Noosa reptile sighting might be a croc, but I've been up close with the real thing
'At first I thought it was a bit of driftwood, but then it moved,' said local Ross Buckley, who was taking a sunrise stroll on Sunday morning. 'I quickly put the dog on the lead and kept my distance. Not sure what's going on with wildlife lately but this gave me a real fright.'
A few hours later, there was another sighting, this time by boatie James Graham, whose photo of his underwater 'fish finder' showed a crocodile-shaped image.
'Tell me that's not a croc – it's got the tail, it's got the snout,' he exclaimed. 'That's bizarre.'
Naturally, there was little reaction from the authorities, who are presumably looking for cane toads. A statement from the Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation said, 'we are … investigating the matter further.'
'The Boyne River near Gladstone, some 300 kilometres to the north, is commonly considered the southern boundary of typical crocodile habitat.'
The people of Noosa need to calm down. I grew up on an agricultural college in Papua New Guinea. In the 1960s, Fitzcarraldo -style, my father carved out a new community in the rainforest 50 kilometres outside Rabaul on the island of New Britain. But instead of building an opera house, he created a teaching farm; we had cattle, horses, pigs, about 50,000 species of insect and spiders so large they ate birds.
We also had crocodiles – the place was overrun with them, but no-one seemed to pay them much attention. My sisters and I would be taken to the beach for a swim with vague instructions about 'getting out of the water' at dusk because of the crocs. Our mother would then go back to reading The Feminine Mystique on the sand, untroubled by the possibility that she could go home with one fewer children than when she arrived.
One day my father announced with great fanfare that he was going to breed crocodiles. Did he not realise that he could simply drive to the beach, grab one by the tail and bring it back? But no; special equipment was purchased, eggs were harvested and placed inside an incubation chamber and we were taken to see the baby crocodiles hatch, the tiny horn on the top of their heads used to break open the shell.
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