The Crow Eaters Read online

  After two hours there are no bites and no signs of a shark, so the crew loads us into the dinghy and we motor over towards the shore of north Neptune Island. It is too rough to land today, though Sienna tells us she took some tourists to north Neptune earlier in the year and when they clambered onto the island she found a brown snake skin on the rocks. She panicked as she’d never seen a snake before and quickly told the group that the tides were changing and they needed to get back on the boat. It’s strange that the fear of the known – in this case the great white for the crew of the Princess II – doesn’t even register like the unseen snake did; they think of the sharks with respect and awe, but there doesn’t seem to be a visible fear from anyone on board.

  Back on the boat, Andrew says that one thing his dad taught him is respect and that’s what he instils in the crew. ‘I’ve got so much experience – I can read the sharks – I know the blind spots and the timing. Just like if you go into someone’s yard who has a big dog. You can tell if it likes you, or if it’s cautious, or if it wants to bite you. It’s the same with great whites. I think you could probably free swim with a lot of the returning sharks here,’ he says. ‘If you do see a shark don’t try and touch them. And don’t try and get the perfect selfie by hanging out of the cage,’ he says as I raise my eyebrows. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he adds.

  Overnight there’s a south-south-west gale with gusts up to 40 knots. These sorts of weather reports are always abstract when you read them on your phone or hear them on the news. That is until you’re on a boat in the Spencer Gulf enduring one. We shelter for the night in the lee of north Neptune as the swell tips the boat back and forth like a manic rocking chair.

  The next morning, after the maelstrom the night before, the wind is cold and the dark water is choppy. On the edges of the Neptunes the swell rises and falls like a pulsing heart. It is big. I’ve come all this way and even though Andrew and the crew are quiet about our chances of seeing a shark, I suit up and jump in the cage alone. I’m in the water for 40 minutes – though there’s nothing but bubbles, trevally and kingfish surrounding the hull of the boat as I smack against the cage in the soupy conditions.

  I retreat inside and stand under the hot shower thinking about the strange expectation I had to see a shark. I am consoled by the wildness and unpredictability of this expedition – it’s not an on-call circus and that’s something I hope never changes – I’ve travelled hundreds of kilometres to get here, rolled around below deck and hardly slept, though it doesn’t mean a thing to the sharks.

  Just as I come to terms with the disappointment, I hear shouting from above. It is unmistakable. ‘Great white!’ I run up on deck just in my towel and the whole crew is leaning over the edge of the boat watching a thick, grey shape float towards us. Its caudal fin slashes left and right before the great white dips below the cage. I stretch my wetsuit back on, not bothering with a hood or gloves this time, and I splash into the cage before anyone else is ready to join me. The 3-metre great white comes within an arm’s length of where I stand underwater in the cage as the swell batters me against the boat. Crew-hands Nathan and Vinnie throw in lines with big chunks of tuna attached and the captain of the Princess II, Pete, throws in a bucket of tuna gills next to the cage. It turns the water momentarily red and I lose sight of the shark. All I can see is blood, bubbles and a mess of frantic trevally feasting on the chunks of fish floating in the water. Just like everything I’ve read, though, the shark has an aura. I feel its presence and I look below my feet; the enormous shape floats up from the depths and turns towards the cage, swimming front-on towards me. It glides through the water; there is no rush, no panic or any wasted movement. I notice its black eyes and the tiny nicks, scars and imperfections across its skin because it is so close to me. Its teeth are visible and I’m surprised at how broad the shark is despite the relatively modest length for a great white. It’s not lost on me that this is the same size as the shark that attacked Rodney all those years ago. The shark opens its mouth and I catch a glimpse of its wicked teeth. I’m completely in the moment and the 40 minutes I have alone with it pass in an instant. I forget to keep my hands in the cage while I’m transfixed by the shark and its movement around the boat. It is awesome, scary and beautiful, though as it thrashes towards me with three quick flicks of its tail to attack the tuna bait I realise how easily those ragged teeth could scythe my arm off in a second. It’s not until this moment that I understand what Rodney endured and why so many people are in awe of this fish. There is something primal about this encounter, though the biggest thought I have from the time in the cage isn’t crippling fear, or a commitment to eradicate these beasts, it is an understanding of the respect that the great white demands.

