An Aboriginal boy went swimming in a Kakadu billabong. A Darwin man launched a tinnie at a waterhole in pursuit of barramundi. Each one, immersed in the pleasures of this land, this water.
The boy, a 12-year-old, had some warning of what was to come. The crocodile first seized his 15-year-old friend, who struggled like a wild thing. The reptile then turned on the smaller boy. It was Australia Day.
Six months later, and 60 kilometres across the national park, the man got no warning. The crocodile - a massive, barrel-bodied beast - exploded out of the water and tore him from his boat. Clutched in the animal's jaws, the 62-year-old man disappeared into the waterhole's dark deep.
A large saltwater crocodile's jaws snap shut with a pressure of about 3500 pounds per square inch. When a large crocodile's jaws snap shut, the noise is an amplified, frightful, hollow pop. And when two people die in crocodile attacks in Australia's most famous national park within six months, the noise carries.
"Shoot to kill - rogue fishos vow to take guns on the water," the NT News shouted on June 10, three days after the man was taken.
"Start blowing them away!" someone called Hemi wrote on the North Australian Fish Finder forum. "People want to get out and enjoy the Territory! Bloody crocs keep breeding the way they are and you won't be able to go anywhere. Lock & Load!"
"It's just the thing that happens for the next three weeks after a fatality, everybody wants to shoot some," says Tom Nichols, senior wildlife ranger for the Territory's Parks and Wildlife Commission.
But when the clamour dies down, the issue remains: in the Northern Territory, the number of crocodile attacks is increasing, as is the headache of managing the species. In 1971, when hunters were told to put down their guns and crocodile protection started, there were about 3000 saltwater crocodiles left in the wild and the species was on the path to extinction. Now, experts say, there are 100,000 or more. Crocodiles have moved upstream into areas no one remembers seeing them, including into the heart of Kakadu National Park. And without people peppering them with bullets, their average size has got bigger. There are now an estimated 21,000 crocodiles in the Territory over 3.5 metres long.
For Crocodylus porosus, it is a conservation story with a happy ending. But for Homo sapiens there have been many unhappy endings. Twenty-one people have been killed by crocodiles in the Territory since 1971. About 50 others have survived attacks. And never mind attacks: it's all a huge inconvenience for folk who once treated the Territory as one big watery playground. "You never worried, you went swimming any-where - the Daly, Mary, Adelaide, all of these rivers that now no one would dip a toe in," says Keith Saalfeld, a senior scientist in the Territory's Department of Land Resource Management.
These days, says one park ranger, "I check the bath tub before I get in."
"It's an ongoing struggle, not just here but around the world, of how you get people to live with increasing populations of saltwater crocodiles, or big crocodiles," says Dr Grahame Webb, pre-eminent crocodile biologist and founder of Crocodylus Park, a tourist and research facility just outside Darwin. "I just had a meeting in Sarawak, where the crocs are eating everyone. In Sabah they're eating everyone. In the Solomon Islands they're eating everyone. It's a big issue. You recover a predator, the numbers increase, so they start eating people. Well, what are you going to do? You've got to have some plan."
And there are plans: Queensland and WA, which are grappling with similar issues in their northern reaches, albeit with smaller crocodile populations and fewer attacks, have plans. The Territory has a plan, and the Commonwealth-run Kakadu National Park has another. Both the NT and Kakadu plans put the conservation and humane treatment of the crocodile at the forefront. Both concern themselves with ways to reduce "human-crocodile conflict". But they diverge when it comes to using crocodiles for their bodies. Kakadu crocs get lucky: the harvesting of crocodiles and their eggs in the park is not permitted. Meanwhile, crocs in Territory waters have to earn their keep: permits are issued for a limited "harvesting" of crocodiles, and also for eggs to be collected and incubated at farms, where they grow up to become $40,000 handbags on the arms of princesses of one type or another.
