The Last Snake Man Read online

  Mum also remembered that an antidote was manufactured, and that it varied from clear to brown to purple. Pop would have her sitting for hours squeezing the juice of the local pigface plant into small containers for his mixture. The juice from this plant has been used to relieve midge bites and jellyfish stings, and a related plant contains mesembrine, a compound that has similar though weaker effects to cocaine. In Pop’s case, surviving that near-fatal tiger snake bite when he was younger almost certainly did him more good than any plant extract, although we will never know how much venom that took.

  The year before Pop got the job at the zoo, there was another life-changing event in the Cann family. I was born.

  CHAPTER 3

  WAR BABY

  I was born on 15 January 1938, the year before World War II kicked off in Europe. The family was living in the La Perouse Round House, sharing some of its extensions with a couple of other families.

  While we were living there, Pop got a war service loan, and started building a house next door to where I live now in Yarra Road. That original family home was where I lived from when I was about two years old. Later on, I bought the land next door (for the princely sum of 250 pounds) and built there. Years later my sons demolished the old house and built their own places, as Pop’s land was big enough for two houses. My older brother George bought the block on the other side of Pop’s place and built a house there. My daughter also lives just across the road, so we’re a pretty close-knit family, to this day. I’ve travelled all over the world, but as a family we’ve never strayed far from La Pa.

  Pop was one of those unlucky few who had been old enough to serve in World War I and young enough to be called up for World War II. Fortunately, the director of Taronga Park Zoo wrote to the government and said he was too important to the community to be sent to war again. In any case, he’d served his country once already and been badly wounded—he didn’t need to go again.

  If you saw me when I was just a nipper, you wouldn’t believe I would grow up to play football and compete at the Olympics. I had rickets when I was a kid—something we now know was caused by a lack of vitamin D, calcium or phosphorus in the diet—and my legs were so bowed they were almost circular. The doctors at Camperdown Children’s Hospital didn’t have much idea, and wanted to break my legs and reset them in the hope they’d grow straight. Thankfully, Mum wouldn’t allow it and her own GP, who was way ahead of his time, said, ‘He wants vitamins, vitamins, vitamins,’ and prescribed sunshine, massage, and good food like meat, eggs, fruit and milk.

  So Mum had to massage my legs four times a day and try to get calcium into me. In the meantime I had to wear aluminium splints all the time. They were like cricket pads with tight straps that were meant to straighten my legs, and I used to stomp around like a gladiator with his armour on. They were annoying more than painful, and they only really hurt when the straps cut into me when I was walking. But I remember going down the back of the snake pit, where our parents couldn’t see, and my sister Noreen used to take them off for me so I could move my legs. I would sit down there for a while and feel terrific, and then we’d get called for lunch or dinner or whatever, and I’d have to put them back on again.

  Once the splints came off permanently, they realised my legs had ‘over-corrected’ and I was a bit knock-kneed. But Pop said I should just run around the sandhills with the Aboriginal kids from the Mission. Between that and the vitamins, my legs straightened up, although later on I still occasionally had my knees knocking together when I sprinted. How did I get rickets? Looking back, I realise that Mum had just lived through the Depression and then we were pretty much straight into the war, so healthy food would have been in short supply. Once she got the word about vitamins, Mum used to make terrible food—tripe and kidneys, and all that sort of stuff. I hated it. She also had me eating mushrooms, and I couldn’t face them for a long time after that.

  I was about four years old when the Japanese sailed three midget submarines into Sydney Harbour to attack our ships and about a week later one of the motherships shelled the Eastern Suburbs from out at sea. Pop decided we were a bit too close to the ocean for comfort, but fortunately he’d made friends with property owners near Nowra. He had occasionally gone there looking for snakes—big red-bellied blacks and tigers—out in the bush. Getting rid of their snakes always made him popular, so he soon found a small property near Pyree, which he rented. Mum and us kids moved down there until the war was over, and Pop used to come down by train to visit us when he could. My brother George worked in the dairy to pay the rent.

