The Last Snake Man Read online

  Competing in the shotput in the decathlon at the 1956 Olympics. (VPRS 10742/P0, unit 11, item B1286)

  Winning my 100 metres sprint heat in the decathlon. My time was second-fastest overall. (VPRS 10742/P0, unit 11, item B1216)

  Picked for the NSW Rugby League State Representative team v Queensland, 1960. John Raper, Norm Provan and Reg Gasnier were on the team and Clive Churchill was the coach! (Pic: Sidney Riley)

  Third from right, front row, with the Tumbarumba rugby league team. (Pic: ‘Hippy’ Quinn)

  Working as a rigger on the powerlines (and keeping fit) in 1963–64.

  In full torso plaster at Barry Goldspinks’ wedding in Tumbarumba after breaking my neck. That was the end of my rugby career.

  Helen and me in 1959.

  Helen in the caravan on our honeymoon, 1964. It was her refuge from the tiger snakes.

  Pop with a fresh Chappell Island tiger snake. We ventured all over the place on our snaking expeditions. (Pic: Eric Worrell)

  My brother George (left) and me at the only snake show we ever did together, after Pop died in 1965. (Pic: Glen Blaxland)

  In New Guinea: Doug Kirkness and our Indonesian interpreter negotiating to buy a freshwater croc. The locals called them sweetwater crocs.

  Bartering for animals in the Asmat region of Irian Barat. It became a spectator sport. (Pic: Doug Kirkness)

  Our pig-nose turtle collection. They’re each about 5 centimetres across. The red-belly turtles (Elseya rhodini) were not described until 2015.

  With a tree kangaroo in the west New Guinea highlands, Irian Barat. (Pic: Doug Kirkness)

  Feeding a baby wallaby at Nabire, Irian Barat. Keeping the animals alive was one of our biggest jobs.

  At the village of Otsjanep—note the canoe paddles that double as spears. The young warriors quickly painted their faces when strangers came by.

  A typical shell nose piece—now on my study wall.

  The village chief at Otsjanep wearing a dogs’ teeth necklace.

  Camped 100 kilometres up the Eilanden River, with two Indonesian soldiers and locals, hunting crocs for skins. (Pic: Doug Kirkness)

  Searching the Mary River with John Greenhalgh. (Pic: Helen Cann)

  Holding the first large Mary River turtle I caught. (Pic: Helen Cann)

  The snake pit at La Pa in the 1980s. Note the too-close ice cream van.

  Milking a snake for venom to send to the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories to make antivenom which would save lives…maybe even mine! (Pic: Neville Burns)

  With an undescribed long-neck river turtle in the Kimberley Ranges. (Pic: Steve Swanson)

  On a camping and collecting trip to Gregory, north-west Queensland, with four mates in 2000.

  Inspiring the next generation: my last show at the Loop, 18 April 2010. (Pic: Steve Boys)

  Federal MP (and Environment Minister) Peter Garrett and state MP Michael Daley present me with a plaque to mark my final show. (Pic: Randwick City Library Service)

  APPENDIX

  AUSTRALIA’S GREAT SNAKEYS

  The great ‘Professor Fox’, who started the snake shows at La Perouse, no doubt inspired my father to follow in his footsteps, and my mother also recalled a long procession of snake men and women who came and went—some permanently after their snakes got the better of them or they decided that their first serious bite was one too many. Some were truly great performers with either a magic potion that worked (unlikely) or a level of acquired resistance that protected them from snakebites. Others discovered the hard way that whatever protection they thought they had was illusory. And some were charlatans, only working with snakes or reptiles that had been defanged and milked—although even that was no guarantee of safety. You can’t milk a deadly snake dry—they will always have some venom there as they are constantly producing it. Whatever the reality of their acts, the snake shows were incredibly popular in the sideshow alleys of travelling funfairs and country agricultural shows.

  In 1978, I realised that the memories of the old snake shows were dying out as rapidly as the trade’s less well-protected operators so I wrote a book that documented for the first time this arcane corner of show business before it disappeared forever. The book, Snakes Alive, published by Kangaroo Press, won a number of awards and commendations. An updated version was published in 1986 by Eco Press in the USA. The stories that follow are drawn from its pages.