  With the debates continuing about great white attacks, culling and the ‘ownership’ of the ocean, this encounter, in the cold isolated channel of the Neptune Islands reminds me how insignificant we are in the sharks’ territory. I suck on my regulator, rub the film of Vaseline on my beard that keeps my goggles sealed to my face and tuck my feet under a rail in the cage so I don’t float out the front into its territory. Being here with the shark as it dips in and out of view shows me how unsuited we humans are in this environment – yes there are people like Rodney and Andrew who can skin dive, hold their breath, read the movements of the shark and understand them more than anyone on earth, though we’re still visitors to this place.

  The shark’s gills pump and flutter past and I notice the half-length dorsal fin, probably from a fight with another predator. I hold my breath for a moment so the bubbles don’t obscure my view. The cage thumps against the boat again with the swell and I push myself down onto the floor of the cage and onto my stomach. I remember Andrew telling me how important the identification of sharks was to them so they can better understand the visiting population – this is a new shark – a young one they haven’t seen before. I crane my neck towards a gap near the floor to get a better view. Male great whites have two reproductive organs called claspers which latch onto the female’s cloaca and open like an umbrella to give them an anchor during mating. The shark glides past the cage again, rattling it with its tail as it goes for the tuna. I can clearly see it is a female and I surface into the cold air to tell Andrew.

  When I’m finally back on the deck, the mood on the boat has changed. Everyone is giddy. Vinnie jumps in the cage just in his shorts and even Andrew dons his wetsuit to photograph this new visitor that hasn’t been catalogued before.

  The shark circles our boat for three hours and the chef for the voyage, Duncan Welgemoed of renowned Adelaide restaurant Africola, spots another great white out the window, though it never ventures close to the boat. On one pass, the shark flies towards the boat, crashes into the cage with its caudal fin and raises its snout, with mouth open for us all to see.

  With the wind picking up again, we decide that we have to pull anchor and begin our journey back to Port Lincoln before the weather closes in further. The swell is enormous. We roll and tumble across the ocean for hours, waves break on deck, plates smash inside, people turn green and others vomit from the strain. In an instant, the great white is gone as the Neptune Islands fade in the swell and the shark is lost below us in the dark again. It’s that same ocean which has terrified so many people since Jaws and the same ocean in which on that fateful day in 1963 Rodney was bitten. Andrew is right – this experience is about understanding and empathy. There is something about the intensity of this experience that changes someone. Once you have dived into the world of the most awesome predator on earth, strangely the water isn’t quite so scary – you just understand your place in it a little better. I grip the side of the boat as we rocket down another swell and remember what Andrew said only the day before: once you’ve swum with a great white, everything else you do feels a bit thin by comparison.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE CROW EATERS

  There’s not much meat on a crow. It says a lot about South Australians’ resilience that it’s the bird th
e state has relied on for nearly 200 years. The South Australian relationship with the crow goes back much further than the genesis of the Adelaide Crows football team in 1990. The first time I encountered the squawk of the black crow during the research for this book was while reading an old edition of the South Australian paper The Register from 1927. In the article, an old gold miner known only as ‘clay pan Joe’ was telling the story of his father arriving at the diggings in Bendigo in 1851. When his father got to the camp he found a group of ragged South Australians who had just crossed the Ninety Mile Desert to get there. They’d run out of food on the trip over and resorted to shooting crows to survive. It’s rumoured that they also ate parrots and cockatoos, though it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

  The NSW paper The Manila Express in 1930 also mentions the South Australian affinity for crows during the same period – the rumour at the time being that many South Australians filled their larders with crows to get their families through the lean months of winter.

  Despite these examples, the settler arrival on Kangaroo Island – which was the first official community of South Australia – also confirmed the South Australian people as ‘crow eaters’ in desperate times from the very beginning. The first band of recruits for the South Australian Company arrived on Kangaroo Island on 27 July 1836 with boats loaded for whaling and fishing, along with coopers, carpenters, families and settlers ready to inhabit the peninsula at Kingscote.

