EXTRACTS

At Gan Gan camp in north-east Arnhem Land, things are simpler.

Gan Gan is where wealthy foreigners come to shoot water buffalo from the world’s last substantial wild herd.

Ferguson wants a bull with 100-inch-plus horns.

Out here, people talk American.

so the Australian dollar is not spoken of.

Gan Gan is an American enclave.

A young American girl shot a buffalo with horns in the high 90s the day before – Ferguson is anxious that his is bigger than hers.

This place is so remote, and humans so rarely seen, that buffaloes do not realise they are a target.

it is a great grey ship of a thing.

Ferguson has a rare $US25,000 Krieghoff with side-by-side barrels. It’s more like a small cannon and takes .500 Nitro Express rounds – huge, thudding bullets.

first shot is perfect. The bullet smashes the shoulder bone and passes through the lungs, causing the beast to buckle. It’s dead, only it doesn’t know it. It paws in silent, astounded protest and spins. Nash tells Ferguson to keep firing. Three more shots, all in the same place, and it sinks to the forest floor. Nash walks up and delivers a close-range lung shot, just to be sure.

“It’s called whacking and stacking,” says Dave. “Fantastic. Faaaantastic.”

Here there are no fences, no cages, just wildness.

Craig Boddington, 52, from Los Angeles, is the world’s most famous hunter-writer. His 18-year-old daughter, Brittany, is a self-described Valley Girl who has in the past few months overcome a hatred of her father’s occupation. The day before she had knelt before an approaching buffalo and taken it out at 10 metres with a cool heart shot. “He looked curious but intent,” she says. “He put his head down but then he put it up. And I shot him.”

There’s J.Y. Jones, 60, the evangelical eye surgeon from Georgia.

And there’s big, bad Bob Penfold, from Newcastle, NSW, who runs the Gan Gan safari.

All gather around the back of the Toyota. Dave’s horns are measured – 103 inches.

Most of the 80 to 100 foreign hunters who come to the Territory each year come through Penfold.

But he feels unloved.

There have been many attempts to run him out of the north.

“You guys have this gift of the buffaloes here and the bantengs up in the Cobourg that have been here since the 1830s,” says Boddington.

“I think you have a great resource in a beautiful part of the world. I came to take a buffalo and found a real big one but I think tourism opportunities are untouched here. It doesn’t all have to be consumptive. There’s great fishing and photographic opportunities. I think Australia is missing the boat.

“The water buffalo is a very big, very impressive beast – and he certainly can be dangerous. Animals like that are fascinating to hunters. The accident of geography is that there’s really no place in Asia where you can hunt buffalo on their native range. Although the wild buffalo are still there, this is the only place. Asia is politically unstable and untenable. Americans feel wonderfully comfortable here in Australia and you guys speak some form of English.”

The argument goes: by bringing hunters in, animals that are old and forced to the fringes of the herd – in Gan Gan, they shoot older bulls which have wandered off and are no longer part of the reproductive cycle – are given a “value”.

Bob Penfold .... He’s the one that makes it happen; the one who knows what rich hunters want. He’s a bruiser. If the old buffalo are going to die on the wetlands anyway, he says let a rich American or German pay to kill them.

He only understands hunters and the herd.

“This is paradise, mate,” he says, staring at four old bulls grazing deep in the mighty floodplain.

We’ve looked at it with a helicopter, we think there’s 4000, 5000 buffalo here. We sustain an annual harvest of 30, 40 big old bulls without affecting the population.

Hunters don’t hate nature. They just see it through a scope. l