  For a while in Australia the market for snake acts was strong enough to even attract foreign performers like the half-French Princess Indita and the American Latiefa ‘Queen of Reptiles’, both known for working with rattlesnakes. The shows were not uniformly welcomed by government bodies, however, and the snakeys were increasingly banned. This meant the snake men and women had to find other specialties to entertain the crowds.

  Vince Labb took his snakes to Shepparton in 1912, for example, but was prevented from exhibiting them. So he became instead the ‘Handcuff King’, and photos show him at the Shepparton showground in front of a tent proclaiming ‘The Escapist’, with chains hanging from his shoulders and arms like great iron pythons.

  And while the travelling shows encountered a wide range of by-laws and restrictions, some more permanent venues were also evolving. Not many people owned their own vehicles, and public transport was in great demand. At many a tram terminus—such as Manly, Coogee, La Perouse, Botany, Bondi and Brighton—fairgrounds sprang up, prospered and remained for many years.

  Needless to say, snake shows became regular and popular attractions, feeding off the fear and dread of the spectators while claiming their share of the lives of usually fledgling performers and a few ‘snake-oil salesmen’. These last were really no more than antidote vendors who, after seeing seasoned showmen take a snakebite and then treat it, felt there was an easy quid in putting on a show. Some of them thought the trick was to defang and milk the snakes, then make it look like the antidote was effective. They would discover to their cost that this was not the case and deaths haunted the acts, although many of them went unrecorded or received only scant media attention.

  ‘He was unable to talk, but wrote down that he was twice bitten when handling a tiger snake some six hours earlier,’ states the obituary for one unnamed victim. ‘Walsford Fowler considered himself immune and used to walk around with a green tree snake around his neck…caught adder…brought to hotel…died the next day,’ reads another. Many such victims would have been snake pit men who never got off the ground…just ended up under it.

  Snake handling changed through the first half of the twentieth century, for a number of reasons: the increasing availability of antivenom made it a lot less hazardous, the snakeys themselves tended to avoid being bitten if they could (rather than trading on their ability to survive bites), and the growing attractions of TV made the old sideshows largely redundant.

  Meanwhile, however, as long as there were audiences around, there were dozens of snakeys plying their trade. The denizens of the La Perouse Loop you’ve met already. Here are some of the other great snake men and women of Australia.

  ‘Professor’ Jim Morrissey

  There was possibly no snake man better at drawing the crowds and holding them than the self-styled ‘Professor’ Jim Morrissey, also known as ‘Morrissey of the Snakes’.

  Born in London in 1849, he was the son of a stonemason and emigrated to Tasmania when he was twenty. Two decades later he got his introduction to Australian snakes by obtaining contracts to rid them from country properties by killing them. He subsequently claimed that because he knew so much about snakes he was entitled to call himself ‘Professor’.

  He was a great talker and his trademark was a battered felt hat with a ligature, or tourniquet, for a band. He was popular with journalists seeking a few paragraphs, and in 1909 became probably the first snake handler to be employed by an education department to lecture on reptiles in schools.

  Eventually the professor set up shop in Bourke Street, Melbourne, though through inclination or necessity he supplemented his inc
ome by some less than legal activities. These, coupled with a taste for the bottle, resulted in run-ins with the law—not that he was unwilling to turn even these misfortunes to his quick-thinking advantage. But snakes were Morrissey’s living and he was certainly versatile.

  ‘There’s lots of ways of turning money from snakes,’ he said. ‘First, there’s the antidote which, with the ligature I’ve got a provisional patent on, I’ve sold to thousands of people from Tasmania to Queensland. Then there’s the venom, and I’ve sold some of that to the university. Then there’s the skin, to be made up into belts an’ bags an’ slippers; and the belts themselves—I’ve often got 35 shillings for a good belt by rafflin’ it in a billiard room,’ he boasted.

  Morrissey claimed that exhibitions and collections at racecourses, and private demonstrations in a cosy little room, or ‘public yappin’ to a crowd in front of a hotel’ all produced cash. In fact, Morrissey said that at times he had made as much as 100 pounds a week, including a ‘cheque for £50 sent to the missis’ by a man whose boy’s life he had saved.

