Been Shooting Donkeys Over The West

It was wild, the Northern Territory in the 70's. I remember the drive to Darwin and the billboard size sign on the way, a big picture of a Brahman bull and bold text proudly announcing: "You're in Cattle Country, Eat Beef You Bastards".

Darwin was flattened by Cyclone Tracy, martial law was declared, all the good folk evacuated to the safety of southern cities and replaced with hippies, misfits, mercenaries, anyone running from something or someone. The abandoned semi-destroyed houses made great squats - some guys moved into blocks of flats and joined them all by knocking holes in the walls between them.

Many of these guys listed their profession as 'Lion Tamer' and as there were no lions to be tamed in Darwin, the government could not find them a job and so they supported them with social welfare payments.

But if you did want to work, you could be almost anything you wanted. There was such a shortage of labor that they would take you at your word, so, say you wanted to be a painter. You would tell the foreman you were a painter and after a day you would be fired because you weren't really a painter. But you'd learn enough in that day to last two days at the next job, and then four and then a week and eventually you'd really be a painter.

Maybe some guys became doctors that way and lawyers and so on.

But I wanted to be a buffalo shooter. So I figured if I went a long way away, right out in the bush, it would be hard for them to fire me or maybe they wouldn't have the heart to, or maybe they would be impressed that I went all the way out there or something and let me stay.

So I called the boss out there, the bloke who owned the plant and chillers and trucks and had the contract to shoot the Bullman buffalo. I had to call him on a radio phone, because all they had there in those days was a radio and the conversation was kind of like "I hear you're lookin for shooters, over" "what?, over" "YOU'RE LOOKING FOR SHOOTERS? OVER", "you a shooter? over", "been shooting donkeys over the west, over", "okay come on out then, over and out"

Now Bullman is right out in the middle of the bloody bush, maybe 200 or 300 km of dirt road without a single service station, shop, nothing. Just scrubby bush and scrub bulls and corrugated dirt road that goes on and on and on.

When I finally reached the station an Aboriginal bloke came out and gave me directions: "Go down this road a couple a miles and he lives in the big house with a swimming pool."

He must be doing alright for himself. Big house with a swimming pool all the way out here. It was a bloody old caravan near a small waterhole. Nice spot though. I stayed there for a couple of years. Shot buffalo there, caught buffalo there. It didn't matter that I lied, they kind of expected that anyway. This was the Northern Territory.

The Wheelbarrow And The Flying Doctor

We watched the sky eagerly. Where was that darn aircraft? The flying doctor always came, didn't they? It was dusk and they wouldn't be able to land in another half hour. I was propped up in a wheelbarrow on the edge of the dirt airstrip at Bulman Station, my right leg bandaged and bloody and starting to hurt.

Bulman station is a huge, wild cattle ranch on the Southern tip of Arnhem Land in northern Australia. It's an Aboriginal run property and we had the rights to shoot wild buffalo there and butcher them for pet meat.

There were few roads and fewer fences in Bulman, and if you travelled for 4 hours or so through the bush, you could find wild buffalo that had never seen a human before. They were easy prey, they weren't in the least bit afraid of us. We didn't go there often, because it was hard travel, much of it on the faint remnants of old tracks. It was easy to get bushed.

But this time we bit the bullet and went out there, two Toyotas, 5 of us and within half an hour of getting to a distant waterhole, we had ten big buffalo bulls on the ground. ten of them. We had to hurry - we had to get them boned out and the meat back to the portable chiller back at camp.

Now I have to add that we were good at this. we did this every day, 7 days a week until the wet season set in and we had to head back to civilisation. Our knives were razor sharp and we could completely bone out a big bull in 6 minutes flat - On the ground. But we used to do one or two at a time and then drive and find another one. This time it was ten!

Now there was one cut we did that was quite dangerous. You had to pull the knife through the thick hide of the neck and rip it toward you, so it went to the right of your body. Well, on this particular day, with the pressure on, I got a little careless.

It's weird. You kind of stand there dumbfounded when you do something like that. You think - "This did not happen"- But it's obvious, you just stuck a knife through your leg. Then you feel sick and weak.

