The Last Snake Man Page 2

  A few months later, in his final demonstration in India, Professor Fox allowed himself to be bitten five times by a krait—the deadliest snake on the subcontinent. Unfortunately, it seems he only treated four of the wounds with his snakebite cure, the fifth having been obscured by blood. Despite having treated and survived krait bites earlier in the tour, he died that afternoon. Was it because he didn’t treat the fifth pair of puncture wounds? Or maybe his snake oil had no potency after all, and his acquired resistance to venom was overwhelmed by too much from a different species of snake. We’ll never know. In any case, a Sunday newspaper devoted a whole page to his obituary.

  Snakeys are a strange fellowship. They’re both rivals and supporters at the same time. When Garnett See was bitten we know he was first taken to a friend’s house, en route to the hospital where he died. I reckon those friends were the two Charlie Hessells, as they were snakemen too and snakeys often gave first aid to each other when one of them was bitten.

  The Hessells were a father and son team. Charlie Senior had been a bootmaker and his son had worked at the Botany paper mill before he got the boot for trying to organise a union. They lived in a tent with a wooden floor in the Congies—a strip of land joining Big and Little Congwong beaches at La Perouse. The Hessells collected snakes for the Australian Museum and other snakeys, while working their own various shows around the city.

  After See’s sad demise and Fox’s tragic end, the Hessells took over the snake pit at La Pa and ran it on and off, sometimes with young Tom Wanless, until the war ended. Then, however, the Spanish flu struck in 1918–19, and the authorities closed all picture theatres and places of public entertainment. Face masks were made compulsory on public transport, and those infected were quarantined in camps set up around Australia to contain the virus.

  It is estimated that 30 per cent of Sydney people were infected at one point, and the flu killed more than 6000 people in New South Wales alone. It also almost killed the snake shows, along with all the other attractions at La Pa. Almost, but not quite.

  By the time Pop turned sixteen, he had his own tent and was accepted by most of the snake men on the show circuit that linked decent-sized towns up and down the east coast and further inland. Needing a couple of other strings to his bow, Pop also took up trick shooting and became a competent juggler. But his first great passion was snakes—a devotion that almost killed him.

  In 1915, while camping at Nowra, Pop was bitten by a tiger snake he didn’t see while pursuing another one into a hollow log. He passed out and was unconscious for four days before a hunter found him and took him to his hut. Pop lay there for another two weeks, his limbs paralysed, but he survived. That bite and others over the years built up the antibodies that kept him alive when many of his peers were not so lucky.

  During a country agricultural show in 1917, also at Nowra, having just turned twenty, Pop enlisted in the army and sailed for Europe. The war had less than a year to run but he was seriously wounded in France and didn’t return to Australia until February 1919. He immediately went to see Snakey George, who told him no one was using the La Perouse pitch. That would have been putting a fair dent in Snakey George’s income stream, but Pop didn’t need much additional encouragement. Still in the army, on his first Sunday back in Australia, Pop registered his claim at the Loop—and thus began the legend of the Snake Man of La Perouse.

  CHAPTER 2

  CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF THE SNAKES

  The La Pa Loop was Pop’s natural home, but the crowds only came out on Sundays and takings were not the best. So he bought another tent and, leaving the snake pit in the care of two other snakeys—Rocky Vane and, later, George Atkins—took to the road again. This was where he honed his showmanship. It wasn’t enough to be able to work with snakes, he also had to work the crowd, especially when snake shows attracted more than their fair share of drunks.

  On one occasion a foul-mouthed blowhard was loudly pouring scorn on the dangers from snakebites, so Pop waited till he was distracted and clamped a harmless blue-tongue lizard on his hand. The drunk started screaming and flailing around, much to the entertainment of the assembled crowd.

