reading

Prologue

The Monaro Mercury, Friday, 7 May 1869:

THE ABORIGINES AT CAPE YORK

… it appears that about two years ago, the Rev. Mr Jagg … and Mr W. T. Kennett, a teacher, [were] sent out by the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel to establish a mission among the aborigines of Australia, [and went to] the settlement of Somerset, Cape York … [The aborigines] gladly received the missionary teacher among them. Whenever Mr Kennett visited them they supplied him with food – fish, fruit and roots – and at his desire took him in their canoes to several islands … Yet there is a determination to accuse, condemn and execute them. The Police Magistrate … told Mr Kennett (so that gentleman assures us) that he had the names of some thirty blackfellows whom he intended to shoot at the first opportunity, not that one of them was even accused of murder … This magistrate also showed on his rifle 47 notches, each representing a blackfellow shot dead with this weapon.

The Sun (Sydney), Wednesday, 8 November 1922:

NEW SNAKE

VENOMOUS GIANT

McLennan’s Namesake

Although the west coast of Cape York Peninsula was the first part of Australia, as far as we know, to be seen by white men, the country behind it is even today one of the least known regions of Australia.

A huge venomous snake, far bigger than any venomous snake hitherto known in Australia, has been given to the Australian Museum … for whom it was obtained at Coen, by Mr W. McLennan. It will be named after Mr McLennan.

This snake, which will be described for the first time in the records of the museum, is not only a new species, but belongs to a new genus …

Worst in Australia

The specimen which Mr McLennan secured is nine feet six inches long, but inhabitants of Coen talk of snakes ten or eleven feet long. The fangs are nearly twice as long as those of the largest death adder. Nothing is known about the nature of its venom, but it has an extra large supply, and Mr J. R. Kinghorn, the museum’s snake expert, considers that it is probably the worst snake in Australia.

The Daily Mercury (Mackay), Friday, 22 February 1946:

TAIPAN?

Much interest was aroused by the arrival in town yesterday morning of the head and part of the body of a nine foot snake killed at Narpi by a local resident, on account of the resemblance borne by the flattened vicious head and thick neck of the reptile to the dreaded taipan, which is alleged by some snake students only to occupy Cape York Peninsula. Mr J. H. Williams will take steps to establish the identity of the snake … The presence or otherwise of this deadly reptile in the district is a matter of rather painful interest.

Newcastle Morning Herald and Miner’s Advocate, Monday, 21 August 1950:

DENTISTS TO SEE ‘PERFECT TEETH’

Sydney, Sunday – When the annual Australian Dental Congress opens at Sydney University tomorrow, members will see … the head of a deadly taipan snake on show.

An aboriginal skull containing 32 teeth … will [also] be exhibited with other displays.

Bowen Independent, Friday, 11 January 1952:

TAIPAN STORY

Mr Chas Hurst, of Longford Creek, called in during the week to relate a story concerning a fight with a taipan snake, and show us the remains, measuring seven foot seven inches from snout to tail. On Saturday last Billy and Mannie Hanlon were going their rounds at the creek, accompanied by their two dogs, when they heard one dog yelp with pain and go down, to be dead almost immediately. They saw the snake reared about three feet high, and as they watched, it struck at the second dog as it raced by, and within a minute or two it was dead. Procuring a gun the snake was despatched, and it proved to be a taipan. The head was very repulsive looking, with fish-like scales and a very streamlined body. Its half inch fangs were still oozing venom when seen at this office on Tuesday. The theory has been advanced that the drought and bushfires are driving these venomous reptiles into comparative open country.

The Courier-Mail (Brisbane), Tuesday, 29 December 1953:

STILL NO KNOWN TAIPAN ANTIDOTE, SAYS DOCTOR

The snake that caused the death of Kenneth Duck, 19, who was flown to Cairns from Starke River station early on Saturday, had been positively identified as a taipan, Dr H. Flecker, well-known Cairns naturalist said.

