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Natural born killers

"The Bulletin"
28/07/2004
By Paul Toohey

Deep in the wilds of Arnhem Land, big-spending American trophy hunters are setting their sights on a not-so-elusive prey.

Dave Ferguson rode a motorbike off a cliff in 1966, became a computer chip genius for Intel and got rich. But he never got the use of his legs back. His obsession in retirement is shooting wild animals. Several years ago he went to Kyrgyzstan to bag a Marco Polo sheep. He was dragged up a mountainside by a horse with a rope attached to his wheelchair. That didn’t get him a sheep, so his guides mounted his chair on the saddle and took him beyond 15,000 feet (4572m), where he was able to take a long shot at one of the elusive and prized trophy creatures.
At Gan Gan camp in north-east Arnhem Land, things are simpler. Ferguson, 59, is lifted by the wheelchair on to the back of a Toyota LandCruiser ute and lashed on tight. 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. Horns are measured by taking the circumference at the base of each horn, then measuring base to tip – in imperial; 4WDs are “jeeps”; hunters pay their Australian guides $US500-plus cash tips, so the Australian dollar is not spoken of. Gan Gan is an American enclave.

Setting off at dawn for the huge floodplain north of camp, buffalo can be made out in the leaning woodland light. All attract passing interest but none appears to be 100-inch-plus. Simon Nash, 21, Ferguson’s guide for the day, knows his client doesn’t want some lesser creature. 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.

The animal has its head down in a swamp, eating. On its back is a white bird, exercising its symbiotic right to the buffalo’s parasites. This place is so remote, and humans so rarely seen, that buffaloes do not realise they are a target. This one shows little interest but Nash is carefully appraising it through the binoculars. He’s not certain it’s got the full 100-inches of hornwork.

There is another problem. We’ve pulled up on the edge of the floodplain and the buffalo is 75m away, knee-deep in heavy mud. Ferguson, like all hunters, is going to want a photo of himself alongside the dead animal. It will be too hard to carry Dave out to its final resting place in the mud; and the winch cable on the Toyota is too short to haul the buffalo back to dry land.

So it’s a waiting game. Finally the buffalo ambles off the floodplain to escape the sun. It momentarily disappears into the stringybark forest but, by now, five or six of the swamp birds are hanging off its back. Like a conspiracy of Judases, they flash upwards every time the buffalo moves and reveal its position.

The buffalo stops and the Toyota stops. Nash is still worried about the size of the horns; but more worried that Ferguson might not find a bigger animal. Ferguson is excited. Rifle in hand and heart racing. He suddenly admits he’s not fussed about record books or even the girl back in camp – he just wants a big buffalo. And it is a great grey ship of a thing.

Now the buffalo is alarmed and sets off at pace. The decision is made. Nash accelerates and cuts off the buffalo, abruptly positioning the vehicle at an angle where Ferguson can get a shot, from his chair, through the stringybarks. 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. Nash is standing by with his .458 Winchester magnum workhorse, just in case anything goes wrong.

The swamp birds have long abandoned their big bush friend. The animal stands, 30m away, and turns to look at Dave. The 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.

Dave Ferguson has paid US$7500 to come to Gan Gan to do this. That doesn’t include his airfare to and from Australia. How does it feel? “It’s called whacking and stacking,” says Dave. “Fantastic. Faaaantastic.”

Ferguson knows that in this world, he can shoot any kind of animal he cares to name. For the right price it can be delivered to his door. He can kill it in a paddock, or a pen. It’s called “estate” hunting in the United States, and hunters like Dave detest it. Here there are no fences, no cages, just wildness.

Now the guides really earn their money. After photos are taken, the front half of the buffalo’s hide is flayed from the carcass and the head is severed. This is the “cape”, which will be further refined back in camp by cutting the leather carefully from the face and turning the whole thing – even ears and lips – inside out. It will be salted and the skull will have its brains boiled then water-blasted out. It will be sent on to North America so Dave can get it mounted by a taxidermist.

We drive away, leaving 80% of the headless bull sprawled on the ground. The dingoes and pigs will eat well tonight.

There’s hot water and home-cooked dinners. There’s Dave, from Nevada, and his travelling companion Jean. 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. There are the hunting guides, Simon, Pete and Matt, and the camp cook, Joy. 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. He’s made it over the magic threshold, which earns him a round of backslapping. This will give Dave all the bragging rights he needs back home and will mean more good business for Penfold.

These hunters do not arrive in the Territory on spec. Penfold travels to hunting conferences in Nevada and Texas every year and stands at stalls selling safari packages. His company, Hunt Australia, is by far the biggest outfitter in Australia and the South Pacific. 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.

Serious customers come to the Territory for two animals: the banteng, an Indonesian cow which has gone feral in Gurig National Park, on Cobourg Peninsula, and is regarded as a must-have trophy; and the Territory water buffalo, which rates even higher – among the top 10 of international trophy species.