  By 1924, Pop was pursuing the snakey trade in all its glory, working the circuit around Tamworth with Ted Williams (aka Little Sea Horse), taking bites and selling antidotes. But up in Gayndah, Queensland, they fell out over something, so Williams took the tent, leaving Pop with the snakes. Also in Gayndah, however, was the Tasmanian showman Tasman ‘Tas’ Bradley. Tas was hardworking and versatile, with a balancing act and juggling among his skills. But it was as an entrepreneur that he excelled.

  Tas had sideshows in circuses all over eastern Australia and Tasmania—freak shows, you’d call them now. He travelled all over Africa, the Middle East and Europe, looking for new acts for his shows. He brought back Ubangi Chilliwingi, a pygmy woman from Africa; Chong Chang Fat, the Oriental Wonderworker; the Monkey Hippodrome Orchestra; the Three Hungarian Marvels, who did acrobatics and balancing; and Prince Karloy, who swallowed swords and was billed to consume billiard balls, live chickens, frogs and mice. Tas was the first to race monkeys on the backs of whippet dogs around the local racetracks, and I have photographs of him with his circus in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia with all his paraphernalia up.

  Among Tas’s stalls and sideshows was a snake pit. When Pop turned up with snakes and no tent, Tas asked him to work in the snake pit with his teenage niece Essie, billed as ‘Cleopatra, Queen of the Snakes’. Essie Bradley was born in Hobart on 23 June 1907. Her parents were fruit pickers who were constantly on the move following the harvests, so she had little formal education in her early years (although she caught up later). When she was thirteen, Tas, her mother’s brother, took her under his wing, making it all but inevitable that she’d end up working in the shows. As well as her uncle and guardian, her step-grandfather, Bill Ditcham, was also a showman, who worked archery acts and later ran a ladies’ boxing troupe. As there were no snake women working the shows in Tasmania at that time, Tas imported harmless snakes from the mainland for Essie to handle, and thus Essie became known as Cleopatra, Queen of the Snakes. Later, I’d know her better as my mother.

  Like Pop, Essie had a complicated family background, but her more distant family history was even more colourful. Mum’s great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Bubb had been a widow, struggling to survive with her two children back in England, so when her sister died she moved in with her brother-in-law to take care of his three young children. Unfortunately it appears that times were tough and she began to use the food to feed her own children, and her sister’s youngest child died of malnutrition. Elizabeth was convicted of manslaughter in England in 1850 and sentenced to ‘life’ in Australia.

  She was allowed to bring only one child with her, so she picked her eldest son, George Bubb, who would have been about nine, and they arrived in Hobart in 1851 on the Aurora. He would have been my great-great-grandfather. A decade or so later, George married a woman called Matilda Bradley and took her name—probably to escape from his mother’s convict name. Ironically, there are records of a Matilda Bradley arriving on a convict ship around the same time, so maybe George’s adopted name wasn’t as ‘clean’ as he thought. And, yes, there are a lot of Georges hanging off both branches of my family tree.

  Pop and Essie didn’t get off to the best of starts. She may have been billed as Tasmania’s first snake lady, but she only handled non-venomous snakes—she wouldn’t touch the dangerous ones. Pop had no problem handling venomous snakes himself, although he was always cautious around them, and when Tas offered him a job in his snake pit Pop refused to work with Essie, saying he wouldn’t work with venomous snakes with a kid. Instead, he said he’d take it over, working with Bradley rather than for him, on his own and never with a woman. Another ‘Cleopatra’ had died at Manly only a few years earlier, which doubtless coloured his thinking.

  So, for a while, Essie was stuck in the ticket box, but as the shows moved south, Pop softened his stance an
d there are photos of the two working the pits together. Pretty soon, Essie had progressed to handling venomous snakes, and with enough respect and care to ensure that not once in her career was she bitten by one.

  It’s probably hard to understand these days, but travelling shows and permanent arcades attracted big crowds back then. There was no TV and cinema was in its infancy, and even then it was more of a novelty than a theatrical experience. But life was hard and people needed a break from the daily grind. The sideshows and their performers provided that, and snake men and women were right up there as main attractions.

