Crocodiles

Hello dear friends 

Here’s a story from back in the crocodile days, back when I was just a young fella. 

I just want to make a quick note. These are just stories about stuff I did when I was young. Views, opinions, morals and beliefs, and stuff I did twenty years ago doesn’t necessarily reflect who I am or how I feel today. But that doesn’t change history or the facts. I just hope you enjoy the stories for what they are. Stories. 

Crocodile roll, by John Williamson 

One of the greatest storytellers and writers of verse of our time. I didn’t get permission to use the song, sorry Johnno, I hope it’s okay and you enjoy the yarn should you ever get to hear it. 

Mick ☮️

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:02

Once upon a time, way up north, right on the dying edge of Australia's last frontier, two young men were hung over. It was not yet nine AM, but the December sun beat down fiercely on the sodden ground. The humidity was so thick in the air that you had to chew it before you could get it down into your lungs. It was a hot, sticky top end morning, and the mercury was only headed one way. Needless to say, the two young men in question were doing it tough. They'd clearly been too well behaved the night before because the bar staff at the beachfront hotel had seen fit to allow them to stay and keep drinking until closing time. Then, feeling like they were on a bit of a winning streak, headed home to celebrate the success of a good solid midweek piss up, cold green cans all round, and toasted one another's good fortunes into the wee hours. I relay the tale with certainty regarding the particulars, as I was one of the two young men. The other, who may or may not corroborate my version of events, we'll just call him Trev. We were both sweating and stinking and looked aside. The misses Mac's chili beef and cheese pie from the servo hadn't restored my lust for life as I'd pinned all my hopes and dreams on a doing, and the water bottles were struggling to keep up with the amount of fluid we were losing. Trev looked like he'd been handed round a prison bathroom, and I honestly thought if no one was here to see me, I would have cried. There's no such thing as an easy day on a crocodile farm, especially in the wet season, and we knew better than to hope for an exception today, because it was just at that very moment that old leathery John marched up to us, grinning like a dingo with a gold tooth. He had a skin complexion similar to a Hessian bag and was lucky to weigh fifty five kilos, but even in his mid sixties was the toughest, hardest working man in the place. Probably one of the hardest working men this side of China, to be honest, and unlikely to be sympathetic to our plight. Ah, just the fit strong young fellas I've been looking for, he announced to the whole world with more intent than I could hide from. Pen number two has laid her eggs. We've got to go and get them out right now. Grab the gear from the container and head straight up there. I'm going to pause the story for just a moment to get everybody on the same page. As I touched on, we were working on a crocodile farm. That time of the year is crocodile breeding season. We had a bunch of enclosures that housed a breeding pair in each one, a ginormous male and a not so ginormous but still pretty big female, whose only purpose in life for the next ninety days is to tear to shreds anyone who comes anywhere near her nest. So, spoiler alert, our job was to go and take the eggs out of the nest and put them in the incubator. Oh, and just for a little bit of sugar on top, pen number two was up in the park, where all the tourists get to see what goes on in a real working crocodile farm. So there we were, standing at the gate of pen number two. I felt a bit like Ronald Ryan must have felt eyeballing the noose waiting for him on the gallows. It was hard to tell how Trev was feeling 'cause he'd sweated sunscreen into his eyes and his face was all screwed up. The plan was simple. Leathery John was up on the boardwalk, splashing the water with a length of pipe to distract the big guy. Trev was to go in and talk mamma off the nest and into the water, and stand there armed with a boat oar to protect me in case she got any wild ideas, while I dug up the nest and placed all the eggs into an eski. Exit stage left, that's a wrap. My sweaty hands had soiled the filter on what I was convinced was my last ever windfield blue. My guts had started churning around too. I guess the misses Max chili beef and cheese pie wasn't liking how I decorated in there the night before. Old John Boy had started yodling up in the peanut gallery for the tourists to gather round and warm up the nick ons. It was time. Trev had one last shirt sleeve swipe at the SPF thirty plus still chewing away at his eyeballs. He gave me a nod and in he went, just like Albert Jacker. I waited outside to be given the all clear. I dared not look. Almost immediately there was an explosion of violence. A tsunami of water washed over the fence. There was timber cracking and teeth smacking, there was screaming and howlin', there were cameras zoomin' and clickin'. One of the tourists dropped the F bomb. Trev's done for, I thought. It's all over. Then there was silence. Nothing. For what seemed like half an hour. Finally, leathery John spoke. In you come, Mick. Short and sharp, serious as tax time. I peered in through the gate and looked up at John, who didn't look away from the water. The fifteen sets of eyes in the peanut gallery turned their bewildered stares to me, all their mouths still agape. Trev was only standing inches from the water, his back to me in his fighting stance, still armed with the boat oar. He was dripping wet, and in his green work gear looked like a ninja turtle that had just crawled out of his shell. I took a deep breath. I wanted to vomit. I crept in and knelt down beside the nest. I started to dig. As soon as I leaned forward, sweat filled my sunnies, and my stomach growled loud enough for Trev to hear because I noticed him tense up in anticipation for round two. I was really starting to feel not great downstairs. Extracting crocodile eggs from their nest is a slow, meticulous process, and this girl had laid about thirty of them. Shortly after an egg is laid, the embryo inside attaches itself to the top of it, and that's how it has to stay. If the egg were to roll over from that point on, the embryo or baby crocodile inside will drown and never hatch, so you really have to be switched on to what you were doing. I managed to dial in, and I was nearly finished when I heard a collective gasp from the boardwalk. I looked up to see the big male had slowly lifted his massive head out of the murky green water. John locked eyes with him. Trev stayed at his post, staunch like a king's guard. I froze, but my guts felt like a washing machine. After what felt like an hour, the giant saury and receded back into the viridescent pool. All he wanted to do was have a look. The bastard. The collective sigh from the peanut gallery followed, and I let rip a fart that would have curdled red wine. Nobody said a word. I retrieved the last of the eggs and got the hell out of there. Exit stage left, that's a wrap. Looking back now, I'm not sure if I was inspired by Trev's courage or just content with knowing he had sunscreen in his eyes, and I was closer to the gate than he was. Either way, he's as tough as Les Darcy as far as I'm concerned. The only thing between me and a boxing glove full of pointy teeth was his scrawny ass. He's as good as mates get. When five o'clock finally rolled around, I looked at Trev and asked, What are you doing now then? He looked at me a bit confused and said bluntly, I'm going round to your joint. We got half a box of cans there. Having a barbie box like I said, he's as good as mates.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

