The Last Snake Man Page 17

  I had no idea. Her father was a blacksmith and he and his wife had come to Yarra Bay from the scrub in the north-west of New South Wales in a horse and covered wagon years before. Helen had seven sisters and two brothers and they lived 45 degrees across the road. But my mates and I ran our own race—spearfishing and the like—and she and her sisters did their own thing, so we never met properly until I was eighteen.

  I’d known her for a few years before we ever went out, but as time went on I started seeing a little bit more of her. We used to go out dancing but I never danced much. She was keen but I was no good. I could only do the La Perouse free step—go wherever you want to.

  Sometimes there was a La Perouse Football Club event or turnout, and other times we’d meet up with Ali Ardler and his wife, who used to drink at the old Bat and Ball Hotel in Redfern. They were a great old Aboriginal couple, and a crowd of us locals just seemed to join them even though it was a fair way from our district. And all the mob danced. I knew this hotel well from my athletics days—the athletes named it the Kensington Arms, and all the old pros used to have a beer there after training. As time went on, I suppose you would say Helen and I were going steady—at least when I was in town. It must have been frustrating for her, waiting for me to come back from wherever I was working, then spend a few days together before I was off again.

  Once we’d decided to get married, I thought I should get us a house, so I went for a loan to build on the land I’d bought with my motorbike money. First I went to the Commonwealth Bank, because like every schoolkid I’d put my money into the Commonwealth and that’s where I had my account. I never had much money in the bank—just a few hundred quid.

  ‘What sort of collateral have you got?’ the bloke asked.

  ‘Well, I own a block of land next door,’ I said. He said it wasn’t enough and told me he couldn’t help me.

  So I came out and I walked across the road to the National Bank of Australia and asked to see the manager. He called me over and I told him I was looking for a loan.

  ‘John Cann?’ he said. ‘You’re a footballer, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I was a footballer, yes,’ I said.

  We had a yarn about football and then he asked me what I wanted and gave me the loan. I borrowed the princely sum of 2750 pounds and, when currency was decimalised, our payments were $37.50. We did it hard at times but we never missed a payment. The house that we built back then is the same one we’re sitting in today, 50-odd years later.

  The wedding was a simple affair. We got married at the Catholic church at Malabar and our families booked the hall at Matraville (now the library), did all the catering and put in a couple of kegs of beer. We went back to the hall for the reception and speeches and all that. We didn’t have a band but we had a record player and there was a fair bit of dancing going on.

  Helen and I went home to change into our party clothes. But by the time we got back, the families had parked the touring caravan a mate had lent us for our honeymoon outside and they just herded us into it. The next thing we knew they were waving us goodbye before they went back inside to whoop it up. They didn’t want us drinking before we drove off on the honeymoon.

  Helen wasn’t much of an outdoors person, and she never liked snakes—still doesn’t. She’d wanted to go to the Gold Coast as she’d never been there. I told her it was too hot up there in March so we went down the south coast. Back then, every holiday I got, I would go snaking, and later on hunting for turtles.

  We headed south and I went spearfishing down near Bega and then went down to Eden where we stayed in a caravan park. Further down the track outside Lakes Entrance in Victoria we got stopped by a fruit inspector who refused to believe the tomatoes we had with us had been bought locally. He told us if we moved the caravan he’d call the police. So I asked him if I could eat them there and he said yes. Then he told me to move the caravan because it was blocking the road in front of his little hut. I reminded him he’d threatened to call the police if we moved it, and I made him wait until Helen had cooked the tomatoes and I’d eaten them. We’d both just had breakfast and Helen wasn’t hungry but she saw a side of me that morning that she’d never seen before. Lesson learned—keep your grocery receipts when you’re on the road.

  We moved on down to just outside Melbourne and went to visit old Charlie Tanner, a great old snake man and a good mate. We spent a few days with him and looked at all his snakes, and went around to Portsea where Harold Holt drowned (or according to some idiot was taken by Chinese submarines). I went spearfishing inside the heads there, which was interesting.

