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A Christian shooting party

Date
September 8, 2012

They love firearms, hunting … and Jesus. In outback NSW, Jack Marx joins Steve “I Like Guns” Lee and crew for 24 hours in pursuit of feral pigs.

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/a-christian-shooting-party-20120903-2593n.html

Shots in the dark … Steve Lee with his dog Frankie on a shoot in far Western NSW. Photo: Mark Quade

Out here in the dark, the only evidence that says we are on planet Earth is the moon. Nothing else looks familiar. We are in the extreme outback of western NSW, an hour north of Wilcannia, in the middle of the night, when it's so cold tears stream down your face in search of a warmer place to burrow.

Our vehicle is little more than a dune buggy with a mounted spotlight, which scans the black landscape for any sign of life, illuminating lone dead trees that loom out of the darkness like ghostly fossilised lightning bolts planted upside down. That anything might live out here seems as unlikely as the idea of chickens on Mars. But things do live in this desolate place - foxes, goats, roos and pigs - and that is why we are here.

The driver kills the engine suddenly. Something has been seen in the distance; two twinkles far away, like tiny flames on the ends of matches. They belong to a fox, I am told. Foxes have not yet made the connection between the spotlight and death. They sit tight, wait for the danger to pass, little realising the reflected light from their eyes is providing a hunter with a perfect target. It's an eerie few moments as the shooter quietly aims while those eyes flicker in the dark. A shot cracks through the silence and the little flames go out, extinguished forever.
Hunters and gatherers … (from left) Matt Melhuish, Steve and Jarod Lee pose with the feral pigs killed after a shoot near Wilcannia, in far western NSW.

Some time later, the buggy engine surges as the spotlight catches something darting through the scrub. It is a feral pig, its rear end bouncing atop short, skinny legs that seem entirely unsuited to the body, let alone a high-speed chase across the desert. We close in and brake as the shooter takes aim. One deafening shot is all it takes for the pig to hit the dirt. As we drive up to the kill and the engine in the buggy dies down, there is a sound that at first I imagine to be a troublesome wheeze in our vehicle's mechanics. It is only when the engine comes to a complete stop that I realise the true source.

Hunters and gatherers … (from left) Matt Melhuish, Steve and Jarod Lee pose with the feral pigs killed after a shoot near Wilcannia, in far western NSW. Photo: Courtesy of Steve Lee

The pig, a male, is lying on his side, paralysed, gut shot, one horrified eye rolled back into the spotlight from which he can no longer escape. His screaming is incredible - the sound of a creature in terror more than pain - and it's frightfully human, pumping like the squeals of a newborn baby. A figure with a knife jumps from the buggy and puts an end to the sound.

In the wake of the recent shootings in Colorado and Oklahoma, the debate in the US between the anti-gun lobby and those who hold fast to the Second Amendment is once again at high torque. The arguments never change much, save for the statistics, which are fiddled, manipulated and misinterpreted to suit one argument or another. What is certain is that guns will never be swept from the face of the Earth, or kept from the hands of the criminal or insane. Like the laws that seek to corral our enthusiasm for tobacco and illicit drugs, gun legislation is little more than a prayer that can only be answered if everyone speaks it at once, and there are too many non-believers.
The terminator … Steve Lee and Frankie hunt foxes just outside the NSW town of Parkes.

The terminator … Steve Lee and Frankie hunt foxes just outside the NSW town of Parkes. Photo: Mark Quade

"Registration of guns is ridiculous," says 45-year-old musician, pyrotechnics expert and contract shooter Steve Lee. "The guns owned by criminals are all unregistered. The only people who register their guns are people like me who do the right thing, so what's the point? The registration laws get tighter and tighter on the gun owners nobody had to worry about in the first place. Meanwhile, the criminals keep buying guns from overseas and don't bother registering them. It's a joke."

Lee might be the Australian face of the pro-gun lobby. Born and bred in Broken Hill, he began shooting as a boy with his Pentecostal minister father, exterminating the rabbits, goats and roos that were making nuisances of themselves on outback stations. Three years ago, having settled with his wife and children in the central-western NSW town of Parkes, Lee released a song on YouTube entitled I Like Guns, a loping, blue-sky country tune with an accompanying video of a smiling Lee blowing away cans, capsicums and melons with weapons of increasing calibre, the final frame showing a Toyota Camry being utterly destroyed by a rocket launcher. The video went viral in the US, more than four million views launching Lee as an internet hit. As a result, he is the guest of honour at shooting parties from Canada to the deep south, full of people keen to have their arsenals graced by the presence of Steve "I Like Guns" Lee.

"It's kicked open doors for my shooting career more so than my music career," he says. "But it was really just a friendly presentation about my love of guns. It said, 'I'm a normal guy, I like guns and I'm not to be feared.' That's the message I was hoping would come across."

For some, that message was garbled in translation. "Ah, yes ... Mr Nauseating," says John Crook, president of Gun Control Australia, when I mention Steve Lee's name. "Immaturity is one of the major marks of the shooting fraternity. They think that just because they like something it must be good, and they seek to mask their ill intent through such trivial things as songs."