Dr Flecker said everything possible was done to save the life of Duck. He was treated with the anti-venene of the tiger snake.

Chapter 1

The house in the canefield

Had he been conscious, George Rosendale may have thought of many things as he lay dying in the back of the rusted flatbed. He could have thought of how rough the road was, the fact it was at least fifty kilometres to the hospital at Cooktown, and that there wouldn’t be any cure waiting for him when they arrived anyway.

Light flickered on the other side of his closed eyelids as he drifted in and out, between this world and the next. The Cape York sun lay upon his skin like the flames of a crematorium. His leg thudded with pain, not from the snakebite but from where Clarrie Hartwig had sheared it to the bone with a chisel. There was no antivenom, he had said, so they needed to get the venom out by any means possible. Afterwards he had burnt the flesh with wax matches. George Bowen, the old grandfather, hadn’t been able to make it bleed, but Hartwig had done perhaps too good a job.

Rosendale had lost a lot of blood. The flow was controlled now, a tourniquet choking his thigh, but still streams of it rolled with the movements of the truck, slithering against his back.

The whole thing had played out like some kind of biblical horror story, rich in symbolism: Rosendale, not yet twenty years old, standing on the site of the Hope Vale church after a morning of stacking timber; the lightning appearance of the snake, its copper scales shining like the armour of a hoplite as it shot out from beneath some planks, mouth agape.

He wasn’t dead yet but soon would be, never dreaming that he could come out the other side only to die again and again.

The truck bounced, jolted, moving in and out from light to shade. Rosendale smelt the hot, verdant breath of the jungle and tasted the red dust in his mouth. The snake – nguman, what most were now calling the taipan – had been huge, close to eight feet, and had hung onto his ankle with such ferocity that he had needed to kick it off. That meant one thing: lots of venom was in his body, no matter how much had pumped out of the severed arteries in his leg. In his mind, he had no chance of survival.

Had he been fully conscious, Rosendale’s life could have come back to him in flashes. There were many things he could have remembered.

He may have remembered being a little boy again, sitting among the other bored children at Sunday School. The priest was lecturing them on the origins of language.

‘Once, everyone on earth spoke in the same tongue,’ the old man explained, his palms spread, his white collar somehow ludicrous in the sticky heat of the morning. ‘In the Middle East, they began to build a great tower – the Tower of Babel.’

Rosendale listened with increasing frustration as the priest continued, explaining how God punished the people for their pride by taking away their ability to understand one another.

‘These people were then scattered across the globe.’

Unable to contain himself any longer, Rosendale raised one small, brown hand. There was a hushed moment. Every face in the room turned on him.

‘Yes, George?’

‘You white fellas have it wrong,’ he said. ‘The origin of languages didn’t happen in the Middle East. That happened here, near Cooktown. My grandmother told me the story.’

George felt himself slipping into the darkness as the truck’s engine roared. Dear God, he thought, if I survive this, I’ll do anything for you.

***

The two boys stood looking at the house in the canefield with some combination of wonder and horror. They’d known the place would be a fix-up job – that was all their father ever bought, and was more than they could afford anyhow – but this was something else. Its dull, grime-coated windows, sagging roof and crooked beams spoke of years of lonely abandonment. A thousand scorching days and insect-screaming nights had led the place to near ruin.

‘Race you ’round the back,’ Bruce called to his brother, darting away barefoot through the long grass and rubbish of the yard.

Bruce and his younger brother Keith explored while their parents parked the caravan. All around them, the towering canestalks hissed in the hot gloom. The house seemed to be in the throes of a losing, rear-guard battle with nature. An ants’ nest clung to one corner like some monstrous growth, reaching all the way to the eaves and seeming to hold the structure upright. Birds had nested in the roof, and spider webs like silken palaces were spun in every nook. A huge guava tree stretched from a carpet of its own rotting fruit.