Car accidents might have killed more people in the Territory in 2013 than crocodiles have in 40 years, but the croc story is a gift that keeps on giving. It's a tale of serious risk, high emotion and big money with a cast of ridgy-didge characters, from park rangers with Ruger rifles and anglers who hold a rod in one hand and a beer in the other, to traditional owners who barrack for proposals to let big-game hunters shoot the beasts and take their stuffed bodies home with them.
Grahame Webb, the director of the research, education and conservation company Wildlife Management International, supports the controversial idea of safari hunting. "What's essential is that landowners get paid for putting up with crocodiles," he says. "They're a terrible animal to live with; if you swim down the Adelaide River there's a 100 per cent chance you'll be torn to pieces and killed."
Mark Djandjomerr, May Nango and Dell Hunter sit beside Mudginberri billabong on Magela Creek in Kakadu. The rains are gone and elsewhere in the park the controlled burning has started. But here, the spear grass is still high and green and the rosella plants are heavy with red fruit. Hunter talks of how the fruit makes a dye that's used to tint pandanus leaves, which are woven into baskets and dilly bags. She also talks about swimming in the billabong. "We all played games on the sandbank and [went] swimming; did a lot of good things when growing up there."
The three elders grew up in the area in the 1960s, when Mudginberri was a pastoral station and the water held little fear. They'd wade through the billabong, feeling with their feet and hands for file snakes - good tucker - and drag fishing nets through the water for catfish and saratoga.
They knew there might be the occasional saltie as well as the smaller and more benign freshwater crocodiles, but had ancient knowledge to deal with them. "We used to do a warning sign for the crocodile; we used to hit the water ... stay alert, we're here," says Hunter. With sinuous hand movements, May Nango, a Mirrar woman, demonstrates how they would slap the water to talk to the "ginga".
They knew the salties were becoming a serious threat when, in the '80s, they started to grab their animals - dogs and pigs and, one day, a billy goat. Hunter remembers the blood spurting and the goat's bell ringing. "We used to ride on him, too."
A Google Earth satellite view of Mudginberri billabong, 10 kilometres north-east of Jabiru, shows a long, dark slit in the land. From the image, it's possible to work out that the billabong is about a kilometre long. But the image doesn't show the blue-green of the water, or the fringe of pandanus trees. It gives no sense at all of how tantalising Mudginberri would be through a Kakadu summer for youngsters from the nearby outstation. Nor does it reveal anything of the nightmare that unfolded here on the afternoon of Australia Day this year, when a bunch of local kids decided to go swimming.
"The first kid just fought like shit to get the croc off him," says an insider. The second child, 12-year-old Terrance Marimowa, did not have the same strength. Boats were on the water within 20 minutes looking for any trace of Marimowa; bite marks on the arm of his friend suggested the attacking crocodile was between 2.2 and 2.5 metres long. Shoot any in that size-class, searchers were told.
Through a night of almost biblical horror, boats scoured the flooded waterway, spotlighting for signs of the boy and for crocodiles' red "eye shine". At some point during the first night's search, senior Kakadu rangers Andrew Wellings and Garry Lindner caught up with each other. "I said, 'Right, what's going on, bro, where we at?'" says Wellings. "Garry said, 'Shit, I don't know, man. It's like a needle in a haystack.' And it was. There's water everywhere, there's grass, you can't get anywhere, it's dark, it's raining, it's just the worst scenario. Like, how are we going to find this kid?"
What Lindner describes as the "recovery phase" is exhausting and distressing: "You got to give 'em some closure and having that person back for a funeral goes a long way." About two days after Terrance Marimowa disappeared, searchers found "evidence" he had not survived. Ten crocodiles had been killed and slit open. A 2.35-metre female was found to have taken the boy.
Kakadu National Park, where about 20 per cent of the Northern Territory's post-protection fatal attacks have occurred, is a high-profile front line for the crocodile management issue. The park also offers a window onto a factor that complicates management: 70 per cent of the Territory's crocodile habitat is on indigenous land, but there are serious differences between clan groups about how to treat the animals. "It's not only about managing crocs, it's about managing local cultural politics as well," says Lindner.