  They were moving to this ‘Uluru in the ocean’ as author Rebe Taylor describes it, on the advice of sealing boat captain George Sutherland who, when on the island for seven months 17 years earlier in 1819, had remarked on the suitable pastoral land in the centre of the island. Sutherland came to Kangaroo Island during its prime sealing years, when, from 1802 the vast colonies of Australian and New Zealand fur seals were battered to death for their skins and oil.

  Sutherland had said that the former sealers who had made Kangaroo Island their home dressed in ‘kangaroo-skins without linen, and wear sandals made of sealskin. They smell like foxes.’ He instilled the idea that the former sealers who had adopted the ways of their Indigenous wives on Kangaroo Island were savages, and in turn, ‘as the new, official settlers, they interpreted the Islanders’ lack of culture as a lack of legitimacy’. As Rebe Taylor writes of the arrival on Kangaroo Island, ‘They did not regard this as a place that other people called home’ and did not feel they were intruding by making it their own.

  Sutherland told the settlement party that he had dug a well of crystal clear water at Nepean Bay and that he had circumnavigated the island twice by sea and once on foot during his time on the island buying sealskins to ship back to Sydney. In the centre of Kangaroo Island he told the backers of the South Australian Company that he’d seen hundreds of acres of open country, emus, kangaroos and only a few large trees. He provided the Company with a map of his discoveries and they used it on their arrival to plot out their new settlement.

  Once they did put down anchor, the Company sent a party out to secure fresh water from the well as Sutherland had promised, though they found that the well water and the surrounding estuaries were ‘disappointingly salty’ and they had to trek inland to find potable water. They also sent out a hunting party to start providing for their new colony – an easy task in this place supposedly rich with wildlife, they thought. After a whole day in the dense Kangaroo Island bush, though, the group came back with only one crow to show for their time and to share with the entire population. Luckily for them the ‘savages’ Sutherland had warned them about – the ex-sealers and their Aboriginal wives – had been watching these new arrivals from the bush. They approached cautiously and took with them water-melon, vegetables and wallaby meat to supplement their diets, so the new arrivals could survive their first days on Kangaroo Island on more than a solitary crow.

  Despite the sealers’ generosity, there was still tension and a sense of entitlement from the settlers. They assumed ‘ownership’ of some of the sealers’ farms and in WH Leigh’s journal from the period he writes of the prospect of eating a gifted kangaroo to survive, ‘It very much resembles the flavor of bad beef and old mutton, if such an [sic] union can be conceived.’

  To further explore the bounty that Sutherland had promised, six young men aboard the ship Africaine were dropped on the southern coast of Kangaroo Island on 1 November 1836, armed only with Sutherland’s map, guns, salt beef and biscuits, to survey the open country their informant had ‘discovered’. After only a mile of hacking through the thick scrub on the edge of the coast the six men were exhausted – they hadn’t taken any drinking water, as Sutherland’s map suggested it would be easy to encounter streams along the way. Nine days later, four of the six men arrived at Nepean Bay on the other side of Kangaroo Island, ‘They had drunk the blood of seagulls and sucked the water off gum leaves’ to survive. The other two men never returned, and their bones weren’t found until 1858 near the north coast, 15 miles (24 kilometres) from fresh water.

  It was only then that these ‘crow eaters’ realised that Sutherland’s hand-drawn map, and many of his other claims about Kangaroo Island, were false.

  The inhabited history of Kangaroo Island began more than 20 000 years ago, when Aboriginal hunters and gatherers occupied the island. Geologist Walter Howchin found a variety of stone tools on the island to prove this, though it was later discovered that the Aboriginal people of Kangaroo Island disappeared around 4000 years ago. People are still unsure if they left voluntarily or died out. The Ngarrindjeri people of the coast around Cape Jervis believe that Kangaroo Island is a land of the dead. They believe that Muldawali – who came from the Southern Cross – leads the spirits of the dead across the water to rest, in isolation, on the island.

