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Big Ivory
The article “In Quest of Big Ivory” by Dr Henk Rall has drawn input from a number of readers. The opening page showed a photo of men standing with two pairs of very large elephant tusks and a car in the background which appears to date the photo as late 1940s. In the text, Dr Rall stated that the photo was given to him by Otilio de Vasconzalez of Mozambique, and that the two tusks on the right side of the photo each weighed roughly 240lbs, and the two on the left each weighed about 220lbs, the elephants having been shot at a waterhole south of Lourenço Marques on a Sunday morning by the German man appearing in the centre of the picture.
The readers raised various questions, but to cut to the crux, Bill Feldstein emailed the article to his friend, American hunter and author, Joe Coogan (who, incidentally, has just been awarded coveted John T Amber Award). Joe thought he recognised the central man in the photo as the late Wally Johnson, one of Mozambique’s most famous professional hunters of that era. Joe Coogan happens to be a personal friend of Wally Johnson’s son, Walter Johnson Junior, to whom he forwarded the article. Walter Jnr positively identified the central man in the photo as his father, Wally Johnson, and