For croc eaters like the Mirrar people, the tail meat is prized; they wrap it in paperbark and roast it under a fire's coals. But for those who hold the crocodile as a totem and believe it is deeply connected to the spirit of the ancestors - some of Kakadu's indigenous population of 500, plus the bulk of traditional owners throughout north-east Arnhem Land - harming them in any way is unconscionable.
Marimowa's mother, Stephanie Djandjul, is a senior Mirrar woman, and two days after last January's tragedy Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation CEO Justin O'Brien, speaking for the Mirrar people, said crocodile numbers needed to be reduced. But a local observer says that even as the search for the boy continued the CEO was "sorted out big time" at a community meeting for his comments.
The boy's father, Jimmy Marimowa, told the meeting: "I don't want a crocodile's head, I want my son back." Jonathan Nadji, a senior Bunidj traditional owner and Jimmy's uncle, was at the meeting. "Jimmy got to the stage where he was basically fed up with the crocs being shot'," says Nadji, who holds the crocodile as a totem. "He said, 'No more. No more shooting crocodiles.' Justin and other people making all these allegations and noises and stuff about crocodiles really should live out the bush and grow up with the crocodile, and learn about crocodile culture and story from communities instead of blaming the crocodile."
Justin O'Brien chaired the meeting and says that, at times, it was heated. "Oh look, emotions were high, things had just occurred." He doesn't resile from his belief that new options need to be considered for crocodile management.
Sitting in his Jabiru office, classical music playing in the background, he argues that traditional owners have been marginalised in the active management of the park and their voice should be heard in the crocodile debate. "Their view is there are too many crocodiles." He wants egg harvesting to be considered. "And there could be commercial opportunities as part of a safari-style selective reduction. Going out there with guns blazing in a cull is not what we're talking about."
Beside Mudginberri billabong, Mark Djandjomerr ponders what should be done about crocodiles. "It's getting really crowded; we got a lot of female ginga making a lot of egg. I think we should bring that egg down." He won't be drawn on whether he thinks crocodile numbers should be reduced in any other way.
The billabong is closed now for "sorry business". "When it rain and new water comes down, then that's the time," says Dell Hunter. People will be able to hunt and fish in the billabong again. But it's unlikely anyone will swim here in future. "Ginga there, they everywhere," says Djandjomerr, adding that the children were warned not to swim in the water: "We did our best." He has a response now for those who tell him they want to swim. "I say, 'There's a tap, swim there.' "
"We used to swim there." In the Northern Territory, that's what everyone says. Some people use it to justify their support for culls. But when it comes to crocodile numbers, living memory may be an unreliable guide. Charlie Manolis, chief scientist at Wildlife Management International, believes numbers are now equivalent to what they were in the early 19th century, at first contact between Aborigines and Europeans. Early dispatches used expressions like "crocodile-infested" and "teeming" to describe the animals' presence in the colony's waters.
"This is a real problem," says Manolis. "The reality is, yes, they used to swim there, but their parents didn't, or their grandparents, or their great-grandparents."
If they did, he says, they would almost certainly have been eaten. "There's been a generational break in the awareness of crocodiles and the danger they pose."
Education is considered a key tool in minimising the risk of crocodile attacks - the Territory Government's Be Crocwise program is a vigorous force - but the message doesn't always get through.
On the East Alligator River, Garry Lindner, 49, smells "gators". After nearly 30 years patrolling Kakadu's waterways, the senior ranger quickly picks up the pungent, musky smell that tells him a crocodile is close. As he steers his boat, the Betty Boo III, towards Cahills Crossing, Lindner says that in the dry season there can be up to 120 crocodiles between two and 4.5 metres in a two-kilometre stretch of the river here.
Lindner stops Betty Boo III just shy of the crossing and watches anxiously as a bunch of indigenous kids splash through water a foot or more deep on a concrete causeway that, at low tide, links the eastern edge of Kakadu with the Arnhem Land community of Oenpelli. "Gingas around here," he'll often tell local kids. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," they'll reply.