‘It’s like an abandoned house,’ Keith said as they came back to the front of the place. In the distance, they could see the farmer’s house across the furrows of a ploughed canefield. That was a real place to live: a place for a family with more than a couple of pounds to rub together.

Bruce hopped onto the creaking veranda and through the front door, only to have his foot pass with a hollow crunch straight through the floor. That was enough to put the explorer inside him to rest, and he returned to the yard. The boys stood by with their mother, Meta, as Norman Stringer climbed into the back of the caravan – their home, for the next few months at least. They had not been a fortunate family, and nor was that fortune to improve in the coming years.

It would be half a decade after George Rosendale’s many deaths that 10-year-old Bruce Stringer was bitten by the taipan. He encountered the snake while playing in his schoolyard at Freshwater, a few kilometres north-west of Cairns, one sunny Wednesday morning. The blond-haired boy never could have guessed that his survival largely depended on the dramas of those preceding five years.

***

The Stringers moved to the little house at Freshwater in 1953; just one more relocation in a sequence punctuating their itinerant lives. The idea was simple enough: Norman would find a cheap place in need of repair, make it habitable, then use that as a base while doing whatever work was available. When that work ran out, he’d load the family into the caravan and set off in search of new promise.

For the boys, this was a life of wonder and adventure rather than restless discontent. In Cairns their father had tried his hand at photography, and even ran a small shop in the city at one time. The business didn’t last long, but it did expose Bruce and his younger brother to things that might never be encountered in a more traditional family. In those days, pearl luggers often sailed into Cairns with their crews of South Sea Islanders, and the men would ask Norman to take their pictures; since they had no money with which to pay, they instead offered mother of pearl, exotic shells, glinting glass buoys used to keep their nets afloat. Inevitably, these treasures became playthings for Bruce and Keith. They would study them while their mother – an artist – used paints to colour the black and white images of those strange, stern-faced men.

After the photography business failed, Norman did a stint in a sawmill at Edge Hill, then became a refrigeration mechanic and salesman. This was his vocation in Freshwater, and it meant he was away from home for extended periods of time, often in the Atherton Tablelands. It made things hard on Meta, but money was too tight for any chance of a sale to be passed up. The boys wore home-made clothes, and when Bruce got an ear infection it took so long to see a doctor that the eardrum ruptured.

Whatever the boys lacked, they were more than compensated by the rich playground of their surroundings. All around them was a lush, humid Eden, thrumming with life. Shrieking parrots shone out brilliantly against the green of the rainforest. Before long Bruce had a pet lorikeet, which he kept on a string and took for walks. Lazy afternoons would be spent battling green ants for the best guavas, then eating armloads of the fruit in the shade of the cane. If ever the humidity got too much to bear, they’d ride their bikes to Freshwater Creek and join the local children in climbing trees and leaping into the water. Even walking to school was a pleasure: across the canefields, through the old wooden turnstile that guarded the train tracks (sometimes placing a penny on the hot steel of the rails), then on and up the hill.

Despite all this, neither boy was blind to the dangers of the land. One afternoon, Keith and a friend were making their way through the cutting, green-yellow maze of a canefield when they spotted a death adder on the soil ahead of them. The short, bloated reptile had complete faith in its camouflage. Its eyes regarded them with cold indifference. The boys watched it in quiet awe for a time. The thing had a body brown as the soil but a tail that was almost white, a natural lure twitching before the waiting fangs.

Another time, Keith climbed into the guava tree only to put his head directly into a nest of green ants.

One night, Norman loaded Bruce and Keith into the ute and took them right up into the Atherton Tablelands on a repair run. By the time the job was done it was after midnight, and both the boys were sound asleep – Bruce stretched out on the bench seat, Keith on the narrow shelf behind it.

At some point, their father woke them.

‘Boys!’ Norman’s voice was at a low, excited whisper. ‘Psst! C’mon boys, quick! Look!’

