters about us. Every village or town we went to, the Indonesian Governor in that village or town had to sign us up and let us stay there, so they had all those documents to show that we’d been authorised to be there and had permission to collect animals. They proved that everything we’d done was 100 per cent legal.

  ‘I want to speak to the Governor,’ Doug told the secretary. He said the Governor would see him for half an hour but it would cost $30,000. Doug just got up and walked out.

  What happened then was a sadly typical tale of bureaucratic BS, bungling and—dare I say it—corruption. The zoo’s director had been very helpful to begin with, encouraging us to bring our specimens back to his zoo because it was close to the airport. He had seen all our permits and knew we were fully approved to collect species for zoos.

  But now he was being obstructive and evasive, even telling the authorities that we were poachers. It’s a real shame and a missed opportunity, as American zoos can be very generous with their partners in foreign countries. It turned out we should have gone to Surabaya Zoo where the director, Mr Sigeto, was much more helpful (and didn’t have a very high opinion of his Jakarta Zoo counterpart).

  In the end, it was the animals that suffered and Doug’s pride and joy, the echidna, lasted only another week after his last visit.

  When we finally tracked down the missing animals, we discovered they had gone either to King Leopold III of Belgium, because he had connections with the Dutch, or had been sold in Germany and the Netherlands. The American zoos paid for the animals they did get, but that only just covered the cost of the expedition. Leon didn’t make a cent. I was disappointed because we had been promised a big bonus for the birds of paradise, tree kangaroos, brolgas and other exotic animals.

  That said, I was happy with the money and, truth be told, I would have done it for nothing—although I suspect Helen might have put her foot down.

  CHAPTER 18

  BACK TO WORK

  When we returned from New Guines, I went straight back into construction work. I got a job with Woodall-Duckham, who were building the new waste-water treatment works in Malabar. I started there as a rigger and there was a big crew of workers there to begin with, but by the time the job was done I was the last man standing. All the bosses and workers had finished up and there was just me and the head man, Harry Steele.

  For the last few weeks, Harry had me doing repairs on the defects the Water Board wanted fixed before the handover of the plant. If I could, I did the job myself, and if not I had to get tradies in or get replacements for the equipment that wasn’t out of warranty. Towards the end of the contract, the Water Board sent inspectors in from all over Sydney to check every bolt, nail and screw in the plant. Clearly, they were going to hit us with a long list of repairs and replacement orders before the contract was finalised.

  One of the last jobs that I was doing was the butterfly valves—monstrous valves more than a metre in diameter. The problem was that the locking bolts were moving when the valves were turned. It cost a lot of money and a lot of time, as we had to get the old bolts out and replace them with newer ones and we were having a tremendous amount of trouble. I got them as good as I could, but I couldn’t get them to the prescribed pressure on the tension wrench without them slipping. The bolts really needed to be removed, roughened up and sealed with epoxy resin—but we didn’t have time.

  Harry Steele and the Water Board inspectors from Warragamba were all watching me as I tightened the bolts for the last time, but they still slipped. I’m pulling it back, pulling again, pull again, and I sneakily flicked the button off and it went ‘Click, click, click, click’. The two inspectors said, ‘Oh, beauty. That’s good, John. Terrific.’ But there was no sign of Harry—he couldn’t watch and he’d walked away.

  ‘That scared the Christ out of me,’ he said when I caught up with him later. ‘You’ve done well.’

  In the last few days, the inspectors were all there with their charts, writing down crazy things they said had to be repaired. We had to replace hundreds of fluorescent tubes, which was a lot harder than it sounds. They were in flameproof cages and we had to build scaffolds to get to them then take them apart. I pulled in a couple of my Koori mates to help. Meanwhile, the inspectors were working away, going for every bit of machinery and anything else that caught their eye. One wall that had some black marks on it—they demanded it be repainted.

  The last day was coming and all the Water Board inspectors were grinning. They were all mates by then and they were laughing about all the things they’d found. Harry wasn’t laughing. These blokes were going to hit us with a make-good demand that could bankrupt the company. It wasn’t Harry’s fault. With all the strikes that went on at the construction site, there was never a full day’s work. Whenever the races were on or the water was good for diving or fishing, it was ‘everybody out’.

  The night before the hammer was due to come down and they would present us with their list of demands, Harry rang me up.

  ‘John, come out and see me now,’ he said. He was living near North Head, so I said it was a bit late to be travelling across Sydney.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Come now.’

  So I drove over there and as he opened the door his hands were shaking.

  ‘Okay, what’s up?’ I said.

  ‘Keep this to yourself,’ he said. ‘The contract expires at seven o’clock in the morning—not at the end of the day.’

  It took a second to sink in, but that meant if they hadn’t presented their demands by 7 a.m., they’d missed their chance. He handed me an envelope.

