Articles > Northern Territory: Crocs of Gold

The chopper swoops over the virulent green swamp, the powerful blades forcing the tall grass to bow into submission. We’ve taken the doors off to get better photos and the wind is whipping our hair about our faces: it’s all so M*A*S*H.

Suddenly, our chopper pilot and owner of Bullo River Station, Franz Ranacher, drops the chopper into the grass, kills the motor, pulls a Magnum .44 from beneath his seat, tucks it into the waistband of his shorts and charges off into the swamp. Pumps three bullets into a large black boar. Boar keeps running. One more to the head, and it stops and falls to the ground with a porcine grunt.

He slits the gut, hamstrings the pig, loops a rope into the groove he’s carved into the leg. Ties the pig to the chopper and we take off again, animal dangling below by one black hindquarter.

Swings toward the homestead, pulls up short, hovers over a large pen, cuts the pig free. The corpse drops 20 meters into the inky water with a black, rancorous splash.

There’s a twitch as the sludge subsides, and Franz nods, satisfied.

“Who said pigs can’t fly?” he asks with a small grin. “I was supposed to shoot a wallaby yesterday, then I ran out of time. But the crocs are fed now.”

Not many homes have crocodile pens in their back yard. But Bullo River Station’s back yard stretches for 500,000 acres into the Kimberly Plain, just inside the NT border. On a good run, it’s 10 hours’ drive to Darwin, three to Kununurra. In the Wet, it can take 2½ hours to travel the 76km to the front gate. Flying is advised.

It might be remote, but Bullo’s no stranger to the outside world. Former owner Sara Henderson described life in remote outback Australia in her bestselling memoir published in 1993, From Strength to Strength.

Fourteen years, a bitter legal dispute and a $3m debt later, Sara’s oldest daughter Marlee and her husband Franz are the owners of this iconic homestead. The transition is documented in Marlee’s own biography, Marlee’s Bullo: The Next Generation, which told of the battle between a mother, fighting breast cancer and intent on the sale of the iconic property at any cost, and her oldest daughter, Marlee, desperate to keep her home of 30 years.

“That was a pretty horrendous process,” says Marlee candidly over dinner, where she and Franz join us each night. “What I wrote was so much less than what actually happened. But my father raised us all to be very strong and very independent so, in a way, it was his own making.”

Candidness, it appears, is a family trait.

“I’ve created female monsters,” Charles Henderson told the TV program The Big Country, which in 1985 filmed an award-winning documentary, Henderson’s Daughters, later the inspiration for the internationally popular rural sitcom McLeods Daughters.

Marlee laughs at the difference between her own harsh lifestyle and the antics of the glam Channel 7 actresses.

“I have a four-second calf castration average,” she says with justifiable pride.

She’s a modest one: the 1985 doco shows a ravishing 22-year old Marlee, long curly hair, wide grin, candid blue eyes peering from under a battered bush hat, and that same energy is there when she and Franz talk about the property’s history and their plans for the future.

Bullo was one of the first Australian properties to muster by chopper – a necessity in a landscape of swamps, 40km-wide river mouths and wild rocky ranges, where father Charlie is now buried, his cross on a remote outcrop that we circle from the air.

The property currently runs 6000 cattle, which Franz and Marlee hope to grow to 9000 by evolving their own bloodstock, with 1000 head of wild buffalo thrown in as well as a plethora of indigenous animals – agile wallabies, plains turkeys, goannas, jabirus and, of course, crocodiles, including a pygmy crocodile found nowhere else in the world.

“At first we thought they were malnourished freshies (freshwater crocs) but they’re a species in their own right,” says Marlee. “They’re so cute, they’d make great pets. You literally could keep them in the living room, and they barely eat anything!”

Crocodiles as pets? I guess no-one’d have thought about a pet pygmy hippo till George Clooney came along.

Crocs aside, the diversity is so broad, it hurts to comprehend, but the couple’s oldest boy, 11-year-old Ben, who delights in freaking out guests by wrapping his pet python across his eyes, rattles off botanical and common names of the plants, animals and 200-odd species of birdlife as we belt though the property to view some Aboriginal rock art.

On the way, we startle a buffalo bull from his bath at a river crossing. Franz puts the big boy at about 800kg. Tonight, his mate’s on the barbie – dinner is buff burgers, salad and a couple of beers before bed. Just a few days in the fresh air and we’re eating like monsters.

Fresh muffins appear at elevenses, lunch is barramundi cakes fished from the property’s rivers and one of our mob, Mark, wins Best Eater award for knocking off a couple of cold buff burgers before an early morning horse ride, where three of us will push the poddy calves off the grass runway, out the front of the house. On the way, we check the croc pen. The pig is still intact, though in a different position – it’s been nudged so it’s lying on its back, four stiff legs pointing to the big outback sky.

“They’re watching him ripen, like blue cheese,” says Franz with satisfaction. There are two crocs in there, though you’d easily mistake the little one, at 11 feet, for, say, an old tractor tyre…with eyes. No-one’s spotted the biggie, at 15 feet, for a while, but he’s in there.

The croc catching is part of a plan to snare a much larger beast that patrols the waterways of the nearby Victoria River. At an estimated 22 feet long with a working title of ‘Bullo’, he’d be the largest crocodile in captivity if their plans to sell him to a US zoo come to fruition. The hurdles include not only snaring the beast, but keeping him alive. By the time they reach that size, crocs are almost octogenarians, and the muscle-thrashing that occurs during the catch can induce a fatal build-up of calcium. Then, rather than having the world’s biggest croc on your hands, all you’d have would be enough leather to shoe an army…

It’s all part of a plan to raise money for the homestead without further desecrating the land: in a nutshell, the sustainable harvest of wildlife will finance the safety of their habitat. And there are crocs to spare. Marlee remembers how one year, she was on a horse crossing a river, and a croc passed them by. “You stop breathing,” she says. “But he wasn’t hungry, so he just floated on.”

Other times, they weren’t so lucky, like when a crocodile killed a foal and mauled two horses just a half-kilometre from the house, at the end of their airstrip.

“It was 15 or 16 feet, judging by the teeth marks,” says Marlee, who then, like a housewife sharing baking tips, relays her tips for stitching horse wounds. “We used coat buttons to pull the flesh together over the wound where we could,” she explains, then pulls out the photo album to show a couple of traumatised horses missing great chunks of their hindquarters.

That’s a good enough reason for softy urbanites like us to stay only in the dry season. Unfortunately it’s too wet still to bring down a few buffalo bulls, but there’s still plenty to do. Sweating and puffing, we haul barramundi from the river’s edge – except mine keep getting thrown back by our fishing guide, Trevor, because they’re too small (southern anglers note, most things under half-a-meter are deemed too small up the Top End).

It’s hot, it’s dirty. It’s like nothing you’ve ever done before. It puts blisters on your hands and weird ideas in your head about running away to become a homestead cook or a ringer. It’s the sort of place that reminds you that missing the morning bus isn’t the end of the world, but that the end of the earth really isn’t such a bad place to be.

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