The Last Snake Man Read online

  Tumbarumba played the grand final against Yenda the next weekend. One of the radio stations—ABC or 2UE, I can’t remember which—covered the game and they played it to me in the hospital. It was a two-all draw after extra time, so they played again the next week and Tumbarumba won 8–6.

  I was in hospital for a couple of months. There were about twelve people with broken necks in my ward at Prince Alfred and I was the only one who could walk. The rest of them were paralysed to different degrees. One of the poor buggers had been in a car accident and he could only use one hand. They used to let him shave himself with an electric razor until they caught him chewing the cable in an effort to electrocute himself.

  I was lucky. For me, the worst thing was this itch at the back of my head that was starting to drive me off my brain. A few of the other patients were weaving baskets so I got a bit of cane off somebody and I put it through one ear hole in the plaster and I worked for maybe an hour or more to get the cane to come out the other hole. Eventually I got it out and I could scratch the back of my head. Bliss! Then I was lying there with my eyes shut and the next thing I heard was swish as the curtains opened and a nurse said, ‘What’s this doing here?’ and pulled the cane out. I could have wept. It had taken me ages to get it in.

  When they let me out of hospital, I went back to Sydney at first but I was so hot inside the cast that my family took me back to Tumbarumba. I had a good old mate there I used to go into the bush with. His name was Charlie Kellam and his son Barry was in my football team. He had a really cool room in his house and I used to lie there most of the time, escaping the heat.

  I’d lie there all day if I could. I didn’t feel like ever getting up. I just wanted to sleep, sleep, sleep. One day Charlie came in and said: ‘Come on, Jack’—he used to call me Jack—‘Get up. Breakfast’.

  He shook me to get up then he gave out a scream. I had my pyjamas on and a blanket or a sheet over me and he’d forgotten about the plaster cast and thought I was stiff and dead. Scared the hell out of poor old Charlie.

  I suppose I was lucky. After I got the plaster off, I was working the jackhammer on a building site, just wearing a neck brace. It must have looked strange but it didn’t seem to bother me. But I wasn’t 100 per cent. For months after that I’d be sitting there with a beer or a glass of water in my hand and the next thing I heard, smash, and it would be on the ground. I never even knew it was out of my hand. This kept happening—I’d just lose the feeling in my fingers.

  Around that time, South Sydney wanted me to play for them and so they sent me to see their doctor. He X-rayed me and asked me how I was going, if I’d any other symptoms, that kind of thing. Then he said: ‘I think you’d be right to play again.’ But my other doctors told me not to even think about it.

  I would never have played again except I did have one game in the bush, mainly because I owed Charlie a favour. His son, Barry, was captain–coach of the team in a little town called Boggabri and they were playing Narrabri. I was working on the powerlines up through that country and one day a Volkswagen came down the road.

  ‘Jeez, I know that car,’ I thought. Sure, enough it was my old mate Charlie.

  ‘Come and have a game with us,’ he said. ‘Play for us. They’ll pay you good money.’

  I was working hard and I felt all right so I said okay, even though it would mean taking a day off work. It was a long drive—almost 200 kilometres on minor roads—from where I was at Coolatai to go down to Narrabri. I went well, playing half a game in reserve grade and then another half in the firsts where I scored a try and we won.

  Then we went back with the team to Boggabri, about 50 kilometres further on, and all got on the grog. It was ten o’clock at night and it was stinking hot and I had two mates from work with me. The team manager came up and said, ‘Oh, John, we were pretty pleased with you. Next week we’ll start paying you.’ Next week? I thought I was getting paid, at least for the day I took off work!

  When we headed back to Coolatai I decided to take the long way round on the bitumen road through Moree but got totally lost thanks to my drunk mates giving me seriously bad directions. At one point, and this was late at night, we stopped at a milk bar in Wee Waa and the owner told us we were 30 kilometres in the wrong direction and needed to go back to Narrabri. So we decided to take a shortcut and ended up on a dirt road going nowhere until we saw a car lights coming the other way. We had to stop before we got to him as the dust we were kicking up was so thick. It turned out he was lost too—but at least he could tell us where the Moree road was.