  ‘Take this to work tomorrow and as soon as they show up, as long as it’s after seven, give it to them,’ Harry said.

  The next morning, all the inspectors were there grinning, with all their charts and their notebooks. Right on seven o’clock out comes Jim, the head inspector, with two of his engineers.

  ‘Okay, John,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some paperwork for you.’

  ‘Have a look at this letter first, Jim,’ I said.

  Jim opened it and his jaw dropped. He read it and re-read it and then just stared at it and me. Finally, he spun around and marched to his office and said to the two engineers, ‘Come with me.’

  Everyone was standing around. ‘What’s going on, John?’ one of them asked.

  ‘See you, fellas, the party’s over,’ I said as I walked away. ‘The contract is finished.’

  Later that day I went up to the office the company had hired at Long Bay. Everyone had gone and Harry was there alone with a big grin on his face.

  ‘My phone’s been busy,’ he said. ‘It’s all over. Done and dusted.’

  I’d been selling off bits of plant and equipment as we scaled back on the work, and I asked him what he was going to do with the last ute we’d been running around in.

  ‘Give me an honourable figure, John.’

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p; I made an offer that was probably a lot less than honourable for a good Holden ute that was only three years old.

  ‘It’s yours,’ he said.

  I sold it a week later; that was my bonus.

  All my mates were having a couple of weeks off when they’d finished, and I thought that would do for me too. I’ve never been on the dole in my life and I’ve hardly ever had a holiday, so I was making arrangements with one of my best mates to go diving somewhere when the phone rang.

  ‘John,’ a voice said, ‘we need a crane driver at Kurnell.’ That was the end of my holiday plans.

  I wanted to get a job as a professional diver working underwater on the container wharf at Botany but there were no positions vacant. Instead they took me on as a diver’s assistant with my mate Trevor Allen. Luckily—well, for some—there was a high turnover. There was another bloke before me and then the next guy committed suicide…

  My longest full-time job was as a rigger with ICI. I was with them for nearly twenty years and they understood that I needed to go occasionally to search for turtles and attend conferences and the like. I suppose having someone like me on board—and providing me with support whenever they could—offset some of the criticisms they faced about what chemicals companies were doing to the environment. Whatever it was, it worked for me.

  Wherever I was, and whatever I was doing, there were always my snakes and, increasingly, turtles, which were gradually becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life.

  CHAPTER 19

  TURTLE WARS

  I was asked recently how does a snakey, sportsman and construction worker become a world expert in turtles? Am I? I suppose I might be. I’ve written nine books on snakes and turtles, identified about a dozen new turtle species, travelled Australia and the world to lecture on turtles and historical matters related to reptiles, and helped various state museums to identify their specimens and catalogue their collections. I was also an honorary consultant to Queensland Museum and an advisor to the Tortoise and Turtle Group of the International Union of Conservation of Nature Survival Commission.

  On top of that, I’ve received an Order of Australia, partly for my work with turtles and conservation generally, so I suppose I have to reluctantly admit that makes me something of an authority. The short answer to how this happened is that curiosity evolved into an interest and from there to what some people, my family included, would call an obsession.

  Whenever I saw something swimming around when I was diving, I just became curious. I asked a lot of questions (my family say I still ask too many questions) but really I was asking myself. There are many unanswered questions when it comes to the wildlife of the rivers and saltwater habitats.

  A few years back, for example, my main diving companion Harry Murphy and I were spearing at Pussycat Bay, just off the NSW Golf Club near Cape Banks. We were in about 10 metres of clear water, near where the SS Minmi was wrecked back in 1937.

  A school of kingfish began to circle us and Harry hit the first one. They were all about the same size—1 metre. The speared fish broke off and Harry went to retrieve it, but I stopped him as the school was still swimming nearby and the wounded one was going nowhere and was just flapping on its side on the bottom. Unfortunately, the school headed away, so Harry dived to get the injured fish. But before he could get to it, another fish nosed under his mate and lifted it. Another one came to the other side and stopped it falling back, and its two helpers began to bump it out into deeper water and away they went, with Harry chasing in vain.

  When he came up and got his breath, he immediately said, ‘Did you see that?’ I still do, 40 years later.

  One of the most unusual and spectacular sights I’ve seen while river-diving occurred on 31 October 1990 in the Bellinger River. About 5 kilometres upstream from Thora, I was drifting downstream in slow-flowing, clear water about 2 metres deep. There was a large, fallen log buried in river sand that extended to the bank.

  Lined up along the log and at right angles to it, were about a dozen eels around 1–1.2 metres long. Their bodies lay quite straight and parallel to each other about 15–30 cm apart. Their heads were also almost in a straight line, and they appeared to be looking down into a deeper hole on the downstream side.