  I was too young to go to school when we got to Pyree. Noreen got to go but I had to stay home with Mum. She was fine, but I was a bit of a tearaway even then, so I suppose we must have got on each other’s nerves. I was always up to something. And it was kind of inevitable that I would get interested in snakes. Pop was an expert and my older brother George was keen. And among my earliest memories, I can recall catching my first small snake in the yard and getting a bashing for that from Mum. But I can also remember very distinctly the pit Pop had built near our house. (I wasn’t allowed in the snake pit on my own when I was young—although I’d sneak in there when my parents weren’t home. The pit was about 20 metres by 10 metres, with high walls, and sometimes filled with 200–300 snakes, most of which were being kept to be milked for their venom.)

  Home life was very, very good. We never had a lot, but we had everything we wanted, and Mum and Pop looked after us as well as you could hope. Pop didn’t have a car. He’d had a truck early in the show game, but it rolled in a bad accident, so he never drove again. That meant poor old Pop had to take trams and a ferry every day to his work at Taronga Park Zoo. And he wouldn’t take the bus or tram up that hill from the wharf. He used to walk up there, through the bottom gates, through the aquarium, right to the top of the zoo. I did that walk with him a lot and it was pretty hard—he sure walked fast.

  He’d work five days a week, and maybe a half-day Saturday. And he did that for years with hardly any money coming in, so he still used to make a few bucks out of the snake show at La Perouse. Life was hard on him but Pop was very good with me. He never hit me once in my life. In fact, when I was bad, Mum used to send me to my room and say, ‘When your father comes home, he’s gonna get you.’ So I’d be in my room, and I’d hear Mum telling Dad, ‘He’s been playing up again,’ and Dad used to pull his leather belt off and walk in and shut the door. Then he’d whisper to me, ‘Start yelling.’ And he’d hit the bed with the belt, and I’d go, ‘Aah, aah, no more, aah,’ and Mum would say, ‘That’ll do—you’ll kill him.’ And Dad would walk out, putting his belt on. But he never actually hit me. He was a great guy.

  One of the many amazing things about my father was that he had no education to speak of and never went to school in his life. In later years, he started to educate himself, but when he was a kid, when he went to the war, he couldn’t read much and had real trouble spelling words. Mum got a pretty good education after she joined up with her uncle Tas, so she used to help Dad. But he knew his snakes and he was quite articulate. He could speak to the public and came across really well—it was the showman in him, I suppose. And he was smart enough to be made curator of reptiles—although I think a large part of that was that he wasn’t scared of the snakes like all the others. Once he’d learned to read properly, though, he’d devour journals and magazines like National Geographic, and became incredibly knowledgeable.

  My brother George was ten years older than me, and I was envious of him because he would sometimes do snake shows with Pop. But when I was older, I used to go snaking with Dad a lot. Every year we did major trips looking for snakes and other reptiles, and I was never happier. Later in life I’d turn down terrific opportunities that other young fellas would have given their eye teeth for—but I didn’t want them if it meant I couldn’t go snaking with my dad.

  Life was a lot simpler back then. I know you hear that a lot, but it’s true. We could play on the street for hours wit
hout a car going past. Now you’d get knocked down if you weren’t across the road sharpish. This whole area, from Botany Bay on one side to the ocean on the other, was our playground, and in the school holidays we were out from dawn till dusk doing things that would give modern parents heart attacks.

  For instance, I used to get an old tractor tyre, sit inside it and roll it head over heels down the other side of the hill at the end of our street. It would travel faster than any runner, and I had to be careful not to hit a light pole down near the bottom of Yarra Road, so one of my mates would be stationed there to give the tyre a nudge as I rolled past, to keep me away from it. It would finally come to a halt 200 metres across a marsh at the bottom of the road.