Bruce Stringer at Freshwater in 1955 (photograph by Norm Stringer)

Bruce peeled himself from the hot vinyl of the seat, squinting into the darkness. They were stopped on a dirt track, the engine idling. Then he saw it: stretched across the full length of the road was the largest snake he had ever seen.

‘It’s a python,’ Norman said, eyes fixed on the animal glinting in the headlights. ‘We can’t ride over him – that would kill him.’

‘Is it venomous?’

‘No. They kill their prey by wrapping around them and squeezing until they suffocate.’

For a while longer they watched the animal, which seemed content to simply lie where it was. Moths swirled and spiralled in the beams of the headlights. The night inched on. Eventually, something had to give.

‘Stay here, boys,’ Norman said, popping the door open and climbing out into the dark. ‘I’ll get him off the road.’ Bruce and Keith watched as their father made his way to the snake’s tail, carefully lifted it, then hauled the creature into the grass.

Norman’s respect for nature was not shared by the other inhabitants of Freshwater, and certainly not when it came to snakes. Since the 1940s, a collective anxiety about a recently described species called the taipan – Oxyuranus scutellatus – had been increasing in pitch to the point that, by 1955, it had reached near hysteria. This wasn’t entirely without good reason; the ground had been sown with the bodies of numerous men and women who had encountered the rare animal, including cane farmers, Aboriginal people and naturalists. There was no cure for the taipan’s bite, and death could occur within an hour. Seldom did a week go by without the papers running a story about the snake.

And Freshwater was notorious taipan country.

This was probably the reason Bruce and Keith were taught snakebite first aid as part of the curriculum. The school at Freshwater was simple, a two-room building on stilts, but the teachers were passionate and, in this case, delivered their misguided instruction with step-by-step exactness. Bruce, academically gifted, soaked it all in: apply a ligature to a single-boned part of the limb, twisting it tight with a stick; wash away any residual venom on the surface of the skin using water, spittle or urine; scarify the bite with a razor by making longitudinal cuts along each puncture; bleed. It would be years before scientists determined that snake venom primarily travels in the lymphatic system rather than the bloodstream.

Whether or not the Stringers were fully aware of the taipan panic unfolding around them, they would soon be distracted by more pressing matters. Meta fell pregnant with a third child, Peter, who was born prematurely and was too unwell to come home from hospital for some time. With Norman away trying to scrape together a living for his family, this left Meta in the difficult position of having to leave the new baby in the hospital while she looked after the boys. Their lives were difficult, strained, but loving. She would express breastmilk in the gloom of the little house in the canefield, then pass it on to Bruce who would happily take it, by bus, to his baby brother in the hospital at Cairns. It was a responsibility that gave the 10-year-old the first glimmer of what it might feel like to be a man.

Then the snake bit him.

***

The game was cowboys and Indians – coloniser and colonised, a childish ritual whispering of inherited supremacy. Good guys and bad guys; the cowboys chased and the Indians ran. Bruce was an Indian.

It was 30 November 1955. That morning was pleasant, hushed, the shade beneath the schoolhouse still holding some of the cool of the previous night. In the coming months, it would be too hot for much besides diving into the creek, but those days were yet to arrive. The schoolhouse doors opened for recess and the pupils all but flew down the steps and into the fresh, tropical stillness.

The headmaster of the school was a man named Tom Lynch, tall, square-jawed, often dressed in only a singlet and slacks. When he took the job a few years earlier he had found a school with very little play area for the pupils. In particular, the land behind the building was an uncleared swamp of wattle, blue gums, ti-tree and mahogany. Lynch had the trees cut down and the undergrowth burnt; this left a rutted paddock that stretched for about a hundred metres to a last pocket of uncleared bush. This wooded area was within the school boundary, with a fence separating it from two roads beyond, but it was not a spot where children were encouraged to play. Most chose not to, anyhow. An expanse of mown grass in front of the veranda was far preferable to children who enjoyed cricket and football.