It's the deep-water approach on the upstream side of the causeway that worries him. "You don't see nothing until he's got a hold of you - if a crocodile was serious about grabbing you, everything's to his advantage, it'd be all over." But kids aren't the only ones taking risks. "Bloody idiots aren't anglers - they're crocodile bait" is how the NT News headlined a photograph of people fishing at Cahills Crossing recently.
Some fishermen, Lindner agrees, are "absolutely crazy - they're just thinking about the end of their rod". They'll get a barra lure stuck and wade out to get it. "Like a $10 lure - crazy."
Lindner was a young Kakadu ranger when Kerry McLoughlin was decapitated by a 5.1-metre crocodile at the crossing in March 1987. The 40-year-old Jabiru storeman, out fishing with his son, stumbled and fell off the causeway as the tide rose. He threw a beer can at the animal but it seized him as he scrambled to escape up the riverbank. "He did everything possible to get eaten," says Lindner.
At Cahills Crossing, Bob Woodland is fishing for barramundi. He's cranky. Not only is the retired BHP worker pulling in one undersized fish after another, he's also anxious about the risk he's taking getting his feet even a little bit wet. "It takes away from the pleasure of fishing," says Woodland, of Bunbury, WA.
His wife Wendy Miles, sitting back from the water in a folding chair, hassles him to "get back, get back". "They get carried away by their fishing," she sighs. Woodland says he's watching for crocs all the time. Even in his dreams. "I was fighting crocodiles all night - one had hold of me leg."
Woodland might have chosen a different holiday activity if he'd known what would happen in Kakadu a few days after his fishing outing. On the afternoon of June 7, a Saturday, Darwin builder Bill Scott, 62, was fishing at a remote spot on Kakadu's South Alligator River, known locally as Bill Dean Waterhole. He was at the back of his moored boat - by all accounts a small tinnie - when a crocodile snatched him.
"It was fast, over in seconds, and suddenly he was gone," Scott's family said in a statement released after the attack. The fisherman's wife and daughter-in-law drove for 90 minutes to get help. At 11am the following morning his body was recovered. Two crocodiles had been shot - one 4.74 metres long and the other 4.57 metres. Police said that the larger animal was responsible for the attack.
The family's statement revealed a little about the victim: he was a father of two and a grandfather of four; he loved a good story and a laugh and a beer with his mates; he was a "mad keen fisherman" who liked nothing better than to pack up his 4WD, load the fishing rods and head bush. Scott also created an unfortunate precedent - he was the first person in Australian history to be taken by a crocodile from a boat.
With increasing frequency, people tell stories of crocs getting cheekier, of bumping vessels, of having a go at fish on the ends of lines, of sitting under boats and setting off alarms on sounders, even of crocodiles getting their teeth into anglers and trying to pull them from boats. Nevertheless, until Scott's death, few Territorians had regarded fishing from a tinnie as a high-risk activity. "A game changer," wrote one angler on a fishing forum after the attack. Says Garry Lindner, "I mean, the days of the 'car-top' [tinnie], that's 1970s stuff. Those days are well and truly behind us".
We want to frighten the shit out of 'em," says Garry Lindner. He's out on the water again in Betty Boo III, this time on Djabiluka billabong, some 13 kilometres north of Mudginberri. It's pitch black and the spotlight that Lindner's off-sider, Joseph May, sweeps across the water looking for croc eyeshine catches the white flashes of hundreds of roosting egrets and corellas.
In Kakadu, rangers deploy "behaviour modification" techniques in heavily visited areas, especially for "problem crocs" - those that might have been showing overt interest in people or boats. Lindner calls it "humbugging" crocs. "You want to give 'em a negative experience with people."
That's why this man who has huge affection for these reptiles is nudging Betty Boo III towards two red eyes so Joseph can launch a three-pronged harpoon at a crocodile's head. The harpoon connects with its target and the rangers scramble to pull the thrashing animal towards the boat. A snout rope is dropped over the jaw and pulled tight and, as it's hauled into the boat, Lindner winds plastic cable ties and several layers of electrical tape around its deadly mouth. There is a contingency plan on board - a .308 calibre Ruger.
