Snake-Bitten: Eric Worrell and the Australian Reptile Park

By Kevin Markwell and Nancy Cushing

Based on extensive interviews with park staff and supporters, this intriguing biography traces the life of Eric Worrell, the original reptile man and naturalist who established the Australian Reptile Park in New South Wales. Depicting Worrell's larger-than-life personality and his pioneer work with snake anti-venins, this inspiring story shows how the herpetologist began his career in wildlife tourism, conservation, education, and research. Containing detailed accounts of the collection of various reptiles kept at the iconic tourist attraction, this record is an essential read for nature enthusiasts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781742240145

Kevin Markwell

Kevin Markwell is Associate Professor at the School of Business and Tourism, Southern Cross University, Australia. His research focuses on human-animal studies, tourist-nature relationships, wildlife tourism and gay tourism.

Book preview

significant.

Introduction:

The only good snake is a dead snake?

Ayoung girl stares in quiet fascination as a small green python slides effortlessly out of its dry wafery skin to reveal its vivid, flawless body. People gather around a large case, mesmerised by a 3-metre-long king cobra as it methodically pokes its fist-sized head into nooks and crannies within its exhibit, searching for something to eat. The two snakes ignore the onlookers but the humans are transfixed by their sinuous grace. Since the Australian Reptile Park first opened its doors to the public, millions of visitors just like these have come to gaze at one of the largest collections of deadly snakes on public display.

Snakes seem to us almost other-worldly creatures. They are so unlike us. They have no limbs and slide on their bellies, gazing about with lidless eyes. They are silent except for their hiss, emitted through a mouth that can swallow prey many times greater in circumference and weight than the snake itself. These mouths often conceal fangs that can deliver a deadly toxin. Snakes hide under rocks or in foliage and often seem to appear from nowhere. When they feel under threat, most can strike with considerable speed, agility and accuracy. As a result, snakes both fascinate and repulse; and they have been stigmatised in Western cultures as far back as the story of the Garden of Eden and the snake’s temptation of Eve.

A deep-seated anxiety about snakes was carried to Australia, stowed in the cultural baggage of British colonists, and passed down for generations. Some people believed snakes could turn themselves into hoops to roll faster than a man could run; suck the milk right out of a cow’s udder; and swallow their young to protect them. It was thought that when a snake was dealt a lethal blow, if its body twitched, it would not die until after sundown. Snakes were supposed to have the power to hypnotise their prey into a trancelike state before covering them in slime in readiness for ingestion. All snakes, regardless of size or species, were assumed to be capable of a lethal bite and to be eagerly awaiting the opportunity to inflict one on any unwary man, woman or child. Snakes, cold blooded and scaly, were not animals with which most people could easily empathise. The fact that some of them were potential killers of humans and livestock made them outsider animals that had no value and deserved persecution.

Indeed, Australians prided themselves on their killing of snakes. They displayed their mangled, lifeless bodies along fences and in photographs; they held picnic days for group snake hunts in which hundreds of snakes were killed; and they read stories in which snakes were nasty, malevolent beings. Having grown up on lonely selectors’ blocks with his mother Louisa managing as best she could, Henry Lawson drew a compelling picture of the solitary life of a colonial woman in The Drover’s Wife, the air of desperation to her life made all the more desperate by her discovery of a black snake within the walls of her house. Her husband far away droving, without neighbours and fearful for her children, she remained vigilant all night, until the following morning when their loyal dog crushed the snake’s head and broke its back. This snake remains a metaphor for the seeming hostility and danger of the Australian bush. In May Gibbs’s children’s classics, Mrs Snake is the wicked force seeking to hypnotise and terrorise the innocent gumnut babies. Steeped in tales of threatening snakes from childhood, Australians embraced the folk saying ‘the only good snake is a dead snake’.

Captain Watkin Tench, an officer who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, actually thought that the snakes common along rivers and sandstone cliffs were all nonvenomous.¹ Soon, the colonists were learning that the situation wasn’t quite so straightforward. Convict William Noah wrote, in 1798, that the Sydney region had ‘a Vast Number of Snakes of Various Colour & very Large & none Venimous [sic] But the Black Ones they are’.² By 1809, the colonists had gained more experience with Australia’s snakes and fear was mounting. Naturalist and surgeon on the Hindostan, Joseph Arnold, reported that what frightened him most of all about the new land were the dangerous serpents, ‘the bites of which are certain death’.³

Snakebite was not an especially common occurrence in the new colony, though, even as the first European settlers set about clearing and working the land. Fatalities occurred in perhaps less than 10 per cent of bites, but the lack of recorded deaths did not prevent a growing hysteria. Surveyor William Govett, who was working in the NSW Blue Mountains in the 1820s, viewed the black snake as an inveterate enemy and confessed that he wasted many hours on the government payroll searching the bush for snakes to kill. He thought it amusing to cut off the head of a black snake, wind the body around his arm and hold the head in his hand, waving his arm about to frighten people who thought he was holding a live snake. In 1858 in Victoria’s Western District, at least one local newspaper carried weekly tallies of snakes sighted and killed.⁴ Killing snakes using a stick, a rock, a gun or whip was an ordinary part of life for many boys in rural Australia. Organised snake hunts in which hundreds of tiger snakes were slaughtered were not uncommon even into the middle of last century, and no doubt still occur on a smaller scale today.

