The Last Snake Man Read online

  But it was sad about the Harpestads, and especially that little boy. I remember one window of the house had all the kid’s little toys lined up on the sill. They were there for a while before they were taken away. The house has gone now. It was bulldozed down and a new house was built there. And don’t ask me why, but that was the end of the snake trick too.

  CHAPTER 4

  UNDERWATER FOOTBALL

  When I was a kid, I was always hunting for snakes and lizards and the like, and I was always on the go. In my early teens I was always in the water, spearfishing. These were the days before surfing really took off here. We used to do a bit of bodysurfing, but spearfishing was the thing. It was good fun and you got a feed at the end of it, so sometimes I would spearfish seven days a week, every afternoon or all weekend for hours and hours, when the weather and water conditions were okay. We never wore rubber suits in summer, but in winter we would wear a football jumper to protect us from the cold water. It’s something I kept up until I was in my early 70s.

  I love mullet. It’s one of my favourite fish and we used to spear a few, but they only tend to come around at Easter. We used to get a few stragglers heading north around Anzac Day. We never really worried about them, because as I said, when the mullet season was on we used to help the fishermen to pull the nets in and walk away with big buckets full of fish. They banned fishing with nets in Botany Bay for a while but the Aboriginals now have permission from New South Wales Fisheries when the mullet run, and only on weekdays. There’s plenty to go around, and they give it away to the La Pa locals.

  I used to go spearfishing down the coast at Wreck Bay, just south of Jervis Bay—and my sons and grandsons still do. Wreck Bay is an Aboriginal settlement whose people also have very close connections to the Kooris of La Perouse. My wife Helen’s brother Bill lived on the settlement for about 40 years as a professional fisherman for the Ardler family. Bill died a few years back and the locals gave him the great honour of being buried in their own cemetery. He was only the second ‘gub’ (whitefella) to be buried there.

  (A few years ago they were catching tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of mullet, and some outfit brought freezer trucks over from Canberra. They bought all the mullet, but all they wanted was the roe, and they would toss the rest of the fish on a tip. I like a bit of roe myself, but that was criminal. They could have given the fish to poor people or hospitals. Instead they threw them on the tip. Disgusting!)

  While we’re on the subject of water, we pretty much invented underwater football. I would have been about twelve years old, I suppose, so we’re talking about 1950. Out on the point out here, in Botany Bay, there’s an inlet to what was Bunnerong Power Station. It’s all gone now but for a couple of relics, but when it was at its peak it was the most productive power station in the southern hemisphere, supplying electricity for about a third of New South Wales.

  Bunnerong was a coal-fired, steam-turbine power station, which meant it needed a lot of cold water coming in, and that meant there was warm water going out. The inlet, which is mostly blocked off with big rocks now, comes straight off Botany Bay and, with its big platform and high concrete walls, looks like a submarine pen from a James Bond film or a war movie. And to be fair, a lot of locals who weren’t around before Bunnerong was demolished back in the 1980s think that’s what it was.

  The reality is a lot less glamorous. It’s shallow these days, as the sand structure of the bay has been changed by the container wharf. But when the tide was high back then, the water would have been close to 5 metres deep during big Christmas tides. On low tide it would drop down to about 1.5 metres. So me and all the other kids would get a rock, which would be our football, and it would weigh us down so we could run or, more accurately, bounce along the bottom between breaths. We had teams of probably six or seven on each side, and we had markers where you had to get that ball past.

  The length of the pen would have been 20–25 metres. You couldn’t move very fast but it used to be horrific: blokes trying to take the ball off the others, bashing, tackling; and other blokes diving down to relieve the ball carrier so he could take a break or pass the rock. A big mob of us used to come out. We had no trouble getting kids because there were so many people at Hill 60 and Frog Hollow and around the Mission. Sometimes there were too many and we had to pick teams.

