Of Marsupials and Men by Alistair Paton

Author:Alistair Paton [Paton, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, Natural Disasters, Social Science, Disasters & Disaster Relief, Animal Rights
ISBN: 9781743822487
Google: WIhlEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2022-07-05T20:37:37+00:00

Eric Worrell milking a tiger snake for its venom, 1968. (National Archives of Australia)

Worrell befriended a poet named Roland Robinson and the pair returned to the Northern Territory in a second-hand panel van after the war had ended. Basing themselves near hot springs at Mataranka, they caught snakes, lizards, turtles and fish by day, and freshwater crocodiles at night, using a canoe made of two truck-engine covers that Worrell welded together. Worrell captured wild buffaloes on film – narrowly escaping their charging horns on more than one occasion – and learnt from the local Jawoyn people. Kevin Markwell and Nancy Cushing, authors of the definitive biography of Worrell, say this is where he adopted the name Karliboodi, which means ‘black snake’ in the Jawoyn language, a name he used on some of his dozens of magazine articles. After several months in the outback Worrell and Robinson returned to New South Wales with four drums full of pythons and young crocodiles.

In 1949 Worrell bought a block of land at Ocean Beach to fulfil his lifelong dream of operating a reptile park where people could see and learn about his favourite animals:

Everybody has a dream, a goal they set themselves and either modify to suit circumstances as years pass, or discard when they grow too old … I wanted to live somewhere away from the city, on a large piece of land where I could keep all the strange reptiles I would bring back from my travels to all corners of Australia. I wanted to keep them in as near to natural conditions as possible so I could study their life stories, and so that people could look at them and learn that there was no reason to fear them.

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