  And I could be a bad little bugger, I have to admit. Ted the Milko used to come around with his cart and a big tank of fresh milk, kept cool with ice, and he’d draw whatever you needed into your milk can from a tap. He used to go down to the La Perouse School and give free milk to all the underprivileged families. One day, walking past when he was down at the door, I flicked the tap and let it pour. I thought I’d got away with it and he had no idea who’d done it. But two days later I was sauntering past and he came up behind me and gave me such a kick up the backside I nearly flew through the air. He knew, all right. Then there was a ‘fisho’. He’d pull a four-wheeled barrow round the houses, singing out ‘Fisho, fish for sale’. That was usually mainly after the mullet season, because usually they’d have that much mullet they’d give it away. You’d go down there and help them pull the nets in, take a bucket with you and they’d give you a feed. But if there wasn’t quite so much, they would walk round the streets selling it.

  Then there was the dunny man. Because we were a downhill run we had an outside toilet with a can for many years. When we had parties, often it would be too much and it would overflow a little bit, so all the blokes used to go down the bush because there was no back fence at the time and they would take a leak down there. But this bloody dunny bloke—whose job it was to come and collect the ‘night soil’—when it was pretty full he used to tip some on the floor to make it easier to carry, which meant we had to hose it down and clean it out.

  So years later, when I had my own house, I got some crap in a bucket one night and I went right down to the far end of the road and around the corner. When he went into this house to do his collection I went in there and tipped it in his truck cab and left him a note letting him know why. We had no more trouble. He wouldn’t have had a clue who did it, as he was doing it to everyone else too.

  Back when I was a kid, there were the clay fights down at the claypans between Big and Little Congie beaches. We’d have two sides of ten to fifteen, and each kid had a whippy stick about 2 metres long, often made from lantana branches, that they’d use to fire bullets of clay about three-quarters the size of a golf ball at each other. It was surprisingly effective over 50–100 metres. The clay was soft but it hurt when it hit you, and could leave a nasty bruise. These pitched battles would occasionally last an hour or until we ran out of ammo. It’s a wonder nobody ever got their eye put out. Fights like this happened all over the district. The Kooris were the best at it, so we always made sure we had a couple in our team.

  If we weren’t firing clay at each other, we were pinging it at trams or passing cars from the cover of bushes. Cars were still a bit of a luxury back then, so the drivers would hear the thunk of the clay, screech to a stop, see it splattered on the door or window and then catch sight of us giggling in the bushes. Some of them would chase us, but we were too fast and smart for them. I was sorry when Randwick Council allowed sand miners into the area, as they removed the clay pits too. The clay was white with red patches, and I’ll lay odds that the area’s Aboriginal inhabitants in the past used it for decoration for ceremonies. It was a shame—they were the only clay pits in the area.

  We all had chores in our family, just to help out, and mine was to cut the grass using a push mower. I tried to do it as quickly as possible—so I could get back to running around with my mates—but when I ran with the mower, the front of it would jump up and the grass wouldn’t getting cut at all. So I put a half-bag of sand on top to keep it down. Looking back, that’s probably where I got my sprinters legs from. And years later, when I built my own house there with my snake pits down the back, I would never walk on that strip of grass, I always ran.

  Life as a kid was mostly innocent fun with the occasional punch-up thrown in, although some of it was quite dangerous. We kids used to jump on and off old Darkie’s coal truck as he went around the streets. One time, however, I ended up with my bare foot under one of the wheels and someone carted me off to Prince Henry Hospital.

  This was around lunchtime, but no one told the oldies what had happened, and it was only when my brother George went looking for me that they found out. Lying in the hospital, I knew Dad was coming because I could hear his boots squeaking—he only ever wore polished boots and they squeaked on the shiny floors. Luckily I had no broken bones—just a slightly flattened foot that was fixed by two nights in the cot.

  Even more dangerous, we used to jump on the running boards of the trams and, when they slowed down at the Loop, work our way round the outside of the doors by holding bars, and jump off before they speeded up again. There were always a few scrapes from that, although one boy, Darcy Dixon, lost a foot when he slipped under the wheels. Another, Billy Hampton, was killed when he got hit by another tram coming the other way. We stopped for no more than a week after that before we were back at it again.

  It could be dangerous in other ways too. I remember my brother George had taken up dancing, and I found his dance pumps and thought they would go well on the trams. Sure enough, they were ideal, as light as feathers and perfect for the acrobatics involved in mounting and dismounting from a moving vehicle. Of course, their soft leather was scuffed and scratched by the gravel on the road and the hard edges on the trams steps and running boards. I copped a few scratches and cuts myself when George found out what I had done with his best dancing shoes.