Occasionally, though, Bruce and his friends went up there. It was the perfect spot for games like cowboys and Indians or hide and seek. The grass was so long among the trees and shrubs that the children would actually fold it over themselves to make cubbies.

That morning, Bruce and three others sprinted straight to that huddled clump of bush at the back of the school. They paused briefly to assign roles.

‘Stringer, you and I are Indians!’

‘Right. Make a run for it!’

They laughed, wrestled, then the two imaginary Indians tore off into the bush with a volley of mad, uncivilised whoops and howls. Bruce glanced back to see the cowboys after him, their fingers shaped into pistols; in a burst of acceleration he zigzagged this way and that, endeavouring to lose them.

Barefoot, wearing only home-made shorts and shirt, the 10-year-old went full tilt. His fellow Indian, a tad slower, veered off in another direction, and the cowboys followed. The gloom of the bush closed over Bruce, the smell of eucalypt, the shrieking retreat of unseen birds somewhere above. Grass and branches flew by at a blur.

What Bruce really needed to do was hide. Ahead, he saw a log blocking his path. Straining to get as far away as possible while nobody was on his tail, he launched himself in a hurdler’s leap over the log and into the grass on the other side.

Right as he landed, the huge snake reared up out of the grass and closed its jaws onto his leg.

Bruce stopped dead, not in terror but in pure, physiological surprise. He looked down at the great, armoured head of the serpent, which bit him three times in rapid succession as he watched. It never really withdrew its fangs, just chewed in a twitching blur, those natural syringes entering and exiting the precise same spot each time. The thing was a rusty brown that faded to cream at the snout. It had red eyes with huge black pupils and a body that seemed as thick as Bruce’s leg. He could not see its entire length, only the foot or two that had reared out of the long grass and struck at him.

The taipan drew back and was swallowed by the grass.

The small, blond-haired boy stood, head down, completely alone now with the animal sounds of the bush and his own rasping breaths. Had anyone been there to see him, they might have remarked on his similarity to the lost boy in McCubbin’s painting, that enduring symbol of vulnerability and abanonment in a place one neither understands nor belongs.

Chapter 2

The Angel of Death

It wasn’t the first time George Rosendale had been loaded into a truck and driven towards an uncertain future. He had experienced a similar trauma as a 12-year-old, when the army had expelled him and his people at bayonet-point from their land. That was in 1942, a year that would long be remembered as one of the worst in the history of the Guugu Yimithirr people.

Had the adult George Rosendale been conscious, he might have reflected on the irony. That first trip in the truck had been against his will, a traumatic dislocation; now, the mission truck was the one thing saving him from dying in the dirt at Hope Vale. By the time they were halfway to Cooktown Hospital, though, he was lost somewhere deep down in the void, his consciousness shrunk to a dimming pinpoint of light as his pulse failed. The taipan’s venom was wreaking havoc on his system, clotting his blood, flaying his neurons like a whip across a million backs.

But he had survived 1942, unlike so many of the others. He had watched coffin after coffin swallowed up by the earth, and his turn had never come. The relocation of those Guugu Yimithirr bama had literally killed them. If Rosendale could survive that, then maybe he could survive this.

***

For the colonialists, it had been a battle against nature from the start. From Sydney Cove they spread across the face of the continent like oil over water, all the while devising new schemes to bring the land under control. Though he didn’t comprehend such complexities as a 12-year-old, Rosendale understood that, in 1942, the army’s decision to pick him up and drop him 1500 kilometres south was because the white man had a plan, and anything standing in the way would be cut down: plants, animals, human beings.

At least in part, an element of the colonialists’ strategy for achieving supremacy over the continent was scientifically classifying everything they might encounter there. For them, nothing really existed until it had been scrawled into their ledger books, defined, categorised. This was part fascination, part terrified desire to cast a light into the darkness of this new land, and so banish all the ghosts of the Australian bush. It was this inclination that first brought Europeans into contact with the taipan.