  I was so tired and sore after that day that I never played football again. Months and months later, when the season was all over, Barry and I caught up with each other and he asked why I didn’t play for them again.

  ‘Me and my mates took the day off work, drove 500 kilometres and they never paid me,’ I said.

  ‘Are you fair dinkum?’ he said. ‘Why the friggin hell didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘What was the good of starting an argument, Barry?’ I said.

  You can’t spend your life brooding about missed opportunities. When I got my neck broken I was seriously thinking about taking up that offer to play for a club in Sydney or even pack my bags and go and play in England where the money on offer would have made up for the cold weather. On the other hand, they only have two breeds of snake in Britain.

  As for the bloke who broke my neck, like they say, what goes around comes around. I never met him again but twenty years later a Koori mate went into his butcher shop in a Sydney suburb. The bloke asked my mate where he was from and when he said La Perouse, he asked him if he knew John Cann.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ says my mate. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I played football against him,’ says the butcher and gives my mate his business card. ‘Tell John to drop in and see me some time.’

  I never went near him. I hated his guts for what he did—and what he nearly did to me. I knew damn well it was deliberate. The only upside was that he still had splints on his arm (from where I broke it trying to fend him off) long after I’d recovered, and he never played football again.

  CHAPTER 10

  WORK

  Just in case you think my life was all fun and games, while all that was going on I was working full time almost from the day I left school at sixteen. Nowadays you would look for a job on the internet, but back then it was the bush telegraph or you went from door to door, building site to building site.

  When I left school I was taken on as an apprentice fitter and turner at H.C. Sligh, a branch of the Wills tobacco factory in Kensington. As ever, athletics was a factor, as the Australian pole vault champion Peter Denton, who had a senior position in the firm, got me in there…but I hated it. I was working indoors on the machines and every day I said to myself ‘F…! What am I doing here?’ I needed to be outside—not stuck in a noisy, dirty factory.

  Even so, I gave it my best shot, and when I went to tech college I was getting good marks in all my exams. After my three-month test, the boss wanted me to sign up permanently. I said I wasn’t sure. I needed to take some time to think about it. They said they’d give me another three months and after that they called me into the office. They had the papers all there, ready for me to sign, but I said I’d decided not to do it. The boss was furious. He ripped the papers up and threw them at me.

  ‘Get the hell out of my office!’ he yelled. ‘You’re done here.’

  And that was the end of my career as a fitter and turner. I’d been getting five pounds, one and sixpence a week, plus a packet of cigarettes.

  The following week my mates and I all went looking for jobs, the six of us together. One bloke interviewed us all, standing there together in his office, and then he sent us away. Next thing, he called me back and offered me a job—but only me. I said, ‘No, thanks.’ It was all six of us or nothing. Can you imagine the sheer gall of it? Believe it or not, we walked down the road towards the Kellogg’s factory and there was a company there called Patrick
s—they hired the lot of us on the spot.

  It turned out to be a short job, and that’s when I went to work at the Caltex site at Kurnell, along with all my mates, digging foundations and laying concrete slabs for the new refinery. I’ve got a photo of me in the trenches, on the shovels with my mates, digging footings. Eric Worrell, who would later open the reptile park at Gosford, was doing an article about my athletics, found out where I was working, and came down and took the photograph.

  I liked being outdoors and enjoyed the physical work—and the money was much better too, especially for a young fella living with his parents. I saved up 250 pounds and was planning to buy a motorbike. I had my eye on a Triumph Tiger 110, the kind the police used. That plan lasted just about long enough for me to tell my dad about it.

  ‘You’re not buying a motorbike,’ Pop said. ‘There’s a plot of land for sale next to us and you’re buying that.’

  So that was me, a landowner before I was out of my teens. I built the house I’m sitting in now on that land—and I have to concede it was a shrewd investment. I’m lucky I didn’t get the bike—I would probably have killed myself on it.