Penfold has been prevented from gaining hunting concessions on the Aboriginal-owned Cobourg and the Northern Land Council has tried to deny him entry permits to Arnhem Land. But Penfold has thwarted them in Arnhem Land by a careful reading of the Aboriginal Land Act. He doesn’t need a permit to enter Gan Gan – just permission from a traditional owner.

And Gawirrin Gumana, responsible for Gan Gan wetlands – and otherwise known as the winner of the 2002 Telstra Art Award – knows the benefits of letting Penfold’s hunters trim his vast buffalo herd. For every buffalo shot, Gumana gets about $1500. By the end of the hunting season, he’s making serious easy money – and selling lesser artworks to the hunters.

It’s Penfold’s abrasive, bulldozer attitude that has seen him so despised by other Top End outfitters and the NLC, which controls most of the land the hunters want to access. They don’t like the way foreign hunters seem to prefer Penfold; or the way he avoids Aboriginal bureaucracy by dealing direct with landowners. In 2002, Penfold won the Territory’s biggest defamation action against the NLC, which apologised and paid him $550,000 in damages for spreading malicious rumours about his operation.

The jealousy and infighting among Top End outfitters has seen New Zealand, where hunters shoot feral deer, leap ahead as the region’s foremost hunting destination. There, hunters are welcomed. In Australia, they’re sneered at or not understood. Boddington – whose name is known to every active hunter in the world, and who writes strictly pro-hunting articles – cannot understand it.

“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. “And over the last 30, 40 years, your country has been doing everything humanly possible to eradicate them. Fortunately, the animals won and they’re now increasing.

“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.”

Boddington has enjoyed this hunt for personal reasons – his daughter’s lethal epiphany. “It’s been a great thing for me,” he says. “In her teenage years she was very much against the whole thing, didn’t want anything to do with it, didn’t want to talk about it. So we never argued about it. And suddenly last year she said she’d give this a try. And I said, ‘Hallelujah, let’s do that’.”

Someone said “Hallelujah”. Not that the 52-year-old Boddington, a veteran of two Gulf Wars and a general in the Marine reserves, is hammering the Bible. J.Y. Jones is. Before dinner, on his last night in camp, J.Y. asks all present if they would mind if he said grace, where he gives extensive thanks for his buffalo and his newfound friends. J.Y. has written a book, Lightspeed to Babylon, in which he hypothesises – from his interpretation of the Book of Revelation – that the Antichrist will come soon, in the form of an animal liberationist.

J.Y. is a creationist who says the world was made at best 7000 to 6000 years ago. In the intervening years, he says, the Dinosaur Age has come and gone. Carbon dating is a lie. He tells the dinner guests that “Allah is the Satan”; but when it is pointed out that Allah is just another word for God, one of the guides coughs and says: “Tell us about that buffalo you shot, J.Y.”

One thing J.Y. has in common with all big-game hunters is the view that they are the only true animal conservationists. The argument is learned rote by hunters the world over. And they’ll tell you killing an animal is the least enjoyable part of a hunt. Bob Penfold talks of the 10 years he spent travelling the world looking for a big elk. When he finally found one in Mongolia, he got choked up. “I laid down with this great golden animal, lying there on the snowy green grass, and just held it. Tears in my eyes. I like to sit with my animals.”

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”. Animals that are “worthless” or causing problems to villagers, particularly in Africa, should be shot. The government gets a trophy fee, the villagers get a fee and the meat.

In Australia, governments seem to find the trade grubby. They take no fees. Hunting may be in fact the only industry into which they haven’t stuck their tax-sticky fingers. It is entirely self-regulated.

“The buffalo is worth nothing unless it’s harvested,” says Penfold. “They just die. It would be much better to have this international currency. We let people come here and take our coal and uranium. If they shoot a buffalo, all they take is the horns. And photographs. They stay in hotels, hire cars, charter planes. They don’t take anything – they just leave $20,000.”

They also leave most of the carcass. But no one wants to sit down to an old bull buffalo steak. At Gan Gan, there are no starving tribespeople waiting for bwana to bring fresh buffalo meat, although you get the idea that some of the “ethical” American hunters, who feel guilty about the waste in their kills, wish there were.

As a self-proclaimed ethical hunter, J.Y. is troubled by this, but sees the economic value he brings. He says he does not enjoy killing any animal but does like making a true shot. “The hunter who is an ethical hunter – not of the individual animal, because it is going to be killed, but of the species – is the man who is going to do his best to make a good shot and the animal will die as painlessly as possible,” he says.

“In the case of my banteng and my buffalo, I aimed at their ears. One shot for each animal. They went down as if someone had chopped their heads off.”