But no such critics are here tonight, the campfire encircled by a hunting crew hand-picked by Lee, the undisputed leader of the party. Lee's 24-year-old son, Jarod, a youth worker and small-business owner, calls his father by his full name - "Steve Lee" - which he explains is an acknowledgment of "not my dad Steve Lee, but big, famous internet sensation Steve Lee". Matt Melhuish is a diesel mechanic and boilermaker in his early 20s. Michael Greenland is a real-estate investor and family man. Four young men with seemingly little in common, save a love of guns. And, as it turns out, God.

"A lot of people might find it ironic that we're Christians who like killing animals," says Lee, "but there's not really any conflict there at all. As Christians, we believe that man is above the animal, that God gave us authority over all other creatures. A great responsibility comes with that ... we try not to be cruel to the animals. But, basically, we believe that if everyone lived a good Christian lifestyle, there'd be no need for gun laws."

Jarod is more circumspect. "People think that churches are full of good people," he says, "but the reverse is true. Churches are full of bad people. Sinners. They are who churches are for."

In the US, there is a strong synergy between Christianity and gun ownership, the cry of "babies, guns and Jesus" being a rallying call in the country's Bible Belt. Steve Lee has witnessed it up close, and it's strange even to him - he tells of an automatic-weapons convention at which the assembled bowed their heads and prayed before spraying the targets with an unholy volley of heavy-calibre firepower. "They're crazy over there," he says.

Here in Australia, a nation founded by police and criminals, the gun doesn't enjoy the same reverent place in folklore - one never hears it said that the gun conquered the outback. But hunting has been a part of Australian existence since long before the colonists came. The gun merely changed the projectile.

"Killing animals is a part of country life," says Lee. "There's no getting around that, and it's something people from the cities have a hard time appreciating. Those cattle are going to the abattoir no matter what, and it's easier for people to not think about how that steak came to be on their plate. There is a lot of death that went into that steak - not just the animal that is being eaten, but the pests that had to be eradicated in order for the cattle to be properly managed. Hunting is definitely about killing. It's the way of the bush."

Lee is probably right when he speculates that your average city-dweller's appreciation of guns is limited to "what they see on television": the slick hoodlum cocking his pistol to the side as he wantonly blows away his enemy. One has to actually fire a gun to fully understand how mad one would have to be to deliberately shoot another human so effortlessly. The sound alone is frightful, jarring the brain with a sonic force to which no cinema speaker system could ever do justice. And there's something about the speed of it all - the kickback jolting the body at the very same moment the target is destroyed - that fills a first-time shooter with a peculiar mixture of power and dread. The idea of putting a human at the end of that transaction is almost unthinkable.

"Because I hunt, I understand the power of firearms and the destruction they can cause," says Lee. "Quite honestly, the part I like least about hunting is taking a life, as crazy as that may sound. The thing I like most about hunting is having a purpose to be in the bush, or wherever I am. I travel the world hunting but it's just a reason to be there. I could be taking photographs, I guess, but my choice is to shoot guns. It's what I do.

"But I struggle with the idea of shooting a person," he says, "even under such conditions as defending my family or my home. If it came to the crunch, I'd rather let someone walk away with my possessions than take a life."

In the morning's wee hours, an incident occurs that might have ended in disaster for Lee and poetic justice in the eyes of his detractors. After feasting on a goat shot by Lee and rotisseried over the campfire, we bed down for the night under the stars, Lee dozing off on a fold-out stretcher that suspends him a body-width above the ground. Unable to sleep, I am startled by a thumping sound which at first I suspect to be an approaching animal. I turn in my sleeping bag to see a log has escaped from the fire and rolled downhill, coming to rest under Steve Lee's stretcher, from which smoke now billows as the red-hot log smoulders beneath the sleeper above. Lee, hero to the pro-gun lobby, nemesis of the gun-control and animal-liberation community, is very nearly barbecued over the same fire that had cooked his daily prey.

For Lee, the fact I woke to prevent such an ironic end was "an act of God".

At dawn, we set off in a four-pronged attack on the beasts of the plains, Steve Lee and Greenland on dirt bikes, Jarod Lee on a quad bike and myself as passenger on Melhuish's Yamaha "Rhino", an appropriately named four-wheel tub with a 686cc four-valve engine and little else besides, its dearth of moving parts making it perfect for traversing this harsh terrain.

One might think of the outback as flat and featureless: "The vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended," as Banjo Paterson observed. Up close, however, it's treacherous and changes quickly, from salt plains to sand dunes, muddy marshes to parched fields where only wicked things grow, such as the "three-headed jack", a monstrous bindi-eye that really lets you know when it's under your skin. This is a land where only the most hardy survive.

We hunt as a wolf pack, fanning out on the landscape in the hope of herding prey into each other's sights. Were we hunting kangaroos it would be a turkey shoot - they're everywhere, and to see them effortlessly bounding across this wild obstacle course of saltbush, dunes and hidden craters is to witness one of nature's most remarkable feats of engineering. "I hate shooting kangaroos," says Lee. "I hate shooting any native animal. Of course, if their numbers get too great, sometimes it just has to be done."