  A bloke came out in a rowing boat and asked if I could help him.

  ‘Mate, can you dive for my traps?’ he said. ‘The boats have smashed the glass floats I had on them.’

  I said fair enough—it was no skin off my nose and I thought we might score a free lobster or something. Down I went and had a look around, and sure enough I found a trap—a bloody big hook with a big bit of meat on it.

  ‘What are you catching?’ I said when I handed him the rope.

  ‘Sharks,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of them here.’

  That was the only trap I got for him.

  On the way back we went to Lake George, where I caught all those tiger snakes I mentioned earlier. We met my mate Sylvester Smith on his property and I asked him the best place to put the caravan.

  ‘Follow my tractor down,’ he said. ‘You’ll get bogged anywhere else.’

  So down we went and then he pulled up in his tractor and waited for me around the front.

  ‘Where do you keep your snake bags, John?’ he asked.

  ‘In the caravan,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Better get them out. You’ve parked your caravan right over a big tiger snake.’

  Helen wasn’t too impressed.

  Later we went snaking and I was getting a fair few tiger snakes. Helen was petrified and it was a stinking hot day, so she went back to the caravan and Sylvester went home and left me to it.

  The tiger snakes were pretty lively in the heat, and one came up and scratched some blood across my knuckle. I sucked a bit of venom from around the wound. They reckon that does no good but I figure that if it’s not sitting there, it’s not going to soak into you. On my way back to the van I walked past a number of tiger snakes still lying out in the heat, but I wasn’t going to take any more chances. It was the only time I was ever scared of snakes. I didn’t know whether I was going to be affected by the bite, so I got back to the caravan and we stayed there overnight and I felt okay. That was the end of the snaking part of the honeymoon, much to Helen’s relief.

  Helen gave up working at the laundry when she was pregnant with Paul. He was born on 17 July 1965. Jace was born on 7 December 1966, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. His name was John but we called him JC and then it became Jace and everyone thinks that’s his name now. If someone called him John, he wouldn’t know what they were talking about.

  Belinda came along on 28 April 1972. Her nickname is Bindi, which we got off Belinda ‘Bindi’ Sutton, who used to live next door to us and these days is best known as the aunty of John Sutton, the first-grade footballer for South Sydney. And it’s from her, indirectly, that Bindi Irwin got her name.

  Her late father Steve was just getting going as a TV zoologist and he’d dropped in to film me and my snakes. We were down the backyard, and there was Steve and his manager–cameraman and me. My daughter Belinda came out and I said, ‘Hey, Bindi, we’ve finished filming here. How about putting a coffee on?’

  ‘Bindi?’ Steve said. ‘Where did you get the name Bindi from? I’ve never heard that before.’

  I said her real name was Belinda but we all called her Bindi because we got the name off the little Aboriginal girl next door. So, next thing we hear, he had a dog and then a crocodile and finally a daughter called Bindi. A few years later they asked him in an interview where he got the name Bindi.

  ‘Oh, I got it off a little Aboriginal girl in Cape York
,’ he said. I suppose that sounded better than a little Aboriginal girl from La Perouse.

  None of my kids are interested in snakes, but Paul and Jace both got my athletics genes. Paul held the New South Wales age discus record until Jace took it off him when he beat the Australian age-group record distance by a third—a mark that stood for 22 years. I guess we’re all genetically suited to athletics. I never lifted a weight or set foot in a gym (until I took up boxing). People who’ve seen pictures of me competing at sixteen find that hard to believe but it’s true.

  When Jace was a couple of years out of Little Athletics and in Year 10, I was informed that the Athletics Association of New South Wales was running a state competition, with the winners to be selected to compete in the Australian school championships in Hobart. I asked, with an effort, if Jace wanted to have a try-out in the competition. Up to that point he’d never done any weight-training, unlike many other kids, because I believed young kids shouldn’t lift weights.