I'm only alive today, because the arteries were somewhere other than where I stuck the knife. Ricko drove me back to the station and dropped me at the only place we could find any people, the school- and then went back out to help get the meat in safely - damned if we were going to let it go to waste.

Once the teacher had washed the wound and bound the two pieces of leg back together, we called the flying doctor on the two way radio and arranged to meet them at the airstrip. Trouble is everybody was out hunting or something. There were no cars. And the airstrip was a couple of kilometres away. No other adults to carry me - what were we going to do?

The solution - an old wheelbarrow. The older kids pushing and the younger ones running along side cheering. It must have looked like a scene from Gulliver's Travels, the little people ferrying their captive giant down the road.

Then the flying doctor didn't turn up, they must have had something more urgent, so they sent an ambulance out by road. Sheesh - it was an 8 hour drive on dirt roads.

Another hysterical day in paradise!

The United Animal Nations

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" my photographer colleague enquired of the waitress. "Non, non, monsieur" came the reply. Stupid Kraut. I looked away. Nobody spoke German, it was Geneva. "Stick vid me" he'd said earlier, "The Sviss unterstant my language". I had to resort to my schoolboy French with a strong north Aussie accent : "doo cafaiy playse", "mercay"

It was 1987 and we were in Geneva to testify at a hearing. The Australian and Northern Territory governments were on trial for cruelty to animals. We'd filmed and photographed the government shooters wounding buffalo from helicopters and an animal welfare group had flown us to Geneva for the court case.

Not caring much for detail, I was still unsure of what exactly it was that we were doing. "It's the United Animal Nations" howled an SBS television producer I'd spoken to. He had jumped for joy the previous day at the prospect of having a scoop. I thought we were going to testify before the United Nations. "It's the United Animal Nations" he cried, his head in his hands. "Who you going to talk to: A pig, a donkey, a chicken?"

Who cares? I was being flown to Geneva, London, Singapore - all expenses paid. My first time abroad. I had some heart wrenching video footage of wounded, dying buffalos - made them all cry in Geneva even if they couldn't understand me. The translators scratched their heads and the people on the bench gave me blank stares. They hadn't come across this style of English before - The language of the deep north of Australia.

At lunch a pretty, young French maiden slid up beside me. I badly wanted to engage her in conversation and more, but the vet from Casablanca cornered me to talk about Australian camels. They were really dromidaries from his country. The presiding Judge: renown wildlife activist Franz Weber, came over for a quick, curt handshake. He was far too busy for small talk, a man on a mission.

Outside, the snow fell, the second hand reached 12 as the train pulled in - so perfect. The British buskers complained bitterly as they packed up their instruments and pocketed their meager earnings. The court of the United Animal Nations was back in session. The verdict: "Guilty".

I don't think anybody back in Australia even knew.

Buffalos, Courage And The Prettiest Girl In Town

I could not quite believe what I had just heard. The prettiest little girl in town had just called me brave: “Gee you’re brave, Michael” and the way she had said it, all starry eyed…

It was in Australia’s Top End, in the late 70’s and I had just shot a big buffalo bull and I was standing next to the Toyota, steeling my knife, ready to turn that bull into pet meat. It was just my job – I did it every day – I was a champion for all the furry little dogs and cats in suburban Australia (Oh, and the guys who illegally sold the meat to the US for hamburgers).

And, that particular day, we managed to talk the prettiest little girl in Pine Creek into coming out with us for the day, so we could impress her. And even picking her up had been an ordeal – We had to endure an hour of her father’s lies and dribble – And we new he was lying, because the leathery old guys at the pub told us he’d never shot a buffalo in his life and they new all the stories.

So, the father lied and the more he lied the more he frothed at the mouth and the froth dribbled down the sides of his mouth. We thought perhaps it was some kind of divine punishment like Pinocchio’s nose. So we stood there, Ricko and I, watching the dribble form little rivers, winding their way through the forests of stubble on the sides of the father’s neglected chin. We watched and waited for a gap in the conversation, where we could say that we had a buffalo waiting and leave as gracefully as possible, without looking like horny young larrikins trying to race off his daughter.