No one else around. A tropical honeymoon knock on a forex down. She was standing in the water, eating a pumpkin scone. When Splash She was gone, and they were doing the crocodile roll. The woman hello there, dear friends, and welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Episode six Crocodiles Chapter One. It has been quite a while since my last episode. I'm very sorry about that. Probably a week longer than I ever planned on it being. I've been very busy, to be honest. It's all excuses, excuses, I know, but I've had a fair bit going on. I'll just give you a bit of gossip about my world at the moment. In amongst all this, I have a full-time job. So that keeps me busy enough. I have kids. I've got three kids, which is almost a full-time job on its own. Well, it is a full-time job on its own. I've been doing a little bit creatively of late. I also um I play music, I write songs, and I sing songs, and I had a gig last week, so that's taken up a bit of my time as well. I've been practicing and preparing for that and writing as well. Um so I did that. I'm also actually studying, um, which I'll discuss more. I'll tell you more about that at a later date, but I'm getting towards the pointy end of that, so it's sort of requiring a fair bit of my time. And we'll continue to do so probably for the next couple of months. Um later on in the year, I'll ramp right up again. I'll keep putting podcasts out in the meantime, but yeah, please bear with me if I'm a little bit not as regular as I'd like to be. Um, yeah, it's quite a lot of work that goes into them, um, to writing them. I really love doing that, I truly do, but it does take up a lot of my day, and yeah, I've got to put my energy into a couple other things at the moment, but that's just how it goes. Um what else? I'd like to give you I'd like to give a couple of shout-outs uh on Spotify, Donna, Andog, and Plozdog left me a couple of lovely little reviews. Thank you for that. That means the world to me. Um I've got a bunch of five-star ratings on there as well. I've been meaning to give you guys a shout out for a while. I'm hopeless at that. So thanks very much. And everyone, please feel free to jump on wherever you get your wherever you're listening to the podcast, and you can do that, leave a little review, or just share it, just tell your friends that yeah, it means a lot. I'd really love that. I want to give a couple of podcast shout-outs too, real quick. Um, going back to episode three, the It Chased Me Out of the Bush, that big long poem. Um, Sarah from Yowie Central, one of my favorite podcasts. Uh she listened to the episode and gave me a really lovely review as well on Spotify. Thank you, Sarah. And definitely everyone go and check out her podcast, Yowie Central, if you have any interest at all in Yowie's or the cryptid world. Um hers is a great one. Go and check that out. Another one, uh, particularly for my international listeners. I've got a few listeners up in the over in the States and in Canada. Um check out uh Struth, another great Australian podcast. It's got a bit of true crime and it's got some paranormal stuff, which is really my jam. I love that. And Mark is the guy that does that, he's a great storyteller. So go and check out Struth Podcast as well, and subscribe and follow to those guys too. But anyway, I'm back. I'm out in the backyard sitting out in front of the trapper's hut recording the podcast by the kerosene lantern, and I've got a candle going. Um it's Wednesday night. There's a full moon tomorrow night, so it's quite bright out, it's cloudy. And my listeners from down south may be thrilled to hear that I'm sitting out here at the moment at 11 o'clock at night with shorts and a t-shirt on. It's really quite mild for late July. But um, yeah, podcast up and running. Did you just go on and see my little video I made about the Trapper's Hut? I bang on about it every week in the podcast, and I kept saying I was going to put something online. Go and check out my Instagram or Facebook, and you can see The Trapper's Hut and what I've done there. That's where I record the podcast each week. Mick Newton Storyteller on Facebook and Mick Newton underscore storyteller on Instagram. Go and give me a follow there, and you can see the Trapper's Hut, and you can see a bunch of other cool stuff that I've done. Crocodiles though. I hope you enjoyed that little story. I wrote that a year or two back. I wrote it for Trev, the guy in the story. Um and I really wanted to share it with you guys on the podcast. I'm really proud of it. I love it. I think it's a great little yarn. And it's a true story. Funnily enough, that's actually how it went down. That was me and Trev's first ever nest we did together. Um and we were quite unwell at the time, but we survived as we survived time and time again after it. Trev and me did some sweet adventures in the crocodile days. Actually, we were a bit of a team. Um, did a lot of nest raiding and egg collecting together. We did a lot of crocodile catching as