  The outlet was a different story—the water coming out was warm and the legendary swimming coach Tom Penny discovered the channels were perfect for year-round training—there were few indoor training pools back then. Not only was the water warmer, but it had a steady flow that ran at between 3 and 5 kilometres an hour for the swimmers to work against—like a treadmill for swimmers. Tom Penny trained Barry Darke—who smashed all sorts of Australian swimming records but retired before he could compete at the 1956 Olympics—and his Olympic gold medallist teammate John Devitt.

  It was about 2 metres deep upstream, and the current would take us to the ocean end. There were no swim fins in those days, so we had ropes that we’d use to pull ourselves out of the water, then run back to the top and dive in again. That warm water seemed to encourage oysters—some swimmers wore light shoes to protect their feet—so we could go down and get a few now and then. I never got any pearls, but brother George got a cheapie. We did hear of the old blokes getting some, but we were told they were low-grade.

  You hear a lot these days that modern kids spend too much time stuck in front of computer screens or tapping away on their phones. A few years ago it was TV that was supposedly destroying the youth of the day. I reckon that’s all a bit exaggerated, but, having said that, there were a lot of natural athletes running around the sand dunes and swimming in the waters around La Pa. And some of us were a decent size, too, which led to me being the captain of a title-winning Aussie Rules football team.

  One day when I was about fifteen, a local man, a Mr Chadwick, who had a big garage in Kensington, pulled up in a big Daimler limousine with two Victorian brothers by the name of McMahon and asked us if we ever played VFL. We said, ‘What’s that?’ The clue to our ignorance lay in the initials for the Victorian Football League. This was an alien game to us, and was widely derided in rugby league country as ‘aerial ping-pong’ but also known as Aussie Rules.

  Anyway, these blokes asked us if we’d like to play a game, and when we said we would they said we’d need to put a team together. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll sort it out.’ I wasn’t the spokesman, but I knew there were plenty of kids around for me to recruit. He said, ‘Okay then, we’ll play next week. We’ll give you a game.’

  So they put some posts up on a flat area that used to be a cricket pitch, down at the bottom of the hill we used to come down in the tractor tyre, and they brought out their best team from Redfern or thereabouts. Most of our blokes didn’t even know what Aussie Rules was—just catch the ball and kick it between the posts was all we knew to do. But we beat them. It wasn’t by much—38–26—but the other mob were pretty impressed with that, so the next thing we knew we were in the local Aussie Rules competition.

  Now I had to round up eighteen players every week and get them on a tram to wherever we were playing. Sometimes I had a squad of twenty, others I only had fifteen, but I knew a lot of reliable blokes so we could always could put a team out. I’d go to their place and say, ‘You go and get so and so, and you round up the blokes on the Hill.’ It was amazing. We went through the competition undefeated and I have a record of every game we played—some of them we won by more than 200 to nil.

  The man who was looking after us, the bloke with the big garage at Kingsford, promised us that whenever we scored 200 to nil he’d buy us a big milkshake. So we played hard and won the grand final. I was picked to go into the state side for a game against Queensland and I was told they’d already pencilled me in as captain. But the headmaster of the school, Mr Dutton, wouldn’t give me time off to go up there as it wasn’t an official sport at our school, so I missed out on that. He must have felt guilty, though, because when I left school he
gave me 10 shillings!

  And that was the end of my short but spectacular career in Aussie Rules. The next year we gave it away. We all went back to rugby league and a couple of the fellas went on to play first grade and Group 9. Kevin Longbottom became a star for Souths, and Dougie Russell played for Tumbarumba and could have been as good as Kevin but he ‘retired’. They were pretty good athletes, regardless of what code they were playing.

  I wasn’t real bright at school—at least, they didn’t think I was—but I was a good athlete and I used to win all the La Perouse school championships for my age group. And then I went to another school at Kensington, because there wasn’t much sport at La Pa and all the Kooris were giving me a bit of a bashing. I don’t know why. I wasn’t cheeky. I was too scared to be cheeky to them. But that’s kids, I suppose. A couple ended up being good mates later on.

