Tales of the Wild North

The thunderclap—at least that’s what it sounded like—woke the whole of Normanton. Still in his pajamas, the police sergeant rushed to the river bank, where a group of local men—”practical jokers,” says Wolfgang Arneth, who’s telling the story—were drinking rum. “What are you silly bastards up to now?” the cop said. “We’re going to be famous,” came the reply. “We’ve sent a man into space.”

Arneth, a 70-year-old former crocodile hunter who goes by the name of Wolf, is reminiscing about the great Normanton rocket launch of 1957. He was among the party of inebriated amateur scientists gathered by the river that night. They’d heard on the radio that the Soviets had just put the Sputnik spacecraft into orbit. “We thought, We can build a rocket,” Arneth says. Commandeering a welder, they made a long cylinder from three 44-gallon drums, then rigged up a nose cone from an old hopper. “They got an old car seat and put that in the drum, and then they went looking for an astronaut,” Arneth recalls. A runty stockman was chosen and inserted, too drunk to protest, into the cramped cockpit. In case he got thirsty on the moon, the men hung a water bag beside the car seat. Then they put some gelignite under the rocket, ran a trail of petrol to it, counted down from 10 and dropped a lit match onto the “fuse.”

“There was a huge explosion, and we all had our eyebrows singed,” Arneth says. But of the rocket and stockman there was no sign. “Everybody sort of sobered up then, and someone said, ‘We’ll all be in jail in the morning.’ But another one said, ‘I saw him. There he goes,’ and kept pointing to the sky.”

When the disheveled policeman arrived, a search was ordered and the stockman was found—stunned and sooty—further along the river bank. The rocket was never seen again. “The stockman was asked if he wanted to press charges,” Arneth recalls, “but he was too drunk to remember what happened.”

Such wild antics are a thing of the past, says Arneth, and you can tell he doesn’t think much of what passes for progress. It’s the same with the 35-year-old ban on crocodile hunting, which he says has outlived its usefulness. “Now there are heaps of crocodiles in the rivers,” says Arneth. (Northern Australia has an estimated 70,000 saltwater crocodiles.) “They have lost all fear. They come up and have a look at you. There are 18-footers out there.”

In a good season, Arneth says, he used to take 10 to 20 crocodiles a day: “You’d shoot them in the earhole.” Stalking and killing them was easy compared to retrieving the carcass. If the crocodile was shot in water, he says, “We’d draw straws to see who would have to dive in and get it. You’d go by touch and hope it was killed.” But the risks were all part of the thrill. Nowadays, he says mournfully, “You can’t do anything without a license. You can’t even smoke in the pub anymore.”