well. Um, we worked at a really cool place that was over in the Northern Territory. I worked with crocs for probably seven or eight years between Northern Territory and North Queensland, but that was the early days, and yeah, we had a ball. We worked at this farm, and um there was a big dam there, like a or a decent sized dam anyway, out in front of our shed. And that was the water supply for the farm. There wasn't meant to be crocodiles in it, but there was a few little escapees, not real big ones. It was close to the hatchery uh and the yeah the smaller crocs anyway, that and they'd escape from time to time and find their way into the dam. And we remember we're talking to the boss about it, and he'd been saying, Oh, I've been meaning to organise a bit of a night where we can go in here and catch them, just we've had too much on. And me and Trev were like, Oh shit, we'll go and do that. Um, can we come in at night and do that? And he said, Yeah, that'd be bloody good. You come in here whenever you want. So that became our hobby, just going there at night catching crocodiles. It was really sweet. The I'll tell you about it. Like our training for the job was basically there yakking to the boss, and he goes, You gotta go in at night, it's the only way to do it. And you've got to get in the water with them. You walk around, shine the torch around, and you'll spot them. Crocodiles in the in the spotlight, they have these really bright orange eyes, their eye shine's bright orange, it's really cool. So they're easy to spot, and yeah, you shine the torch around, you spot one, then you've got to keep the torch beam right in their eyes, don't move it at all. You've got to get in the water and sneak up as slow as you possibly can and get up really close to them. These aren't big crocodiles, like I said, they're only little ones. Maybe up to like 60, maybe 70 mil, 7 uh 70 centimetres, 700 mil. So they're not huge, but you don't want to get bitten by one all the same. But yeah, you get in the water and took a bit of trial and error and a fair bit of practice before we got the hang of it. Worked out you want to get in the water about waist deep. Any shallower than that, you're gonna make too much ripples, you're gonna splash too much while you're walking. So you want to be at least waist deep in the water. You don't want to be swimming either, you need to be able to move around. Like I said, keep the torch beam right in their eyes. You don't want to break that torch beam in their eyes. And you go as slow as you possibly can. One little ripple, they feel that ripple and they're gonna take off. Crocodiles are pretty amazing, they're water creatures, that's their element, they're designed to be in the water. Google a photo of them and look real close up around their jaws and around their teeth. They've got these little black dots that sort of ride around their lips, I suppose. And these are basically sensors. They can pick up changes in water pressure and they can um feel any vibration and movement real close to them. So, yeah, the water is very much their domain. So you've got to go really slow, and I mean really slow, like it it ends up taking you a couple of minutes just to go, you know, five minutes just to go a couple of meters. So you creep up as slow as you possibly can, which is hell with the mozys just thrashing you at the same time. Keep that torch beam right in their eyes, and hold that with your left hand so you can cock your right hand, and do that out of the don't even let your arm go through the torch beam at all. Get right up close and then just strike like a snake, bang, grab him round the neck, jam the torch in your mouth so you can grab it with the other hand as well, and you got him. That's about it. Get out of the water, take him up, jam him in a tub, go back and get another one. And we did that for hours, and oh we'd go in every week and do it. It was just we were having a ball, and that progressed into catching bigger crocs as well. Down the other side of the farm, um, where we'd I guess what we'd call the grow-outs. This was a crocodile farm, like it may not be super cool, but they they grow them for their skins, they harvest crocodiles for their skins, the salt water crocodiles, and that's sort of the sad reality in order to protect a native species that could put a dollar value on them. Um, like I said, I know it's not super cool, but I'm just telling you stories about the old days. That's all I'm doing here. But yeah, we'd go down to where the grow outs were and crocs getting up to like 1.5, 1.8 metres, about six feet long. Um, and they'd spend the last sort of year of their life in these little cages, they'd just be in an individual cage each, and they were kind of shit as well, they'd just rust out at the back, half in and half out of these water channels, and they'd break out of there all the time as well and just sort of roam the channels at night. So me and Trevor go in there and catch them too, just saw with torchlight, just running around