PORMPURAAW
All PhDs face hurdles. Mine was a decision, halfway through my first year, to withdraw all support for the project I was working on in Torres Strait. After 12 glorious months I had to shift my experimental design from flapping turtles to snapping crocodiles. They were being farmed at the Aboriginal community of Pormpuraaw on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula.
One of my first tasks on arriving was to collect my experimental animals. That meant stealing eggs from inside the newly constructed crocodile breeding pond, an area of about 20 hectares enclosing about 40 breeding female crocodiles and two 4.5 metre males, Hymn and Psalm. Once we had found a nest in the long grass fringing the pond, my role was to fend off the defending female with a broom while the farm managers transferred eggs to an eski. So long as the female did not actually steal your broom it wasn’t a problem. If she did, retreat was rapid.
My project was on the diet and husbandry of crocodiles at the farm, so every morning I had to extract hatchlings from their pens for measuring. Inevitably, some would be too quick for me and my hands were soon pockmarked with punctures - I claim to have survived more crocodile bites than most people alive. It meant that I soon came to know my animals’ personalities. I remember one clutch in particular, because several hatchlings bit me as they emerged from their eggs, their slits of pupils wide and malevolent. Others were always placid, barely bothering to move as they sat on the scales. Curiously, the snappier crocodiles were more likely never to feed; a wasting syndrome that still afflicts the crocodile farming industry, killing about 10% of hatchlings.
My attempt at solving the problem, apart from finding it afflicted some clutches more than others, was to look at the wild diet of young crocodiles and see if anything might be missing from the captive food. A friend and I borrowed a ten foot flat-bottomed punt and started scouring the tidal stretches of rivers for red crocodile eyes reflected in the spotlight. Being only ten years since hunting of crocodiles ceased in the area, they were scarce or wary, slipping beneath the water within moments of detection. So we were excited when one eye remained staring at us as we bore down on it, until it turned, and we realised the second eye was rather too far from the first for us to sample.It may not have been twice the length of our boat, but we were glad the motor kept going. After that we stopped swimming in the river, as we had been. We did manage to catch some animals, but that part of the research was more adventure than science.
My main associates were a small coterie of people associated with the crocodile farm. They were a wild bunch. The crocodiles were largely fed the meat of feral pigs. So each week the manager, Robbie Bredl, an extraordinary bushman and always barefoot, would head off with a group of farm workers into the surrounding wetlands, returning laden with so many dead pigs that you would think there would be none left. But, such were the hunting skills of Robbie and his crew, that the supply never faltered. His successors had to buy in cattle from nearby stations. He was both so keen on fishing, and so generous, that I wearied of mudcrab and barramundi. I myself caught just one barramundi - it had overrun a school of shoreline mullet and ended up at my feet on the beach.
The community itself was a bizarre place. An Anglican missionary had brought people together from two groups whose long-standing enmity meant the town was divided in two. People were provided with corrugated iron shacks sitting on concrete blocks which were so hot that most people sat outside. The white colonial administrators lived in raised Darwin style government houses in the middle. The general manager was a force to be reckoned with. Anyone, black or white, who challenged the established order could be ordered to leave. Many people had relatives who had been banished to Palm Island near Townsville.
Through this sort of experience, the Aboriginal residents were cautious about relating to yet another itinerant white man, but gradually I came to know people. Young men I mixed with assured me that if I put the stamen of a Hibiscus tiliaceous flower under my tongue, the next girl I saw would be mine (it didn’t work). A couple of old men took me out to collect materials for spears and woomera. I was a fit young man who could cut the tough lancewood for their spear shafts, or dig up ironwood roots so they could melt the bark until it formed a wax for binding the black-necked stork sinew used to tie the wallaby bone tips to the wood.
Much of the surrounding countryside I explored on my own. It was only on later visits that I realised I should have asked first; that I was intruding on a magic landscape that, to Pormpuraaw residents, was governed by strict codes of access and behaviour. As it was, as soon as my crocodiles were weighed and fed, I would set out on foot or with a swag strapped to an old motorbike, looking for birds, collecting plants and exploring an extraordinary landscape few biologists had visited. The coastal dunes were clothed in a low rainforest that dripped with cooktown orchids and the nearby flooded grasslands were swathed in ephemeral flowering annuals of which one I collected, a tiny mauve utricularia, was new to science.
When I left, I took a sample of crocodiles with me for experimental work in Townsville. They travelled in a cardboard box on the seat beside me in a borrowed Landrover, for what was then a trip of several days overland. As it was hot and the car lacked air conditioning, I wanted to make sure the crocodiles stayed damp. The cardboard seemed strong enough to withstand a little water splashed over its contents. It wasn’t. It was amazing the places the crocodiles had found to hide inside that vehicle when eventually I reached the university and was able to search it thoroughly.
Stephen Garnett is a conservation biologist working at CDU. Image credit (Artwork): D’Arcy Ellis