  In the intervening years, Kangaroo Island was re-discovered by Matthew Flinders and then French explorer Nicolas Baudin in 1802. On 22 March, Flinders and a landing party from the Investigator approached the shore of Nepean Bay. As they rowed in towards the beach they noticed numerous dark brown kangaroos feeding in the thick scrub and seals lounging on the shore unperturbed by the intrusion. Neither species was particularly bothered by the human visitors, so Flinders’ men killed 31 kangaroos with guns, muskets and bayonets. They skinned and cleaned the animals and had a great feast of fresh meat. Flinders was so grateful for this first meal that he named this southern land Kangaroo Island in recognition of their bounty.

  Not long after, in April 1802, Nicolas Baudin arrived at Kangaroo Island. He was aboard the Geographe and had just returned from Van Diemen’s Land and Bass Strait. Despite the fact that France and England were at war, Baudin and Flinders met in peace to share their stories of discovery.

  In the intervening years, Kangaroo Island was populated by sealers and escaped sailors, ‘refugees from their own society’ as Jean Nunn called them, and the island was briefly considered by Governor Arthur as the site for another convict settlement. The men who did find a life on Kangaroo Island were romanticised in the press as clichéd versions of Robinson Crusoe – they wore kangaroo-skin jackets and sealskin slippers; their long hair and beards concealed former gentlemen who were born in London. They lived their lives on the Southern Ocean and their movements were dictated by what they could hunt, harvest and sell. Men such as Nat Thomas and ‘Fireball’ Bates would trade ten or 12 skins for a gallon of rum and they planted roses and vegetables around their huts to recreate images of the homes they had left behind.

  While visitors such as the surgeon WH Leigh remarked on their ‘solitary Selkirk life’ – referring to the resemblance to the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s book Robinson Crusoe, he also observed that to a ‘proper’ Englishman, the way they had become ‘native’ was absurd.

  One thing that is attributed to the sealers and sailors of Kangaroo Island and has only just started to gain more public awareness is the kidnapping and abduction of many Aboriginal women from the mainland and from Tasmania. There were thought to be up to 200 men living intermittently on the islan
d during this period, with 30 or so of these ‘living in skins’ with Aboriginal partners. The sailors and sealers forcibly took up to 22 women from Tasmania and more from the mainland around Cape Jervis and Encounter Bay according to records kept – though it was likely a conservative estimate. As Rebe Taylor writes in her book Unearthed, about the Aboriginal women on Kangaroo Island, it was the pursuit of profit that took men to the island, hunting and hauling sealskins. ‘Not all would take part in the abduction of Aboriginal women’, who would then help the men learn how to live in the harsh environment, how to cure skins with their teeth, how to trap wallabies and dive for crayfish, though few of the sealers and sailors would ‘condemn this cruelty, and all would profit from the women’s passed-on knowledge’, as they were removed from their families and forced to be the companions of the ‘outcasts’ on Kangaroo Island. There are numerous stories of the Aboriginal women trying to swim to the mainland, some even with children on their backs. Few survived and most would disappear in the current or be taken by sharks. Bruce Elder writes in Blood on the Wattle of the period before Kangaroo Island’s settlement, ‘The treatment of Aboriginal women by sealers often verged on the indescribable. They seemed to delight in dreaming up sadistic punishments to ensure that their slaves did not slacken and did not attempt to escape.’

  As if to brag, Fireball Bates told The Advertiser in 1886 that he’d been on five such raids to the mainland to grab Aboriginal women to take back to Kangaroo Island.

  One of the most enduring characters of this ‘lawless’ period on Kangaroo Island was Nat Thomas – whose name you can still find on streets in the town of Penneshaw and plaques around the island. He arrived on the island by accident in 1824. His sealing boat was wrecked on Nuyts Archipelago in the Great Australian Bight and after five months, when they were finally picked up by another sealing vessel on its way to Sydney, they stopped in at the sheltered bay of American River on Kangaroo Island to fill their hold with salt. Nat Thomas jumped ship and never left.