in the middle of the night with no shoes on. You'd sort of lasso them, you get a long pole with a noose on the end of it, and you want to get the loop around his top jaw behind those big teeth, halfway along the top jaw. Ditch the stick and pull the pull the rope tight, and you got him. He'll roll over straight away and just sort of fight himself out, wear himself out a little bit, get around behind him, throw your shirt or a Hessian bag or something over its eyes, and jump on it, pin it down by the back of the head, jump over it sort of the back of its neck and pin it down, and then once you got it down, it starts thrashing. Your mate lets go of the rope and he charges over and grabs hold of it as well, get some tape around his snout, you're done. Catching big crocodiles, and yeah, we did that for uh all the time. That was just the go. That's what we did. Heaps of cool stuff. Tear around at night, drinking cans, catching crocodiles. Never come to grief. We never got any gnarly bites or anything like that. I reckon the worst injury I ever got catching crocs was Trev roped mine up once, and I went round behind it to jump on it, and like I said before, you jump on the back of its neck, pin its head down, and you straddle it, you're like one leg goes over either side of it, and because it was dark, we only had sort of torchlight, we couldn't see a hundred percent what was going on. I didn't see that tucked right up against its belly was a a little a star picket, a steel post was sticking up a few inches out of the ground, and I landed like my shin landed fair on it and just ripped a big hole in my shin. I've still I can feel it now, I've still got a big scar there. Um had that to deal with when I jumped on a crocodile. But that was sort of the worst worst that we ever got. But I did get a few bites over the years. Um I remember my first crocodile bite. I'd only been there a few months working with those yearlings after the hatchery stage. Get up to around 40-50 centimetres long, and you'd move them outside into these other pens and let them grow out a little bit bigger. We were sorting crocs out in there one day, and I can't remember exactly how it happened. I just put my hand in the wrong spot. This croc maybe like 60, 70 centimetres, the size of the ones we were catching in the dam bit me on the ball of his or of my thumb, like with at the side of his mouth, and it just jumped, clamped down on it, and I was just like, I was really surprised at how hard they bite. Yeah, they got their teeth are razor sharp when they're little like that, and it grabbed me, and because I panicked, so I sort of grabbed it and I hugged it a little bit, and because I did that, it just seemed to bite down harder, and my knees gave way, it was epic. The just it felt like I hit with a hammer, but then the pressure stayed on there, it was crazy, and it hurt so much. And the older one of the guys there had been doing it for ages, he was like, Let it go, put your hand in the water, let it go, let it go. And I couldn't do it, I was freaking out, I just didn't know what to do. And I eventually did just what he said. I just sort of let the crocodile go and I thrust my hand back into the water and it let go straight away. And the relief that I got was just it was insane the pressure in this thing's jaws. So that was sort of a good lesson learned early, I think. I did cop a few little bites over the years, but no, we never come to grief tearing around there at nighttime in the park catching them. Um that might be about it though for tonight, I reckon. It is midnight and it's a school night. So I might leave you as B. Thanks very much for hanging out with me again. Um hope you hope you had a bit of fun. Remember to give me a subscribe or a follow wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends about it. Like I said before, check out my socials as well. Mick Newton Storyteller on Instagram and Facebook. Actually, a shout out I forgot to give out before. Uh Melanie on Instagram. Thank you very much for your kind words. That was really lovely. I got a lot of cool feedback from last week's or last episode, rather, the wallabies and curlos. So yeah, thank you. Um I'll be back in a week or so with something different. There'll be a crocodile's chapter two down the track as well. I've got a few other crocodile stories I'd like to share to share with you. But um, yeah, I'll be back in a week or so with something different. Actually, I've got a couple of special guests coming in for the next episode. I've got Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. They're gonna come and hang out. They're not gonna talk about politics, they're gonna smoke a joint and tell stories about the old days. So tune in on the next episode. Don't want to miss out on that. Until then, um, you know the drill. Tell everybody you love that you love them. Give your mum and dad or grandma a call if you haven't done that for a while. Be kind to everybody that you encounter and peace out. See you then. Bye.