But not today. On this hunt our prey is the feral pig (Sus scrofa), an ugly, smelly, destructive creature that causes headaches for pastoralists from Darwin and Cape York all the way to the Victorian border. Introduced to Australia when the First Fleet arrived, pigs escaped into the bush and mutated, adapting to the outback and reproducing at a rate of up to two litters of 10 piglets per sow every year. Aside from being reservoirs for diseases such as foot-and-mouth and devouring local lamb stock, feral pigs burrow into the earth in search of vegetation roots, and the wreckage a mob of pigs leaves in its wake has to be seen to be believed - it's as if a pitched battle has been fought on land from which nothing will ever grow again. Moreover, Lee says, it is believed by some that pigs get a "sexual thrill" from drilling their snouts into the earth - another good reason to put the beasts out of their perverted misery.

Pigs aren't particularly nimble - they do not run with the grace of dogs or the speed of cats, but with an ungainly sort of gallop that suggests they'll be out of puff within a few metres. Frustratingly for hunters, however, pigs have boundless resources of energy in reserve, and are capable of hitting an overdrive switch the moment they feel a pursuer is upon them - a situation that can lead to an afternoon of slapstick for the hunter trying to catch a pig with anything slower than a bullet.

Pigs are also excellent at hide-and-seek, adept at judging the right size of a bush under which to burrow and keep mum until danger has passed. What gives them away is their smell, a putrid, rotting stink that rides on the breeze and even overpowers the Rhino's exhaust.

Pigs sometimes wander in mobs, but the boars tend to scavenge alone and are difficult to spot. Lee says hunting is defined by the long stretches between kills when nothing happens, a maxim he proved to me weeks earlier in the bush outside Parkes, as he lay in the scrub for hours blowing a whistle to attract foxes that never came. (In a somewhat brutal irony, the whistle emulates the scream of an injured rabbit, thus luring any opportunistic fox to its own doom.)

But stealth isn't the name of the game today, our engines alerting pigs to our approach. We scan the landscape for movement, distant blackened shapes revealing themselves through their motion: roos bounce, emus float, goats canter. The pig, his size camouflaging him beneath the tumbleweed outback flora, tends to scuttle between the bushes, rather like a cockroach. You have to be looking in exactly the right place at the right time.

Melhuish spots something and the Rhino's engine roars into overdrive, sending us thumping across the plain and over bushes that crumble under our wheels. It's a family of pigs - a boar, a sow and three piglets - bolting into a clearing. We close in, near enough to see their faces, the mouths of the little ones open as they pant along behind their parents. Melhuish hits the brakes, stands and opens up with his lever-action .30-30. The sow falls first, then the boar, brought down by Steve Lee's pump-action .308. The piglets stop, turn to their fallen parents and scream. Their horror doesn't last long.

One might think there'd be a kinder way to do this but, as Melhuish explains, there isn't. Poison baiting or trapping carries the risk of killing native animals, and "dogging" - hunting with pig dogs - is cruel.

"The dogs maul the pigs alive," says Melhuish. "It's a little bit inhumane for me. The best way is to get a clean shot and put the pig down fast."

This attention to mercy is plainly illustrated late in the afternoon. The hunters are keeping a tally of kills - Greenland has shot five pigs, Jarod Lee 10, Steve Lee 31 and Melhuish 11. Though there is little talk of a competition, the fact that personal tallies are being noted is testament to it - so, too, is the fact the wolf pack has fallen apart, the hunters now spread out across the land, out of sight, each on a personal mission to bag some scalps before the sun goes down. Melhuish spots a mob of four pigs darting through the scrub. He turns the Rhino into the brush, herding the pigs out into a clearing that extends to a line of trees at least a kilometre away. They have no chance.

Melhuish drives right up behind the mob, cuts the engine, unclips his weapon and stands. He pulls off four quick shots in succession. Three pigs go down, but the fourth has eluded the bullet, taking a sharp right as he bolts for the trees far in the distance. Melhuish's 15th scalp is just a short drive and a shot away - he's got all the time in the world - but he climbs from the Rhino with a knife in his hand, declaring he'd better "take care" of the others. By the time he returns, the fourth pig is just a speck, a wisp of red dust advertising his entry into the safety of the trees. At this moment, he's undoubtedly the luckiest pig on earth. The rest of the kill is left to rot or be eaten by scavengers.

In not much more than 24 hours, this Christian shooting party eliminated 60 feral pigs, a half-dozen foxes and one goat. For the man who owns this wild, 290,000-hectare property, it's a blessing. For those opposed to guns, or dedicated to the rights of all creatures, it's surely something else.

I don't know what to think. It was powerful, exhilarating and horrifying at once. As if to frame the dilemma, the bus on the way home to Broken Hill from Wilcannia struck and killed two kangaroos - the bus didn't stop, nobody blanched. I just wish I could get the sound of that screaming pig out of my mind. And the vision of those little ones, galloping helplessly after their parents, makes me dwell a bit too much upon my own.

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John aka NitroX

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

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