  Summing up life as a snake-man entrepreneur, he once said, ‘I’ve had money for catchin’ snakes, and even for lettin’ snakes kill me—if they could. I’ve earned a pound apiece gettin’ snakes out of wells and cellars, and I’ve been paid half-a-crown a head by McKenna’s brewery for catchin’ ’em in the barley crop when the men threatened to knock off work, they was so bad.’

  One of his most colourful encounters was witnessed by a well-known journalist, W.A. Somerset, and recounted in Melbourne’s Life magazine. In 1915, Princess Indita arrived in Australia from the United States. Her forte was the ‘weird snake dance of the Hopi Indians’, which she performed in vaudeville shows. Morrissey learnt she was to give a private exhibition for the press and certain favoured citizens, performing with rattlesnakes, which Morrissey had not encountered before, so he went along. She told him her favourite snakebite antidote was an American Indian one that had been handed to her by her father’s tribe, but often she just used iodine or salt.

  Morrissey was not impressed and, pulling out a phial of his own brownish cure-all, said, ‘I’ll back this little old bottle against this Yankee tail-shaker. He may have a row like a bloomin’ spinning jenny, but for quickness, dash and for venom, give me the Australian tiger anytime.’

  ‘What’s more,’ he challenged, ‘I’ll come here any night you like an’ prove it before an audience.’ Princess Indita agreed and a few nights later at the Bijou Theatre, after she’d performed for a spellbound audience, a short, elderly man in a grey suit and battered felt hat strolled onto the boards, and the audience rose as one and cheered.

  Morrissey stirred the rattlesnake with his toe and it struck but landed between his feet, which were wide apart. He stuck his arm towards the snake and this time the rattler made no mistake, biting him just above his wrist. He whacked it on the nose with his free hand so the reptile reverted to its coiled stance.

  The bite looked bad and was bleeding freely. Tom ‘Pambo’ Eades, a snake-man friend, was in the audience and immediately went up on stage to help to apply the antidote and scarify the wound, cutting a line in the skin from one puncture hole to the other, a standard preparation for the application of antidote.

  Morrissey was unconcerned, but the Princess stood spellbound by this rash display of foolhardiness from the 66-year-old showman. All was not quite as well as Morrissey made out, however. Later that night he collapsed and was taken to Melbourne Hospital. When he awoke he found himself in strange surroundings and yelled, ‘What am I here for?’ On being told he said, ‘That’s all right. Just bring me my clothes. Oh, and thanks for the help.’ And within minutes he was up, dressed and had discharged himself.

  Morrissey was constantly on the move and showed little sign of his age as the years advanced. He seemed always to be seeking a crowd, though after a few drinks he could be equally adept at breaking up the people or the furniture. Morrissey had patented his antidote in 1912, and a pamphlet supplied with the bottle quoted a story from the Northern Star: ‘A lad named Arthur Vagne while snake hunting at Gundurimba was bitten by a snake. The reptile was of the black species, with bright red underneath. Vagne had a bottle of Morrissey’s Antidote with him. He at once applied the ligature, scarified the bitten part and applied the antidote. Afterwards, no ill effects of the bite were experienced.’

  Given the unusual name it seems likely that the lad was a relative of Rocky Vagne (later Vane) who by that time was becoming as famous as Morrissey—in fact, the two teamed up for a spell or two. Things became tougher for Morrissey in his declining years, however, and it’s said that he had to ‘hump the bluey’ (become a swagman) on the open roads of the Hawkesbury district. He died at Parramatta in an aged-care home on 7 August 1929 at the age of 80—not a bad innings for a ‘feller that was easily satisfied and doesn’t want to live forever’.

  Tom Wanless

  Tom Wanless was not the first showman to trade off the name of a predecessor, but in calling himself ‘Young Morrissey’, he linked his career to Australia’s most flamboyant snake man. Wanless claimed that he had every justification in taking Jim Morrissey’s name.

  Research reveals few details of Wanless’s early life. It’s said he was born in Victoria in 1895 and orphaned at six, to which he added the claim that he was then cared for by the self-confessed reprobate Jim Morrissey, who ‘induced me to study snakes and in that work we were inseparable. If he got a bite, I got a bite.’ Whether this is true or not, Wanless made the claim while Morrissey was still alive—and in fact, the older man outlived him by eight years.