  Snake women held a particular fascination, as the more daring of them also doubled as striptease artists, although I’m sure they would probably seem very tame by today’s standards. My mother was not one of those snake dancers, although she would certainly have known one or two.

  Pop and Mum played the Melbourne Show in 1924 and they feature on newsreel footage titled ‘The Pit of Death’, which I gave to the National Film and Sound Archive and can now be seen there. It is claimed that 375,000 people saw that film when it was doing the rounds. The film, which once included now-lost shots of the Tassie tigress and three cubs that were owned by Tas, also features Pop handling snakes in a manner that would scare the living daylights out of any contemporary snake handler.

  From Melbourne, Tas Bradley’s troupe moved to South Australia, where Pop was bitten by a brown snake during the Adelaide Show, and to Tasmania where he was called from the showground to capture a large black tiger snake that had been found on Murray Street, Hobart. On catching the snake he put its head in his mouth for half a minute—holding its jaws closed with his teeth—before placing it in a bag. This was Pop the showman, though in his private life he was much less flamboyant and in fact quite shy.

  He had an extensive knowledge of snakes and could identify a specific tiger and where it was collected from a pit seething with the reptiles. He was put to the test many times by snake expert Eric Worrell, and was once handed two bags each containing a freshly caught snake. Pop shook each bag a few times and then identified the species correctly from their hiss.

  At Stockton, New South Wales, in 1925, a local carnival owner, Sam Peisley, offered Pop his snake pit. Pop accepted and asked Essie to marry him, which she accepted too. Peisley then sold the couple a honeymoon tent for 10 shillings and it was set up on the beach. Once married, they broke away from Tas Bradley’s troupe and decided to settle down, do their show in one place and pursue their growing interest in reptiles from a more scientific point of view. Going around the show circuit, Pop and Essie had known many, many friends die from snakebites, nearly all of them from tiger snakes as well as two from brown snakes. So after they got married, Pop said, ‘No more snake shows for you.’

  The obvious place to settle was La Perouse, and in 1926 Mum and Pop found a house at Hill 60, a sandy mound in Yarra Bay (now Phillip Bay), near where Captain Phillip is believed to have stepped ashore for the first time in 1788. Pop dug a massive snake pit there, too.

  There were quite a few huts on sandy Hill 60, which was about a kilometre from La Perouse. The Sunday-outing crowds were growing there again, so Pop began to show his snakes at the Loop once more. He still travelled to the main annual shows, however, and was sometimes away for as long as two months at a time. He made a bit of extra cash selling specimens to other snakeys, zoos, collectors and educational institutions. When Pop put on a show he usually announced that his snakes were from Botany or La Perouse, so other showmen were always after him for replacement stock.

  Mum had lost a lot of her enthusiasm for snakes, which had claimed the lives of so many of her friends and fellow performers. When Pop was away, his stand-ins were Rocky Vane and possibly George Atkins, but when there was no one else to cover, Mum still put on a show, if nothing else to hold down the spot and prevent interlopers from moving in. Otherwise she was happy that her days on the road had ended, and that for the first time in her life she had a home and could put down roots.

  In 1927, Mum gave birth to my older brother, George. Life was still tough and it was about to get tougher. When the Great Depression hit Sydney in the early 1930s, the area around La Pa became shanty towns: Hill 60, and two others known as Happy Valley and Frog Hollow. Poor people from the city, kicked out of their lodgings because they were out of work and had no money, would arrive with a few sheets of tin and some cardboard, and set up home wherever they could find a reasonably flat spot. The area is all sand dunes, so digging in was no big deal, and people got on with just surviving the best they could.

  The Aboriginal Reserve was one of the few in Australia that housed Kooris in the area they had originally lived—and before the shanty towns sprang up, there had been very few whites. Even so, relations between the refugees from the city and the local Aboriginal people were generally very good. It was part of Koori culture back then to share, so the locals showed their new neighbours where to find fresh water and catch fish. Ironically, during the Depression, Aboriginal people were denied any social benefits as they were not considered to be citizens.