  I worked on construction at Caltex while there was work, and then in the laundry at Prince Henry Hospital in the lead-up to the Olympics. Years later, ironically, I would also get occasional work at Caltex as a rigger. And then, many, many years later, after I was retired, a friend, Andrew Melrose, and I were hired by Caltex to relocate the red-bellied black snakes, which were in big numbers at Kurnell. We caught up to eight a day and moved them to a safe spot not far away.

  This hunt was carried out once a week over a number of years, but it finished in 2016 when the new boss decided to cut costs—and dudded me out of two days’ pay. But I imagine that was probably the longest anyone ever worked at Caltex in the world—on and off it added up to 62 years. Relocating the snakes could not have offered more of a contrast with the ecological vandalism that occurred when I worked there in my teens.

  When the construction site was being levelled it was done by dredging Botany Bay to make it deeper for the tankers, and pumping millions of cubic metres of sand to fill the swamps and small lagoons. This was an environmental disaster; there were hundreds if not thousands of freshwater turtles buried alive, but nothing was ever said (although years later I think there was an article in Australian Geographic magazine).

  Before the Olympic Games I was on a jackhammer in Sydney city, drilling holes in solid rock for the footings of big new buildings. The holes were about 4 metres deep and 1.5 metres wide by 1.8 metres long. When I filled a bucket with rock, a mate would pull the bucket up on a rope and often a rock would fall out of the bucket and nearly hit me on the head. There were no hard hats in those days, so I used to put the shovel over my head to protect myself. And all the time I was still training for athletics. To answer the obvious question: no, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up…I still don’t.

  When I was about sixteen I was approached by Brucie Reynolds’ dad—who was a mad-keen gambler.

  ‘Are you interested in turning professional?’ he said.

  ‘Not really, why?’ I replied

  ‘We can guarantee you some good money,’ he said. ‘We want you to run in the Stawell Gift. We’ll get you a big start and no one will catch you.’

  I wasn’t interested and knocked it back, but it figured in a very strange coincidence. A couple of years later I was working in the city, down the end of George Street, jackhammering and loading all the rubble onto the back of the trucks. It was hard but I was fit. One day I was shovelling away there and this bloke sang out to me, ‘Hey, John. John Cann!’

  He was at the end of a ramp up to the roadway and I looked up at him, but the light was behind him and my eyes weren’t that great at the best of times, so I walked up towards him, trying to work out who he was.

  ‘John?’ he said. Then, as I got closer, ‘Oh, sorry mate. You’re not John Cann.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

  ‘Nah, you’re too young,’ he replied.

  We chatted for a bit and it turned out he thought I was a John Cann from Broken Hill who—now get this—had won the Stawell Gift! I couldn’t get over there being another John Cann out there who was a runner. Later I found a newspaper cutting with a photo of the J.E. Cann who won the Gift in 1949, eight or nine years earlier. It was a bad picture and I suppose he did look a bit like me, but what a coincidence!

  In Tumbarumba I had the job on powerline construction, through a fella called Alan Mundy. He had me and three Italian blokes putting powerlines through the district and down to the edge of the Snowy Mountains. I learned all the tricks of the trade down there and worked sometimes seven days a week, three weeks on and six days off.

  Working in the bush allowed me to keep catching snakes to take home to Pop, and diving for freshwater turtles—a growing interest of mine—in my spare time. I stayed on the powerline construction for years, on and off.

  We were basically digging monstrous big logs, about 20 metres long, into 2–3-metre deep holes, then holding them up with cables attached to trucks until the stays were in place. Then we would ‘terminate’ them—attach the power cables to the insulators on the cross-pieces. One time when I was foreman, three of us were up the pole terminating and there were three big army trucks, one on each cable. Everything looked right so I told the truck drivers to take the weight off because the stays were in place and the pole would hold.

