Transcript
RON KNIGHT: I think it's the same croc. It's a huge male. I've hunted him a couple of times, got close, but he's very smart, very wary of guns, very wary of people.
JOHNNY BLADES: Is it pretty hard to catch them and to shoot them?
RK: Yeah, the big ones.. It's probably over a hundred years old this thing. And he's already experienced everything from spears to... you know, he's probably been shot a couple of times with .22s and shotguns. So he knows the pain associated with rifles and guns. He's probably getting really really old now. It's harder for him to catch turtles, and he's gone on to something much easier and without a shell.
JB: Are crocodile attacks frequent there?
RK: In PNG they happen all the time, but in Manus itself you know we've... at one time we were losing at least one to two people a year. Now I think it's back up to seven a year. The worst part is the west coast of Manus, where I was brought up as well. We've got lots and lots and lots of crocs there. It's just so over-populated, they're even cannibalising themselves. People on the islands near those rivers and those marshes, at night they live on stilts in their houses, they don't walk around at night. Underneath the houses the crocs come up and walk around underneath and take their dogs. It's pretty much a nightmare.
JB: Do you think there's more crocodiles these days, with the warmer seas and things?
RK: Definitely, most definitely. When my Dad was here... my Dad came in 1954, right through the crocodile-shooting craze that happened. They shot almost all crocs out of Manus. What's happened is that when they banned shooting crocodiles the crocodiles have come back in a big way, they're an apex predator and nothing's taking their eggs. One crocodile can lay up to four or five hundred eggs, a big one. When they all hatch maybe fifty percent of those get through it, maybe twenty percent mature up to adults, and when we come to breeding season again, you know, it just explodes. The population has just exploded. Even in the main town in Lorengau, you can sit on the beach here and watch huge crocs swim past.
JB: Would you compare it to the Sepik region for crocodiles?
RK: Yeah. The individual rivers that I've been on up there...you can go up the Sepik and you see crocs on the river banks. You can do the same here too. Smaller rivers, smaller marshes, but I think our crocs are more oceanic. The big ones, the bigger they get, another one fights and pushes him out of the river, takes their place. They're territorial animals. The big ones they just go everywhere, travel all around Manus. Actually we've had people catch them two hundred miles out at sea. We've had a Korean purse seiner come in with a load of tuna with a croc in its net. In the 1990s I shot one down in a (local) river which was a nuisance croc, and it had a Department of north Queensland tag on it. So that gives you an idea of the distance it had travelled, from where ever in the northern territory to here.
They're just something people here have to live with. People have to paddle up rivers to go to attend to get sago or go to their gardens, and that's when the crocodiles take them. You have to be careful. People washing plates in the river have been dragged in. You have to paddle in the middle of the river, because if you disturb one of them, it'll jump off the (bank) and smash the canoe as it jumps in the water. So keep in the middle of the river. Nearly every person you talk to that goes up and down that river, there's multiple times that they run into crocs and the crocs have tried to turn them over and chase them up the river. So it's pretty bad.
JB: Is it enough of a problem that government or local level government try to counter, or is it just every man for himself kind of thing?
RK: Before I became a politician... my dad was the one who was cleaning them out. Every time somebody got killed, he'd go down there and shoot it, and we'd cut it open and drag the person out of it. And I took that over from him. I was doing that right up until 2012 (when entered parliament for five years), and I guess I'm going to be going back into that mode again. No there's not really any help... you know they send a police contingent up there, they've got no idea how to shoot crocodiles; they go and shoot a bunch of small ones, and never shoot any of the big ones. Usually when a big one takes a person, it'll go off the scene for a long time to digest what it's eaten, you have to find it, and it'll be up in the river or creek somewhere, and it's usually half in / half out of the water, in a sunny spot, trying to digest the food that's in its stomach. And you have to find it and scare it out and then shoot it from a distance.
JB: Do people consider crocodiles in any parts of the country as something revered or loved in any way?
RK: Yes. People here, when people are taken, some of them believe that their ancestors originated from the crocodile, and they have rights and things. And maybe some one was taken because he's been screwing around with somebody else's wife, or he's been a bad person in the community, or he's done something for the croc to take him. That sort of fatalist view is really big here, a lot of people...in fact a lot of people here do not eat crocodile, they think that if you touch crocodile your teeth will fall out, stuff like that.