  This hole had been formed when the river flowed at a faster rate, banking up gravel against the tree and swirling other soil away downstream. I held back rather than approach too close, and after watching for a few minutes, swam wide around them then slowly back upstream. From 5 metres, about the extent of good visibility there, I could see some activity in the darkness of the hole into which the eels were staring intently.

  Diving slowly towards the sediment-darkened hole, I could see about another dozen similar-sized eels all swimming quickly around in the hole in an area of about 2 metres, the others watching from about 1.5 metres above. None of the eels seemed to pay any attention to me as I swam along the bottom close enough to notice two Elseya turtles lying apparently uninterested below them. I backed off and, on surfacing, continued downstream, marvelling at what I had seen.

  I was always curious about how things work in the natural world. Why, for instance, why do some forms of abalone have great growths and parasites on their shells while others don’t? I also noticed this when I was diving in New Zealand: the paua (blackfoot) had the growths on them, yet the yellowfoot at the same locations were always clear. Why?

  Do some forms prevent this with a chemical, and if so might there be some application in anti-fouling treatments for boats? I have mentioned this a few times to marine biologists over the past 40 years and it sounds like they are finally taking an interest—or maybe they started asking the question themselves.

  I see strange things all the time. Once, in the Gregory River in North Queensland, 100 kilometres upstream from the coast, a bull shark swam right up to me. It was steady, then his whole body started trembling with his eye almost poking out. When I told my mate Alex and asked him what he thought the trembling was all about, he said, ‘He was only mimicking you.’

  When I first became interested in turtles, there was virtually no research going on and no one knew too much about them. But I was a keen hobbyist and that’s the real difference. Professionals do a university course and study biology and they’d go in any one of many fields. It’s a job for them. They develop an interest and some of them get very keen but usually it starts off as their profession.

  I developed an interest and then tried to study the science. To begin with, I got a book out of the library and learned the Latin names—well, the names of the turtles that had been identified. Then I started buying books, and before I knew it, I was crosschecking the information and thinking, ‘Hey, this doesn’t add up. This thing isn’t what they’re saying it is.’

  So suddenly I had a couple of mysteries on my hands, which just made me more determined to find out the facts. At that point I started asking the experts for their advice and opinions and took it from there. I had a very good friend called Raymond Mascord who used to be a snake man but later became a top spider man. When he was doing his first book on spiders, Ray said to me casually that I’d probably never write a book on turtles.

  I suppose the old competitive instinct kicked in, because I immediately thought, ‘Oh, yes I will.’ That’s how I did the first one. And then I made friends with John Goode, the king of turtles in Australia and the author of Freshwater Tortoises of Australia and New Guinea. He was a journalist and wrote a lot of beautiful books, but what fired me up was that he was an amateur naturalist too.

  When I did my first major turtle book in 1978, I showed it to Professor John Legler, who opened it up, flicked through two or three pages, saw a picture of himself and closed the book up.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said in a snobby way. ‘That’ll serve its purpose.’ Shortly after that he told me, ‘I’d like to restrict your writing on turtles to only how to catch them and look after them in captivity.’

  ‘Yeah, fair enough, John,’ I said, but I took it as a p
retty heavy insult, and assumed it was because he was an academic and I was an amateur. But I was wrong. Down the track, I told a good mate of mine, Dr Arthur Georges at the University of Canberra, about what Professor Legler had said.

  ‘John Legler said something similar to me,’ he said. ‘He asked me if I’d please restrict my writing on turtles until he’d finished his own work.’

  John died a few years ago and he’d still done nothing on Australian turtles, apart from the two that I found and he wrote up. You’d be surprised how competitive some zoologists can be. He just didn’t want any opposition.

  Since then I’ve published numerous magazine articles, two major turtle books—one of them in 2017—and my historical books: Historical Snakeys and Snakes Alive. The historical books are my favourites because while anyone could have written the turtle books over the years, I felt that I was the only one who could have written the books about the snakeys.

  I had to do a lot of research, digging up the histories and finding photographs. I spent hours in the Mitchell and State libraries, and chasing people all over the world who had moved away. Most people wouldn’t have known where to start. I lived in an era where all these old showman’s families were dying and I missed talking to a lot of them, which hurt. A lot of it was my fault because I was too slow. There were boxes of pictures that were burnt and destroyed by families or relatives after the people had died. ‘Who’d want them?’ they thought. At least I saved this other stuff. That’s there forever now.

  I’ve also travelled a lot, mostly to the United States, giving talks on reptiles, snakes and turtles. I once went to New Zealand, where there are no tortoises, turtles or land snakes but I had a pretty strong following. The first meeting I went to, about snakes and reptiles, there were just the six of us: three guests, the two organisers and me. The second couldn’t have been more different—it was held at a private zoo and there must have been 80 people there.