  It was the right tension but the weld on the stay broke and the only reason I and the other two blokes are here today is that one of the trucks had stalled and it stopped the pole from snapping or being pulled out of the ground by the tension on the power cables. I said to my mates, ‘Don’t move an inch.’ They ignored me. They were down that pole like bullets and I followed them. There was a domino effect back down the lines and they were damaged for miles. It cost thousands of dollars to repair, but the contractor was compensated because it was a faulty weld on the stay.

  I loved the work, though. I used to work hard and long, sometimes fourteen or fifteen hours a day. I never got that much money, but I was able to save enough to build my house because there was nothing to spend it on out in the bush. We got onto some big lines up in southern Queensland, where I was also working as foreman. I started to study then because the inspectors found out I was powering the lines up without being qualified. I’d been considering doing my linesman’s ticket certificate anyway, but this spurred me on to do it by correspondence.

  Out in the bush, often miles away from any towns, the boss used to rent properties for us, like shearing quarters or abandoned homesteads, so we always had good accommodation. Two beds and a little window. Bring your own mosquito net.

  On some of the jobs we took turns at cooking, but on bigger jobs we got a cook. One time we had a terrible cook when her husband got a job with us. The place had big fuel stoves, so she used to fry the eggs at night-time so she didn’t have to fire up the stove in the morning, when she just heated them up on the little fuel stove off the side. We weren’t happy with her but the boss was away and how could we sack them both?

  One day I caught a king brown snake more than 7 feet long and I put him in a big chaff bag. Normally with snakes we would use sugar bags or some other big smooth bag, but not chaff bags as they can push their way out—as we discovered. I put it in the grain shed at the end of the row of all the little rooms we had, and made a box up to put the big king brown in to take home to Pop. Then one day my mate Barry came out with the empty bag and said, ‘He’s gone.’ He must have escaped under the floorboards. I made up a sign with a drawing of a snake’s head with big fangs and dripping venom and the words ‘Missing brown snake. Bites likes a dog. Extremely deadly!’ and stuck it on the wall.

  ‘Are you serious?’ said the cook’s husband. ‘That snake’s got away?’

  When I answered yes, he and his wife packed up and went straight back to Goondiwindi where they came from. That saved us sacking the cook�
��and he was pretty useless too. Some time after that I brought in a mate of mine from Sydney, Vic Dalton, as our cook. He was a good mechanic too and he came up with his wife. He did the cooking and a bit of everything.

  Later on, between jobs, Vic and I started our own business installing car-wash equipment in petrol stations from Queensland down to Tasmania. All the machinery was imported and delivered to the petrol stations. They’d have the building up and ready and we’d just unpack the boxes and install it and it was good to go.

  But it was while I was working on the powerlines from Armidale over the mountains to the Macleay River that two life-changing events occurred. The first was that I was diving for turtles in my spare time when I found what I considered to be my first new species.

  Meanwhile I was going out with Helen when I came back to Sydney. I’d be away three or four months at a time and then come home for a spell and then I’d be off again. Up in Armidale, I got a letter from Helen.

  ‘I’ve booked our wedding on 29 February 1964,’ it said. I burst out laughing.

  ‘There’s only 28 days in February,’ I said to my mate.

  ‘Next year has 29,’ he said. ‘It’s a leap year.’

  CHAPTER 11

  SNAKING

  You’ve probably realised by now that all the time I was growing up, playing sport and working, I was fascinated by snakes. I hated it when Pop used to go snaking with my brother George but later he’d take me on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. There were a lot of snakes around back then. Pop got thirteen tiger snakes one day at Eastlakes swamps and I have a photograph of him, taken for a newspaper story, taking one from high up in a tree. The most he ever got on his own in one go was 26, around the Chinese market gardens at Botany. At least once a week in the summer months we’d be called to get a tiger snake off Yarra Road or La Perouse School and once in the foyer of the Yarra Bay Sailing Club. They used to come up from the swamp at the bottom of that tyre-rolling hill. But no one was ever bitten in our area, although one bloke died from snakebite near the airport in 1956.