  Another favourite game was to make a ‘snake’ from a man’s necktie or a length of one-inch rope and attach it to some fishing line, just behind its ‘head’ in the middle of the road, then hide in a bush and wait for people to come off the trams from Sydney in the evening. When they were close enough, but not too close, we’d give our snake a wriggle and see how they reacted. At first we left rocks lying around for our victims to throw, but we kept getting hit by the ones that missed our snake. After that we’d leave a stick handy so they could try to bash the ‘snake’. It was hilarious—especially the time one bloke got the fishing line tangled round his ankle and thought the snake was chasing him. We thought we were going to die laughing.

  After a while if we ran out of ‘customers’ in our usual spot, we moved our little snake trick closer to the tram stop at Yarra. But because the cover wasn’t as good, the passengers would sometimes chase us. Occasionally one of them would catch us and we’d even get a boot up the backside for our pains. Happy days!

  All of this came to a sudden and final halt, and it had nothing to do with the snake trick itself and everything to do with the intrusion of grim reality into our relatively carefree childhoods. One night we got chased away from the terminus, so we came back down to Yarra Road and as we came over the hill we could see floodlights around a house on a corner. This was September 1953, so I would have been fifteen years old and a bit long in the tooth for playing games anyway.

  The house that was all lit up was occupied by a Norwegian war veteran, Peter Harpestad, his Australian wife Bernice and their little boy, also Peter, who was only five. I thought, ‘What the bloody hell is going on here?’ When we came down there and got in closer, we saw police cars. A door to the house was open and we could see a shape that turned out to be a body lying inside the side door with a sheet over it. That had to be the father. The newspaper said the next day they found the bodies of the kid and the woman in the bedroom, dead, with the
woman’s slip pulled up to her neck, so it was probably a sex crime. At first the police thought they had been shot, and then there was a rumour they had been killed with an axe, but newspaper reports said they had all been bashed to death with a glass lemonade bottle. The police said all the signs were Mrs Harpestad had put up a terrific fight before she was felled.

  The culprit was almost certainly another Norwegian, Karl Groos, who was a friend of the family and visited there a lot. This Groos fella, a seaman, was done in by bad luck. The next day he was seen by a motorcycle policeman, near Kiama, driving a car with a flat tyre. The copper tried to tell him about the tyre but Groos took off, no doubt thinking he’d been sprung, and the motorbike cop chased after him. Then, either accidentally or deliberately, Groos drove straight into a tree and was killed. When they examined the car, the police found a blood-stained hammer and a key to the Harpestads’ back door in his jacket pocket. They also found his fingerprints at the crime scene. It’s pretty safe to say that if he hadn’t driven into that tree he would have died in jail. It had been fourteen years since anyone had been executed in New South Wales, just up the road in Long Bay Gaol.

  A woman who lived close to the Harpestads said Groos had attacked her the night before the murder but she hadn’t wanted to create a fuss. The Coroner later concluded that Groos must have just gone insane—although exactly why, no one ever knew. This kind of thing was all very new to us, so for a while everyone was wary. One night my sister Noreen wanted to go three doors down the road to a girlfriend’s place and Mum said, ‘You be careful.’ But there was a big street light out the front and so away she went.

  Once she’d gone, I went to Mum and said, ‘Lend me a pair of Dad’s trousers.’ And when Mum and Dad had gone to bed I got the long trousers, stuffed some clothes in them to fill them out and put them under Noreen’s bed. Then I got a pair of Dad’s workboots and had them facing the opposite way under the bed. So Noreen comes home being nice and quiet so she doesn’t wake up Mum and Dad. And she waits till she’s shut the bedroom door before she puts the light on. The next thing there’s an unearthly scream. My brother George and his wife Moira had their own house next door to us and George told me a few days later they heard the scream. Moira said, ‘What’s that?’ and George said, ‘Oh, that’ll just be John playing his usual games.’