Bill Bowman, a gay Republican from Detroit, is not what the hunters at Gan Gan would call ethical. Bowman wasn’t at Gan Gan but The Bulletin caught up with him in Darwin. He’d spent a month in the Territory in which he killed 300 animals.

Bowman, 46, is a culler and a killer. On a previous trip, he too shot a Gan Gan buffalo. But he likes going on cattle-station hunts and taking down donkeys, horses, anything feral. He’s a numbers man.

“My friends say I’m going to hell,” he says. Asked whether being gay had anything to do with hunting, Bowman says: “It doesn’t come into the equation. Although the Safari Club International convention in Reno, which they hold every year, does seem a terribly straight event. But it’s not a factor. I mean, it’s unusual. It does tend to alienate me from many in the gay community. Me being a Republican doesn’t help either.”

Bowman is a malevolent, likeable person. “I’ve seen donkeys take a shot no other animal could take and put their head down and start eating again. They don’t know they’re dead yet. They don’t have brains. Well, they do actually. I’ve had donkey brains all over me.”

Bowman has seen the Clint Eastwood film White Hunter, Black Heart, in which Eastwood, playing film director John Huston, is hell-bent on shooting an elephant. He is told that it is a crime to shoot an elephant. Huston’s Eastwood replies, “No, it’s a sin” – and pulls the trigger.

“I saw that movie, it’s a wonderful movie, it was shot in Kenya,” says Bowman. “A lot to relate to in that movie. The moral turmoil you go through sometimes before you pull the trigger. It was just on this last trip (to Africa) that I finally shot me a kudu. And the trips before that, I had opportunities and I just said to myself, ‘No.’ I couldn’t do it. It’s such a magnificent looking animal. And yes, you do go through turmoil. I do. You wonder about your motives and you question what you are doing before you dispatch that animal.”

But something in Bill always makes the decision for him. “I think about it for a second or two and then I pull the trigger. The flipside of it is in Africa, in particular, if you did not have the income stream coming in from hunting, there is no other available rationale or resource for keeping animals in Africa. If I wasn’t bringing money in there by shooting that animal, the locals would be butchering those animals to eat.”

Like most other foreign hunters, Bowman brings his own rifle and ammunition into Australia. It’s not much of a hassle to arrange with the airlines – just requires a lot of paperwork. Ammo and rifle are separated and taken in the hold then collected at the other end off customs. In order to use the guns here, hunters need an NT shooter’s licence.

We don’t have any great native icon animals in Australia. Not for shooting, anyway. “No, you don’t,” says Bowman. “They don’t have that showroom appeal to them as Africa.” Blasting a kangaroo is frowned upon by foreign hunters and – for some reason – they care little for the current debate in Australia about allowing a wild crocodile cull. They’re horns and hooves people.

Even an animal removalist like Bowman demands more than summary execution – which is why he’d never shoot a penned animal. “On these trips it’s literally like living a Hemingway novel,” he says. “After a couple of days you no longer know what day of the week it is – and you no longer care.”

Bowman describes the first time he saw the great wild herd of Gan Gan – estimated to run to 5000 buffalo. “It’s right on the edge of the Blue Mud Bay,” he says. “There’s a floodplain right out there by the Koolatong River and to get there you leave the camp, take a jeep ride to this little bitty lake, you get into a boat, you ride across maybe 300 metres, you get into other jeeps, you’re in heavy brush mostly, until you come out of that and you’re standing there at this very large floodplain which has gotta be four, five kilometres wide, and as deep as you can see.

“Out in the floodplain you’ll start to see water buffalo dotted around. And as you stop and start scanning around the plain you’ll start picking up buffalo in the hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds. The trouble becomes which one to bag – and then getting to it.”

Bob Penfold is 62. He’s had a “gutful” of the Territory, with its bad-attitude hunting politics. He says he’ll pull out next year, but he won’t. 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.

“I don’t know why Australia is so reluctant,” says Boddington, who will go home to LA and write to the hunting world about Gan Gan – a place most Australians know nothing about. “It could be that these buffalo are not native animals and therefore you don’t place the same value on them that we in the international community place on them,” he says. “I don’t know. It seems strange.”

As for Penfold, his view of Gan Gan is not based on any understanding of the complex Aboriginal history of the area, which he wrongly imagines doesn’t exist. He only understands hunters and the herd.

“This is paradise, mate,” he says, staring at four old bulls grazing deep in the mighty floodplain. “Nobody’s ever been here – no Aborigines, no Australians. There’s such an abundance of greenery, the water is permanent, the buffaloes just live here. 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. It’s a viable safari option. When that gun goes bang, the sky is just black with ducks and birds.”

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

Natural Born Killers

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John aka NitroX

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Govt get out of our lives NOW!
"I love the smell of cordite in the morning."
"A Sharp spear needs no polish"