  But now he was fifteen and ready to compete at state level I changed my mind and took him to the sports gym that had recently been set up at Matraville near Yarra Bay. Jace had done a few bench presses when a bloke came up to me.

  ‘Is that your son?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘He’s a bit rough round the edges,’ he said. ‘Where does he train?’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ I said. ‘This is the first time he’s set foot in a gym.’

  The bloke looked at me like I was mad or having a lend.

  ‘I’d like to train him in weightlifting,’ he said. ‘There’s probably only one kid in the state who lifts heavier weights than him. With a bit of training he could go a long way.’

  So I asked Jace if he fancied training as a weightlifter.

  ‘Not interested,’ was all he said.

  The next day there was a knock on the door. The same bloke had tracked us down.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Your boy has so much raw talent, and I guarantee that in three months he’ll be competing in Asia. He’s a one-off.’

  So I asked Jace again but got the same response: ‘Not interested.’

  Helen agreed—she didn’t want him getting into weightlifting.

  History repeats. A few months later we turned up for the junior athletics trials for the state team to go to Tasmania—the scene of my first interstate athletics comp. But when we got there, we noticed Jace’s name wasn’t on the program.

  So we went to the officials’ tent, where there were a few parents and kids with the same question. The officials told us they didn’t have a green slip for Jace from his school, and if you didn’t have a green slip you couldn’t compete.

  ‘What’s a green slip?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a permission slip that has to be signed by both a parent and a teacher,’ this bloke says.

  ‘Well, I’m his parent,’ I said, ‘and his teacher’s standing right over there so give us a slip and we’ll sign it.’

  ‘Nope,’ said this jumped-up paper shuffler. ‘We’re organising this on a professional basis and we can’t have people just wandering in off the street wanting to take part.’

  We weren’t the worst off—families who’d travelled from Broken Hill and Tweed Heads were also rejected for not having their green slips.

  ‘God,’ I said. ‘You bastards never change. You stuffed athletics for me when I was a kid and you’re still stuffing it up now with your bureaucratic bullshit.

  ‘Come on, son,’ I said to Jace. ‘Let’s go and get your surfboard.’

  At the age of 50 he still surfs and goes spearfishing—and at the time of writing we’ll be eating lobster for the second night in a row.

  Helen didn’t go back to work again until I got the turtle bug, chasing them all over Australia. It was taking up a lot of my time and it was costing a lot of money, so she said, ‘I’ll go back for a year and you can spend more time running after turtles.’

  So she went back to work for a year…and ten years later she retired. She was a very good press hand and got her old job back straight away—she even qualified again for superannuation.

  And even though she wasn’t outdoorsy, as I said, she came with me on some long trips and never complained. She doesn’t go in the water, but she’d look out for crocodiles and cook our meals and hold the turtles while I was photographing them. One time, back in 1990, I got my long service leave and we travelled around Australia for three months looking for turtles. Every week or so we might go into a caravan park where she’d have a proper shower with hot water—otherwise it was a camp shower in the bush.

  I had a big box trailer to carry all our gear and put the boat on top. To keep the gear down I had those camping mattresses that roll up and then self-inflate to two-inches deep when you open them out. I wouldn’t sleep on one now, but Helen stuck it out for three months. It was only years later when the family was chatting about not being able to sleep or the toughest trip they’d been on or something like that she let on how bad it was.

  ‘The worst trip of my life trying to sleep on those mongrel mattresses,’ Helen said, out of the blue.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘You never complained.’

  ‘What was the sense in complaining?’ she said.

  Which reminds me of the Coolgardie cooler (or safe, as it was often called) that Pop had made at Hill 60 at Yarra, before the days when everybody had fridges, or even electricity to run them. The Coolgardie cooler was basically a box with hessian walls that sat in a tray of water with some felt, if you had it. The water would get drawn up into the hessian, where it would evaporate (especially if there was a breeze) and that would cool the air inside the box. It would get pretty cold inside and last a day or so before you had to top up the water.