In pictures, Amalie Dietrich looks every bit the stoic, nineteenth-century pioneer woman. Her square jaw accentuates thin lips pulled taut beneath deep-set, colourless eyes. Her hands are large, the fingers thick. She has the kind of portrait one could easily skim over as belonging to merely another historical naturalist. However, her bland photographs conceal a number of stories: one concerning the taipan snake, and another that would eventually lead her to be dubbed the Angel of Black Death.

Originally from Germany, 42-year-old Dietrich left her only daughter in boarding school and set sail for Australia on the La Rochelle in 1863. She had been employed by Johann Cesar Godeffroy VI, a shipping magnate with a keen interest in natural history who was establishing a private museum in Hamburg.1

Dietrich – the only woman Godeffroy ever employed in this role – was given a simple instruction: collect items of interest for the museum. Her lack of formal training and status as a middle-aged woman made her an unusual choice, but it was a risk that would pay dividends.

Between 1864 and 1867, Dietrich made her home in the colonial outpost of Rockhampton, Queensland. Life was hard. The wood and tin shacks were hot as foundries, the dirt roads peopled by men who in some cases had come to the southern hemisphere in leg irons. Horses grunted and panted as they hauled overloaded carts across the uneven ground.

Despite all this, Dietrich thrived. While the choking humidity and isolation broke some men, this German naturalist stalked the tropical rainforests and mosquito-infested riverbanks with grim indifference. Jars of formalin and press-dried flora were her companions. Ferns, seeds, rocks, seaweeds, corals, lizards, birds and bones; it wasn’t long before she sent her first shipment on its way back to Germany.

What Dietrich stumbled upon very few of were snakes.

Like all the pioneers, Dietrich knew that Australian snakes were nothing to be trifled with. By the time she was scouring Rockhampton and its surrounds for plants and animals, dozens of fatal species had been classified: the death adder, tiger snake and eastern brown to name just a few. All these reptiles had been responsible for the loss of settlers, often by way of slow, lingering deaths. Asphyxiation usually got victims in the end, suggesting that Australian serpents were neurotoxic and so comparable to the cobras of Asia and the mambas of Africa. Still, the resolute Dietrich was as prepared to collect them as she was any other specimen. In the wilds of colonial Rockhampton, though, the snakes had the advantage, and Dietrich no doubt watched in frustration as many a tail disappeared into the tangles of jungle that still matted the place. Indeed, one letter to her daughter lamented that the ‘unbearable’ hothouse conditions of the locale resulted in ‘such a wealth of vegetation that literally everything towers high above my head’.2 As the taipan hunters of the next century would discover, these are some of the most difficult of conditions in which to capture snakes.

So it would have been with a combination of wariness and exhilaration one hot day in 1867 when Dietrich encountered a serpent the likes of which she hadn’t seen before. Though the specifics of the encounter have been lost, it must have been some distance from the jungles that had made it so easy for other specimens to escape.

This snake was close to seven feet long, a size usually reserved for the non-venomous pythons, but Dietrich could see this was no python. Coppery-brown with a head like a blunted arrow, the reptile moved with startling swiftness, far faster than the lumbering constrictors that were no real danger to humans. Its forked tongue – a biblical symbol of duplicity that perhaps resonated with Dietrich – flickered at its snout. Slightly protruding supraocular scales added to the sinister aspect of eyes that were already a dirty red.

A less committed naturalist may have retreated from this new species, or at least satisfied themselves with observing it from afar. Amalie Dietrich, though, was not going to let this animal escape her. Completely oblivious to the fact that she was dealing with one of the fastest and most venomous snakes in the world, she somehow managed to secure it without being bitten. By late that evening, she was able to study it up close through the glass of a jar filled with formalin. The snake’s scales glinted in the candlelight, its eyes dull and vacant in death.

A coastal taipan, Oxyuranus scutellatus (photograph by Michael Cermak)

The eponymous drover’s wife of Henry Lawson’s story may have fared less well had she encountered a taipan instead of a black snake, but it seemed that nothing was a match for Dietrich.