At this point in the process, the beast can suffer a range of indignities: its "scutes" - the bumps along its back - might be cut as part of a numbering system and rangers might stick fingers in uncomfortable places to determine its sex. It can be released immediately in the same place or kept for a day or two for school talks. Occasionally a croc might be completely relocated.
At 3.3 metres, the female that's now trussed on the bottom of the boat could do quite some damage to human flesh. But she has nothing on Lindner's "boss" or "icon" crocs, the rare and mighty males who can be over five metres long and 80-plus years old.
In the 2007 croc-attack movie Rogue, a character describes the 7-metre monster of the title as "a f...ing steam train with teeth". The same could be said of crocs like the 5.1-metre Sweetheart, caught by Lindner's ranger father Dave in 1979 after a series of attacks on boats and now on gob-smacking display at Darwin's Museum and Art Gallery. Or the 5.5-metre, 800-kilogram Wendell, who lives at Darwin's Crocosaurus Cove and entertains tourists who are lowered into his aquarium to swim in a plexiglass "cage of death".
Lindner points out how few crocodile hatchlings survive and all the decades the big crocs have seen. "That's why those boss crocs are significant animals - they've well and truly run the gauntlet of a crocodile life to get to that size. They should be treasured." Many indigenous communities are also fiercely protective of a local icon croc, but not everyone understands. Says Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation's Justin O'Brien: "There's this 'I love crocs' thing - it's really odd. They love 'em. They eat, breathe, drink, shit crocodiles."
As Lindner sees it, his job is to protect Kakadu's crocodiles. And sometimes that means getting people offside: campers who might be told to pitch their tents further from waterholes than they might like; visitors who want to swim in places like the Twin Falls gorge and plunge pool, which were closed a decade ago because of crocodiles; bureaucrats who want to lure tourists to the park with snaps of happy swimmers.
But the park's management program tries to strike a balance. "We haven't closed down much," says Andrew Wellings, who points out "managed zones" such as the famous Jim Jim Falls, which are kept clear of crocodiles with surveying and trapping efforts.
The Territory's plan is more intensive, especially in Darwin Harbour, ranger Tommy Nichols' patch. It's a venue for open-water swims, surf-lifesaving patrols and a beer-can regatta (although most Darwin parents refuse to let their kids near the water). It's also where Nichols lost two fingers when a crocodile he was hauling aboard in 2002 got stroppy: "You get one or two a year who have a real mongrel look in their eye."
He spends many hours each week checking and clearing 26 traps - and baiting them with foul chunks of hairy, bloodied, feral-pig bits. Since the mid-'80s, the aim has been to keep the harbour as free of crocodiles as possible, but despite the fact that Nichols' team removed 318 crocodiles in 2012 and 226 in 2013, he's one of many who say that wider culls won't work. "That's where the people are stupid ... it will reduce the numbers of crocodiles but won't stop people getting taken, because they'll go swimming everywhere and could get a false sense of security."
Scientist Charlie Manolis says the only way to completely remove the risk of crocodile attacks is to remove every crocodile in Australia. His colleague Grahame Webb adds that overseas evidence suggests that culling crocodiles might even result in an increase in numbers. "When you're harvesting you're breaking up the social structure of these big males and so it allows the population to expand," he says.
Both the Kakadu and Territory crocodile management plans are currently undergoing routine reviews, but neither is likely to recommend culling or give any satisfaction to people who wanted to blow the animals out of the water after this year's fatalities. Nor will the review of the Kakadu crocodile strategy revisit the issue of crocodile harvesting or egg harvesting, according to a Parks Australia spokesperson. Some think both plans might include new advice about minimum size limits for boats. "We are considering the recent crocodile incidents through the formal review of our crocodile management strategy," says federal Director of National Parks Sally Barnes.