Anyway, there I was, with the prettiest girl in town admiring me, the only one who had ever admired my bravery. I stood up a little straighter, even put my chest out a little.

But then something was not right. Ricko was not looking in admiration - In fact, he was laughing. Laughing and looking over my shoulder. And then it dawned on me. I knew before I even turned around – I had just been caught out in front of the prettiest little girl in town. And she was just too simple to realize it.

Alright, so I was not always the best marksman in the world, but then I was never allowed to have a gun when I was young. My dad was a lawyer and he defended too many victims of shooting accidents and even getting one when I was older was hard work. The police kept opposing my firearm license because I'd been a rebellious teenager and got into trouble with the law. But I’d got through all that and become a professional shooter -Professional in the sense that I did it for a living, not that I was any good at it.

But some days, man, some days I could amaze even myself. A running target at 200 yards, BOOM, straight down – heart shot.

Then there were the other days. The ones where I couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a shovel.

But mostly I could bluff my way through, well I used to. That was, until my ego had got the better of me and I came up with the plan.

I explained it to the others - there were four of us – two teams, two Toyotas. It seemed brilliant. We could make a lot more money, get more buffalos. It was simple. Instead of splitting up and going out by ourselves, we could just pool our resources and be more efficient. Someone would go ahead and shoot the buffalos (and I volunteered for that) and the other three would come behind in the other vehicle, bone them out and collect the meat!

But the others got upset when semi-dead buffaloes (and very angry ones) would stand up while they were trying to bleed them. It was just too dangerous and they even made jokes about my marksmanship. Hell - it wasn’t that easy - Buffalos had such thick skulls and little brains – If you were a little bit off target, you’d knock them out and they looked dead. I didn’t know they’d get back up.

So, I decided that as the other blokes were so ungrateful, I would not help them anymore with innovative ideas and they would just have to be happy with the money they were making.

Anyway, so there I was. The prettiest little girl in town, sitting in the Toyota admiring me and the angry semi-dead buffalo behind me, probably on his feet by now, sizing me up for a revenge attack. How the hell was I going to get back in the Toyota gracefully, without losing my new found reputation for bravery! I cursed all the stinking buffalos. If they’d just been given bigger brains and thinner skulls, I wouldn’t be in this predicament.

The End Of An Era

It was sometime in the early 1980's. We sat uncomfortably in the conference room of a Darwin hotel, scratching our bushy beards, dressed in button-up shirts we'd bought that morning, listening to the Yankee guest lay down the law. "You guys have to eradicate your wild herds by 1984".

It was the end. Australia's meat exports to the US were under threat. Meat infected with brucellosis and TB had been found in a shipment and we simply had to get rid of those diseases. The end. They'd aerial shoot the wild herds and turn us into farmers.

The kind of men who go shooting buffalo don't make good farmers. Some tried. a couple shot themselves. The end.

At the end of the day it was our fault. You see, when buffalo are shot and butchered out in the wild, they are not tested for disease and the meat can only be sold for animal consumption. Boxes of meat from the abattoir, properly tested have official stamps on them, so they can't be mixed up with the cheaper untested 'pet meat'.

Anyway, when some of the more enterprising and ruthless pet meat buyers started making counterfeit stamps we took our hats off to them. Clever. It was highly amusing to think of super-sized Yanks chewing on our pet meat in their super-size burgers, in fact it was just plain hilarious - especially when the beer flowed.

And we got paid more for the meat.

It didn't occur to us that they'd get caught and it would all end.

It was the end of an era and the end of a lifestyle. Hooning around in cut-down four-wheel drives, our guns sitting on the rack, going to the local pub fresh from the slaughter, covered in blood and staying till stumps. Out again at dawn. Come to think of it, none of us were terribly sane at that time. Barely a day went by that we didn't get nearly hurt or killed. Rolled the Toyota on a bend - "coulda sworn I took it at the right speed" or the dead buffalo jumped up when you went to bleed it - "my shooting's a bit off today".

The fact that we lived through it is testimony to a higher power wanting us to stay alive. The reason still escapes me.