  So I went to Kensington Public School on Doncaster Avenue, where they reckoned I was such a thickhead that they wanted to send me to a special school for backward kids. The real reason I wasn’t performing was my eyesight. I couldn’t see the board. However, the way they worked, if you were a thickhead, you used to sit up the front. So when they thought I was stupid I could see the board perfectly. And when the monthly exam came along, I would go really well, and they’d put me at the back of the class with the brighter kids. And then I couldn’t see and I had to take a guess, and I’d get it wrong.

  One time, the teacher, Mr Turnbull, said to me, ‘John, I can’t work you out. You’re not cheating, because you’re sitting up the front. And when you’re up the back, you go really bad. I can’t work out what’s wrong with you.’ I never told him I couldn’t see the board. My folks got me glasses, but I wouldn’t wear them. No way I was gonna be a four-eyes! Can you imagine what the La Pa kids would have done if I had turned up with goggles on? They would have given me heaps. And I never wore them until after I got my driver’s licence.

  When it was time to get my licence I told my neighbour a few doors down, Tommy McKenna, who used to take George and me hunting in his big Nash car…a bit classy for our suburb. Tommy was a good mate and he used to chauffeur Tilly Devine, the notorious brothel madam and crime boss, when she got old and was living in Maroubra Junction. And when the Granville train disaster occurred, Tommy worked for 24 hours straight under the collapsed bridge with Joe Beecroft, the policeman who set up the Police Rescue squad. That day he told me to walk backwards and tell him when I could no longer see the number plate. Off we went to Rosebery motor registry, where I filled in the form and they told me they’d call me when they needed me. When they called out my name, Tommy stood up and said, ‘That’s me.’ When he came back he said, to me, ‘Off we go mate, my eyes are okay.’ And then I did the driving test.

  When I went to high school at Maroubra Junction—they wanted me because I was good at sport—they put me in 1D, going on my school records, but the next year I was in 2A, and then 3A. Okay, so I knuckled down a little bit, but the main thing was I could sit wherever I wanted to, so I sat at the front. I could learn there, because I could read the board.

  Regardless of how well or badly I was performing in the classroom, I was a pretty good runner. In primary school one year I won every event at the school carnival, which I suppose is why Maroubra Junction wanted me. In 1951, they had the first ever Australian school championships and I won two state titles in my age group, under-13s, and I got picked to go to Tasmania to represent New South Wales. This was a big deal because I was probably one of the only boys in the squad who wasn’t from a posh private school. They had all the training facilities—whereas I trained running around the La Perouse sandhills and probably being chased by the Koori kids. I never seemed to tire, but distance runners learn how to conserve their energy even in the 400 metres. I came back with three medals—for the 100 yards, 220 yards and the relay. And I met someone you might say was my first girlfriend—well, she was a friend and a girl.

  Her name was Betty Cuthbert; we were the same age and, like me, she was a sprinter. At one point Betty held world records in every distance from sprints to 400 metres, in both yards and metric. She won three gold medals at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 and got another in Tokyo four years later. Betty and her twin sister, Marie, used to come down from Ermington in the northern suburbs and visit relatives in Brighton-Le-Sands, just on the other side of Botany Bay, so we would occasionally link up when they caught the 303 bus and then the tram to Yarra to swim on the beach.

  The national championships was probably the first time I realised I was a bit better than most blokes at this lark, and with Melbourne only five years away I decided to take athletics a bit more seriously.

  CHAPTER 5

  BORN TO RUN

  When my old mate Keith Smith wrote about me recently, he said I was a natural athlete who enjoyed winning, and I suppose I can’t deny either accusation. When I was still thirteen I went down to the E.S. Marks Field in Moore Park near the showground, which was a training ground and arena for athletics. I asked the Botany Harriers athletics club if I could get a run with them, but they said I was too young and I should come back in a couple of years. I was pretty disappointed with that, but there was another club based there, Randwick. They asked me my age too, but they gave me a run and put me in with the D-grade runners. I blitzed them. When the Botany fellas saw this they wanted me back, but I stayed with Randwick because they’d given me a shot. Later on, the two clubs combined so I ended up with Randwick–Botany anyway.