You can't escape crocodiles in the Territory - even in the heart of Darwin. At NT Souvenirs in the Smith Street mall, amid the boomerangs and leather hats, are croc mugs, croc-themed stubby holders ("no soft crocs in Darwin") and crocodile-claw back scratchers. Down the mall at Di Croco things are a little more chic. Just like French luxury goods maker Hermès, which gives its bags names (a "Birkin" for French chanteuse Jane Birkin, the "Kelly" for Princess Grace), the bags at Di Croco have monikers. The "Olivia" is $5700.
The cornerstone of the NT's crocodile conservation and management policy has long been the concept that, unless crocodiles have value, no one's going to put up with them. "Farming gave them that value," says Keith Saalfeld in his Darwin office. He's wearing a crocodile-skin belt.
The silky belly of an Australian beast is the highest- value skin on the international luxury leather market. Hermès likes it so much that last year it went shopping for Australian crocodile farms, buying Lagoon and Janamba in the Territory and another in Cairns. It's believed the company now owns up to 80 per cent of Australia's crocodile farming industry, estimated to be worth $30 million annually.
But only a fraction of that money flows back into local communities and none at all to Kakadu's traditional owners. Up to 500 animals are allowed to be harvested in the Territory each year, but each returns only a few hundred dollars to a landowner; a wild crocodile's belly is considered inferior to the farmed version and will never see a Paris catwalk.
Egg harvesting is only a little more lucrative. Jida Gulpilil, the director of the Gulpulul Marayuwu Aboriginal Corporation and son of actor David Gulpilil, reckons it earns his Arnhem Land community maybe $12,000 a year - split between about 150 people. "It's not much at all." It's why Gulpilil backs proposals for commercial crocodile "safari" or "trophy" hunting. "Everyone knows that there's not a great deal of economic opportunities out there, so we need to create our own," says Gulpilil, who this year plans to launch hunting trips under the name Gulpilil's Australia. "We're not calling it safari hunts, cos we're not African and this is not Africa."
Instead he describes it as "a commercial, sustainable hunting management system" that will lead paying visitors through his family's lush country - the Charlie's Country of his father's most recent film - to hunt for feral pigs and buffalo. "Who wouldn't want to come to Gulpilil's country and see where he lives and meet his family and go hunting with a spear," says Gulpilil the younger. "All that's missing now is the opportunity to ... bring in those same international hunters for crocodiles; we want $60,000 for them to pull the trigger."
In March, Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt knocked back the NT government's plan for limited, intensively managed safari hunting, the third time such a proposal had been rejected in a decade. "A total load of croc," declared Willem Van Holthe, the Minister for Land Resource Management, and Bess Price, the Minister for Parks and Wildlife, in a joint press release. "Canberra needs to take its foot off the Territory's throat."
Maybe it will one day. Safari hunting is not going to go away, says Keith Saalfeld. "The idea is that substantial payment goes to the landholders and provides a benefit to them. It's about self-determination."
Saalfeld and his mate, Kakadu ranger Garry Lindner, agree to disagree on the safari-hunting question. A big-game hunter wants to put a bullet in the biggest croc possible, says Lindner. A boss croc. "The thing is, once you have safari hunting and you take out all these big crocs, the world's a sadder place ... once you get rid of that big croc, he's gone. That was a unique individual, you know."
MY SWIM WITH CHOPPER
I have an absurd desire to stroke the expanse of Chopper's belly. It's white and prettily patterned and I know that it will be intoxicatingly soft.
I don't stroke Chopper's belly. Even if I could stretch my arm outside the plexiglass cage in which I'm held, it would be foolish. Chopper is 5.5 metres long and 790 kilos. I'm 1.7 metres long and many, many hundreds of kilograms lighter.
Chopper, named after the notorious earless criminal, may have sacrificed two legs in some wild territorial struggle and, at 80-odd years, may be a little bit gummy. But if, somehow, I were to be spilled from my "cage of death" into Chopper's enclosure at Darwin's Crocosaurus Cove, I'd quickly become acquainted with his massive head, which right now is toying with a chunk of meat that his handler is dangling over him.
I try not to think about his appetite. I concentrate instead on the vast body of a beast of prehistory, a beast that has survived for generations in a world intent on eliminating it.
- Stephanie Wood