She dutifully sent it back to Hamburg, where it was put on display in the Godeffroy Museum. As luck would have it, renowned zoologist Wilhelm Peters visited the exhibit soon afterwards, and took a particular interest in the snake. He concluded that it was of a species as yet unknown to science, and, after researching other Australian snakes and considering such factors as scalation and general morphology, dubbed the animal Pseudechis scutellatus. The genus Pseudechis situated the specimen as a member of the black snake family. Given the relatively inoffensive nature of Pseudechis, it is surprising that Peters’ error stood for so long, especially since the people of Rockhampton (and north Queensland generally) had known for some time that a bite from their ‘giant brown snake’ meant certain death.

If this is a colonial horror story of sorts, however, Dietrich’s snake is not the monster. Godeffroy’s interest in Australian flora and fauna extended to the Aboriginal people, and this included their physical remains as well as their tools and weapons. And just as she wouldn’t be cowed by the threat of a venomous snake, so Dietrich forged ahead with gusto in her attempts to satiate her employer.

Allegations of the desecration of Indigenous graves are among the lesser of the charges against the German naturalist. At the same time she was collecting shells, mammals and reptiles, Dietrich was approaching local settlers and offering them money for the shooting of ‘healthy aboriginal specimens’.3 Whether anybody accepted this offer is unclear, though she eventually sent at least eight Aboriginal skeletons and one skull across the sea and back to Germany.

More macabre, her camp was at one time decorated with the tanned ‘pelt’ of a human being, which took pride of place alongside her microscopes, magnifying glasses and flasks of gunshot. Before long this too was on display in Hamburg.4

‘What freedom I enjoy here as a collector,’ Dietrich wrote to her daughter. ‘I speedily forget the discomfort of heat and mosquitoes in the unbounded feeling of joy that animates me when, at every step, I light upon treasures that no one has secured before me.’5

***

For fifty years Dietrich’s taipan hung in its formalin purgatory, denied even the dignity of being allowed to rot. For the German sightseers in Godeffroy’s museum, it was little more than a symbol of the dangers lurking in some strange and foreign land that few would ever visit.

It wasn’t until the early 1920s that another naturalist – this one with a far less dubious reputation than Dietrich – would cast light upon the taipan.

William McLennan was an ornithologist known internationally as an authority on birds’ eggs. A gentle-natured and thorough scientist, he had survived a mustard gas attack in the trenches during the Great War, an experience that left him ill-equipped for the field work that was his passion. Nonetheless, when he heard stories of a mysterious, undescribed species of bird said to haunt the rocky scrub around Coen on the Cape York Peninsula, he couldn’t resist. In 1923 he set out from Melbourne to see if he could find one.

On arriving in the far north, McLennan teamed up with a local man named Bill Sheppard who acted as a guide, and who claimed to have seen the bird. For days they searched the bush around Coen, traipsing through the heat which pounded against them like fists. McLennan would not give up, and all Sheppard could do was watch as the ornithologist’s health deteriorated. Often he would stop, doubled over, coughing with such violence it seemed impossible that he could continue the search; but then, wiping his mouth, he would straighten himself and continue on, scanning the treetops with his binoculars.

After several days the bird still had not appeared, and McLennan’s retching cough had developed into full-blown tuberculosis. Finally he was forced to abandon the hunt, agreeing to let Sheppard take him to a Dr Paterson in Coen.6 Even then, after only a few days of respite, he returned to the bush with a deeply concerned Sheppard in tow.

It was in a paddock five miles out of Coen that McLennan happened upon two enormous venomous snakes. In all probability he caught them off guard. Taipans – like most snakes – do not cohabitate, and are only found together while mating, or when males are fighting for mates. Seizing his opportunity, McLennan shot them both.