  By the time I was fifteen I was doing pretty well in club events and starting to get a reputation, but I was curious to know how well I was doing compared to other countries. So I sent a letter to the British Board of Amateur Athletics with my achievements and asked how they compared with other boys my age. The honorary secretary, Jack Crump, wrote back and said that while our age groups were different and they probably shouldn’t make direct comparisons, my times were ‘quite exceptional and were unlikely to be bettered by anyone in your age group anywhere in the world’. For the record, comparing my times like for like with the results of the All-England School championships, which he sent over, they were (UK results in brackets): 100 yards—9.9 seconds (10.6); 220 yards—22.3 seconds (23.4); and long jump—21 feet ½ inch (20 feet 2¾ inch).

  We had quite a good team. Just before the 1956 Olympics, although we only had five A-grade competitors, we still won the Sydney inter-club championships. Two of us used to do lots of events—sprints, middle-distance, pole vault, long jump, javelin, hurdles, shot-put—but the other three were top-notch in their disciplines. They included Geoff Goodacre, the former state decathlon champion and Olympic 400-metre runner, and Olympic pole vaulter Peter Denton. Inevitably, because I was doing ten events anyway, that led to me competing in the decathlon. For all that, I never had an athletics trainer in my life, except for our club’s sprinting trainer.

  We had a Hungarian bloke called Gabor Gero, who had been his country’s national sprint champion fourteen times. Gabor had competed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin—the famous one where Adolf Hitler was disgusted that a black American called Jesse Owens had made his so-called master race look inferior. When Gabor retired, he lobbed into Sydney and wanted to give something back to the sport. Back then there were no professional athletes—not officially, anyway—and very few professional coaches.

  It’s funny how achievements of the past are so easily forgotten. I was reading recently that some young bloke was the first sixteen-year-old to compete in the men’s sprint final at the Australian Championships. Good on him! But he wasn’t the first—I was. Back in 1954, I won the under-18s junior sprint final in Adelaide and qualified for the men’s final of the 220 yards on my times.

  The strange thing is that if you look this up on Google, I’m not listed in the field or the results, so I can’t blame the people who thought this young fella did it first. The official results only list five runners, but I was in lane 6 and I can prove it. I have an old black-and-white photo of the finish, with we
ll-known runners of the time crossing the line. I came last but I’m there, in the background, giving it my best shot. What’s more, I recently dug up a newspaper clipping that correctly lists all the starters.

  A lot has changed, and not just the record-keeping. Back then, being amateurs, we didn’t have the same adherence to diet and strict training regimes as the current crop. I remember one time Gabor said I was losing too much weight. Sprinters tend to be built for power, like boxers, whereas distance runners are built like whippets for endurance. Gabor said, ‘Look, John, when you go home, I’d like you to have a middy of beer and it will make you hungry and you’ll want to eat.’ He wasn’t getting any arguments from me!

  One night not long before the Olympics, a few of us, probably fifteen or so, were training down at Rushcutters Bay. I think most of us were Olympians or elite athletes to some degree, plus a couple of others probably, and we all had our own coaches there. For some reason or other I went into the change room with one of the distance runners. Before we’d started our training, there’d been a cricket match on—two police station teams playing each other. They’d had a keg of beer for the lunch and after the match, and they’d left it open. They were probably going to come and get it the next day, so we had a drink.

  Pretty soon the word got out and all the blokes came in, so we locked the doors and had a party. Not just blokes: Marlene Matthews was there too. Marlene was a top sprinter, and would go on to take bronze in Melbourne in the 100- and 200-metre sprints behind the winner Betty Cuthbert. Anyway, we all got on the grog and the coaches were banging on the door, going off their brains. Someone shouted, ‘Oh, piss off, we’re having a party,’ so all the coaches left. It was a good night.