  In an effort to disassociate himself from Wanless, Morrissey contacted Truth newspaper, which gleefully publicised his indignant plea to ‘have placed on record through the columns of the only paper worth reading that the individual Thomas Wanless, who is alleged to bear also the “MORRISSEY” moniker is no relative and incidentally no friend of the “Professor”. The little weather-beaten and mentally acute old ’un wishes it known, that he did not, as has been stated, adopt Wanless, the “younger Morrissey” for the very good and sufficient reason that it has at times taken the old fellow all his time to adopt himself.’

  Morrissey was a garrulous self-promoter at the best of times, but the tone of his renunciation of Wanless’s claims smacks of more than a mere family rift. The earliest objective report of Tom Wanless’s career dates from 1913, when the teenage ‘confectioner’ of Lawson Street, Balmain, was bitten on the chin by a red-bellied black snake more than 2 metres long. He was rushed to Sydney Hospital in a serious condition, but lived to charm again.

  A few years later, Wanless extended his snake-show venues to take in the La Perouse Loop, along with the Hessells (see Chapter 1), and in March 1920, there being no import restrictions on reptiles, Wanless, as ‘Young Morrissey’, showed an American copperhead snake in Balmain and was bitten.

  ‘Like a flash, the fangs of the cold-blooded immigrant were buried into his upper lip,’ a journalist recorded, ‘and in a couple of seconds, Morrissey was taking the count. But in just half a minute he was around again, having given the antidote one of the greatest tests it had ever been put to.’

  Later, Morrissey said: ‘A great sickness came over me. I felt as if I was choking, as if my glands had grown monstrously. It seemed as if all my teeth were failing out and then I seemed to be paralysed. I take seven or eight bites a week, mostly at private exhibitions, the bite of a tiger snake being most severe. It will be a tiger bite that will settle me in the long run. The punishment is too great on the heart, but I never think of that. Time enough to worry about death when we come to it, whether it delivers the knock by snake poison or by dieting yourself carefully so that senile decay sets in.’

  Later in 1920, Wanless teamed up with Dave Meekin, one of Australia’s best middleweight boxers. They made a rough- and-ready knockabout pair, with Wanless as fond of the bottle as he was of snakes and Meekin addicted to fisticuffs and the fairground. Meekin was contracted to figh
t for the South African big-game hunter John Burger, and Wanless—now calling himself Morrissey—went along to South Africa for the ride. Burger and Wanless soon became firm friends.

  According to Burger, Wanless stood only 5 feet tall and weighed barely 50 kilograms. He had three top front teeth missing and wore a red scarf around his neck, the ends pulled through a gold ring studded with two diamonds. He invariably dressed in an open khaki shirt, a pair of riding breeches and top boots.

  Early in their friendship, Wanless bullied Burger into taking him by rickshaw to a snake-infested plantation. Within a couple of hours Wanless had caught a 2-metre green mamba, known to the Africans as the ‘cloud of death’ and one of the world’s deadliest snakes. To Burger’s astonishment, Wanless managed to get the snake into his shirt. ‘His belt and button were securely fastened and, for additional security, my tie was fastened around his neck below the collar,’ he wrote.

  When they returned to town Wanless advertised that he would accept a bite from the mamba that night at 9 p.m. When the time arrived, the showman’s tent was packed to suffocation. After teasing the mamba, Wanless grabbed it by the head and pushed his forearm under the snake’s snout. When the fangs sank into his arm, Wanless released his grip and let the reptile hang from his arm for some seconds, supported only by its fangs.

  The mamba was then removed and placed in a cage, after which Wanless showed his bleeding arm to the crowd. Incisions were made and Wanless’s antidote was poured into the wound. On completion of the treatment, Wanless told the watchers that the following night he would allow himself to be bitten by a puff adder. The crowd was reluctant to leave and those who hung on for purely ghoulish reasons were not disappointed. Wanless collapsed within a few minutes and showed signs of neurotoxic poisoning: his breathing was affected, his pupils dilated and his pulse raced.