Kneeling over the bodies of the colossal dead reptiles, a low, phlegmy cough churning at the back of his throat, McLennan must have realised he had stumbled upon something far more significant than the bird he had come for. Like Amalie Dietrich before him, McLennan knew of no snakes anything like these. They were red-eyed and cream-bellied, their backs a rusty brown that paled away at the snout. And they were huge. Contemporary newspaper reports suggesting one was more than ten feet long were probably exaggerated, though certainly the largest was close to three metres with a girth of twenty centimetres.7 When he prised open their mouths, he discovered that each had disproportionately large fangs.

After taking the animals back to his camp, McLennan used a specimen jar covered by a sheath of rubber to collect venom from both the taipans. He then shipped the dead animals south to the Australian Museum in Sydney, addressing them to James Roy Kinghorn, the zoologist in charge of reptiles and amphibians.

Kinghorn (a man who in later years would confess that he had never liked snakes) examined them and decided that they were not only members of a new species, but an entirely new genus. He dubbed the serpents Oxyuranus maclennani, moving one step closer to the final, definitive classification of the taipan.

The venom McLennan collected was significantly deteriorated, having been extracted from dead snakes and improperly stored in extreme heat for a time. Despite this, tests at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne showed it was one of the most toxic yet studied.

***

George Rosendale grew up in one of the most beautiful corners of the earth. Cape Bedford was a magical place of white-hot beaches and water blue as the great, watchful eye of some benevolent being. The sky was often cloudless, the jungle-clad mountains overlooking it all with a tranquillity so absolute it could make your ears ring. If Rosendale and his brothers climbed the trees on a clear day they could peer out above the canopies and see all the way to Cooktown.

Since 1886, Hope Valley at Cape Bedford had been a Lutheran Mission, the first of its kind in Far North Queensland. It was a highly regimented life: days were punctuated by bells that started at six in the morning, though Rosendale and his friends still had plenty of free time to play and explore. The children were happy.

Despite all this, the older Guugu Yimithirr bama made sure this next generation of their people understood that a series of catastrophes had brought them here, even if they believed in the goodness of most of the white men and women on the mission. Many of the families were on that land because government authorities had forcibly removed them from their traditional country.8

Some evenings, when the twilight had sunk in a hushed cool and the fire was spraying its embers into the surrounding dark, Rosendale’s mother would hold him close and tell him stories. Her large, brown eyes would wrinkle at the sides as she gazed down upon the plump boy in her lap, a boy whose ringlets partially concealed eyes that mirrored her own.

‘This is not where I’m from,’ she would say in Guugu Yimithirr, a language of gentle, bouncing consonants and purring vowels. ‘Years ago, when Aboriginal women had children to white men, they removed what they called the yellow ones.’

Rosendale gazed into the fire, imagining what these strange, yellow children might look like.

‘I was one of them,’ she went on. ‘My father was part Pakistani. But your grandmother wasn’t one of the yellow ones. She was an Aboriginal from Bloomfield. Guugu Yalanji – rainforest people. When I was eight, the troopers came and shot us out, men, women and children. Your grandmother and I managed to escape, but not for long.’

She stopped, the amber flare of the fire catching the moisture in her eyes. ‘The first time the white men took me and my sister away. We walked all the way back to Bloomfield. The second time they got me I was taken here, to Cape Bedford.’

These moments of openness were rare. For the most part, Rosendale’s mother found it difficult to share her pain with the children. Only when he was older would Rosendale learn the full truth: that his mother’s parents had been murdered by troopers, and that she had no idea what happened to her brothers and sister.9

Such stories must have been confusing and frightening to the young Rosendale, who rarely saw his mother show this kind of vulnerability. Her chest rose and fell more quickly than usual, and he lay a cheek against it, closing his eyes. Beneath the warm skin her heart beat its familiar, reassuring timbre.

Perhaps sensing his upset, the woman would stroke her son’s hair and bend downwards, pressing her lips against his forehead. ‘But I have forgiven them in my heart,’ she would say. ‘And I want all you children to do the same.’