  Years before this trip with Helen, when I was working on turtles with Professor John Legler, he would use my place as a launching pad. We went bush a few times in his Land Rover station wagon but he never took ice with him, which annoyed me because I like my beer cold. He did have a roll of cheesecloth, which he used to soak in water then use to store the turtles for transportation back to base in the back of the wagon. It worked pretty well.

  One day I got some of his cheesecloth and I put a few beers in it, tied the corners, dipped it in the river and hung it up in a tree where it could catch a bit of a breeze.

  ‘What are you doing that for?’ he asked, so I explained that it was a Coolgardie cooler and how it worked.

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ he said. ‘That beer will just get warmer.’

  I let it go at that. The cheesecloth dried out after a while so I re-wet it and stuck it back up. Later on, John was cooking with his shirt off, just his shorts on. I pulled a beer out of the bag and stuck it on his back. He screamed like a stuck pig. He couldn’t believe how cold the beer had got in that cheesecloth. That’s how a Coolgardie cooler worked and I used it a few times before we got Eskies and suchlike.

  Helen and I went right around Australia on that trip, starting in Sydney, south through Victoria, over to Adelaide, up to Port Augusta and then straight across the Nullarbor to Western Australia. Then we went up to the Kimberleys and along the Gibb River Road to Darwin, across the Top End and back down through Queensland.

  We weren’t collecting—we were taking measurements and photographing a lot of turtles. Poor Helen. We’d find a beautiful spot and she’d have her deckchairs out while I was diving. But then bingo, I’d have my turtle and my photographs and I’d be ready to go.

  ‘Oh no, I want to stay here for a couple of days,’ she’d say, but I’d tell her we had to go. I had a timetable.

  For three months we camped every night and lit a fire and did our own cooking. Later on she showed me a film she’d made on the trip. I didn’t realise until then that she was shit-scared every time I went diving because in some places there were a lot of crocs around.

  One day we went to Sara Henderson’s property, Bullo River Station. When I asked her for permission to dive, she said I c
ould dive in the river but I had to be careful and not cross the causeway the army had built for her.

  ‘Don’t go downstream from that crossing because it’s full of crocodiles,’ she said. ‘Upstream is okay—that’s where our workhands wash.’

  So that’s where I dived, even though I wasn’t 100 per cent convinced the crocodiles couldn’t walk across a road. It was a great dive because I got what I was really after. There were two species of turtle in this river system that I really needed to find and photograph. Both had been collected and described from this waterway back in the 1800s.

  But the water was murky and dirty, with pandanus all around, so as soon as I got the second one I was looking for I got out. I snuck back to our camp and that’s when I saw Helen shooting the video, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I found out when we got home and she played it back.

  ‘John’s been gone a long time,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of crocodiles here and I’m really, really worried about where he is.’

  I’ve got to give it to her: she put up with the flies and the heat and the campsites and cooking on an open fire. A couple of years later I would get the Order of Australia for my contributions to turtle research, conservation, the environment and the community, but it was Helen who deserved a medal.

  CHAPTER 22

  MARTIN LAUER

  The day we got back from our three-month expedition around Australia, I had a phone call out of the blue from Germany. It was Martin Lauer—we hadn’t spoken since we became good mates at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne.

  Like me, Martin was a decathlete. Being a little older—and possibly having had better training—he was very generous with his time and advice when we met at the Olympics. He was a bit better, too, coming fifth representing West Germany, and won bronze in his specialty event, the 110-metre hurdles.

  Martin was phoning to check I’d got a letter he’d sent about a planned trip to Australia, specifically the Kimberleys. My brother George hadn’t had a chance to pass it on to us, though, so this was the first I’d heard about it. I told him he was welcome to stay with us in Yarra Road. Martin accepted the invitation, and suggested we come with him and his wife Christa on the trip.