  Ever resourceful, Pop found various ways of feeding his little family. Just past Hill 60, heading towards Botany, there are Chinese market gardens, and back then the gardeners there were terrified of the tiger snakes that regularly invaded their area in search of frogs and water in the small spring creek. Towards the end of each week, Pop would patrol the gardens with two bags, one for snakes and the other for the vegetables he was given as a reward for capturing them. And in the colder months, when the snakes were a lot less active, Pop was not beyond taking his belt off and waving it around like a snake to make sure he got his usual bag of vegetables from the grateful gardeners. If they asked to see the snake, he’d say it was too dangerous: ‘You saw how angry it was—he could jump out of the bag and bite you.’

  In 1936 Mum and Pop moved to better lodgings in the Macquarie Watchtower at La Perouse, a fine old stone tower that at the time had extensions built around it. The extensions are gone now, destroyed years ago by fire, and it looks just like a castle on the hill. It was originally built in the 1820s, when Lachlan Macquarie was Governor, as a watchtower from which they could look out for potential invaders, smugglers and escaped convicts. Later it became the Customs Watchtower, then for a while it was La Perouse Public School—the first in Australia to accept both Aboriginal and white pupils. When Mum and Pop moved there it was known as the La Perouse Round House.

  About the same time, Pop befriended a boy who was clearly fascinated by snakes and would watch the shows for hours on end and then sometimes help carry the bags of snakes back to Pop’s pits. The boy was Eric Worrell, who many years later would establish the Australian Reptile Park near Gosford and be awarded an MBE for his work with wildlife and reptiles in particular.

  One of Pop’s show trips around this time was to Wollongong, where he was operating against his mate, the famous Rocky Vane. Rocky’s skills as a spruiker seemed to be working, and he was wooing all the crowds to his tent. So Pop fell back on the old La Pa Loop method of letting people in for free then passing the hat around after the show. Before long, Pop’s tent was topping the takings. ‘If you hadn’t done that, I was going to do it,’ was all Rocky could say in grudging admiration.

  Pop was also building his reputation in the scientific community and increasingly gave talks, including at Taronga Park Zoo. In May 1936, Mum had a daughter, my sister Noreen. By that time my brother George was nine years old and would travel with Pop whenever he could, collecting snakes and helping with shows. But in 1939 Pop finally took himself off the show circuit when he was offered the job of curator of reptiles at the zoo.

  Before we go much further, it’s worth looking at the whole issue of snakebite treatments and the development of antivenom. Effective antivenom was first developed in the 1890s by a French scientist living in Vietnam. He discovered that, in the same way that vaccines could be used to ward off diseases, small doses of venom could be given to animals—like horses
and goats—and they would progressively develop immunity. Then their blood could be treated to create something that countered the effects of a snakebite on humans.

  That was all well and good, but it soon became apparent that bites from different snakes required different antivenom, and injecting the wrong one could make matters worse rather than better. It was also a long and expensive process to create the antivenoms. For that reason, Pop’s snake-catching skills were in high demand, as the laboratories needed as much snake venom as they could get from reliable sources.

  There’s no doubt that many of the snakeys had developed immunity from bites over the years and Pop was clearly among them—a clear case of ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. But what about the lotions and potions that the snake men sold to audience members as part of their shows, as well as in pharmacies, barber shops and even tattoo parlours? Professor Fox’s antidote may have actually worked to some degree had he applied it to that fifth bite from the krait. Who knows? As for Pop, it’s hard to work out just how much he believed in his antidotes. In later years he would evade any questions about the small phials on a shelf in his shed or visible in photographs of the floor of his snake pit during the 1920s. But there is archive film of him performing at La Perouse in the late 1930s in which he deliberately takes a tiger snake bite and scarifies it – joins the puncture wounds with a razor cut – and then applies an antidote. No ill effects follow so we can assume he went on to pitch his antidote to the crowd.