Author Alan Moorehead captured the prevalent attitude towards snakes:

In the part of Australia where I grew up we used to come across snakes quite often when we were walking in the bush, and our fear and loathing of them was something more than the usual thing, mainly I suppose because very occasionally some of us really did get bitten … I never saw a snake – that furtive sliminess, that mad, hating eye – without a sudden instinctive constriction of the heart and after the first moment of panic was over we children had just one thing on our minds: ‘Kill it. Do not let it get away.’ And so we would grab a stick and in a spasm of furious terror we would beat at the hideous twisting thing until at last it lay inert in the dust.⁵

Into this world was born one boy who did not share the fear, Eric Worrell. He would grow up to be Australia’s original snake man. His sustained and enthusiastic involvement in venom production would help save lives and he would do more than anyone before him to change Australian attitudes to snakes and other reptiles. Beneath the successes, he would face personal challenges and financial hardships that would bring him to the brink of ruin – yet the Australian Reptile Park stands to this day as his enduring legacy. This is his story, and it is the story of those who worked with him and who have expanded his vision to create today’s Australian Reptile Park.

PART ONE

THE EARLY YEARS

1

A childhood with snakes

Before retiring to bed in her Lilyfield, Sydney, home late one evening in the 1940s, a middle-aged woman walked the familiar steps down the damp brick path to the outside toilet. When she reached up to pull the chain, she fumbled a little in the darkness. Her hand sought cool metal, but instead it found the silky scales of a large diamond python. The woman screamed and immediately knew who the culprit was. ‘Eric Worrell!’ she shrieked, ‘Get this snake out of my toilet!’

Worrell was a rarity. Like many children, he developed a love of animals from a very early age but he gravitated towards those that were less appreciated by others, the ‘unpopular ones’, as he would later write.¹ Worrell became interested in reptiles, particularly snakes, because he was puzzled by the fear people generally had of them, when they were so obviously more fearful of human beings – and with good reason.

He had empathy for the outsider but he was not one himself, for Worrell grew up in a home in which he was warmly nurtured and supported. Eric’s parents lived in what was then one of Sydney’s working-class western suburbs. His father, Charles Percival (Percy) Worrell, a carpenter, was born in 1892. He married 23-year-old Rita Mary Ann Rochester in 1923 in Granville. Their marriage was to last 59 years, until Percy’s death in 1982 at the age of 90. Eric Frederick Arthur, their first child, was born on 27 October 1924. The Worrells were proud of their son, entering the curly-haired two-year-old in a beautiful baby competition in which he won first prize. Daughter Joyce followed three years later. This rather small family for the period was enlarged by foster children who were welcomed into the household.

The Worrells moved to Norfolk Street, Paddington, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, when Eric was still a young lad. This was not the exclusive Paddington that emerged later in the century, but a down-at-heels terrace-house suburb. There, Eric engaged in the usual money-making schemes of a Depression boyhood – collecting bottles and helping in a grocery store. He also did some things that weren’t quite so common and reflected his budding interest in animals, such as going door-to-door selling raffle tickets for budgerigars he bought at Paddy’s Markets.

Worrell’s fascination with reptiles began with Sunday visits to La Perouse as a child. From the 1920s, the land along the shores of Botany Bay had been dotted with a series of shantytowns for Sydney’s unemployed and homeless, who shared the area with Aboriginal people from the La Perouse mission. Among the hardship and poverty, an entertainment precinct developed on the La Perouse headland at the Loop, so called because it was the end of the tramline, where the trams circled round for their return trip to the city. A variety of spectacles came and went at the Loop, including performing dogs, camel rides and demonstrations of knife and tomahawk throwing. The longest-lived offering, the snake show, started there in 1897. Young Eric, curly headed and often well dressed in shorts and a blazer, stood fascinated beside the enclosure in which Snake Man, George Cann, demonstrated his mastery of dangerous snakes each Sunday at 1 pm. This snake show continued after Cann’s death in 1965, performed by his sons, George Jnr, who died in 2001, and John. John, who was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1992 for services to the community and the environment, officially retired from the pit in April 2010. George Cann was a snake showman of the old school. He had entertained, educated and thrilled his audiences for decades in travelling shows and at La Perouse, showing his acquired skill and quick reflexes as he grabbed and toyed with his snakes. His prowess with reptiles was recognised by Taronga Zoo, which appointed him to manage their reptile collection in 1939. Cann stayed with the zoo for 23 years, until his retirement in 1962, and he maintained his Sunday snake show until shortly before his death in 1965. Cann noticed Worrell’s intense interest in snakes and slowly an apprenticeship of sorts developed between the two. His gift of a yellow-faced whip snake was treasured by Worrell, as were his grisly stories about the effects of snakebite. Worrell attributed his own caution when handling snakes to his early training with Cann.

A second mentor was George Longley. The two met in the late 1930s at a bushland exhibition run by the Rangers’ League of NSW, where Longley displayed some of his extensive collection of lizards. Longley was a frequent contributor of short but insightful articles on aspects of lizards to the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society of NSW and had accumulated a wealth of knowledge about Australian lizards and their care in captivity, which he shared willingly with Worrell. Longley’s more scientific approach to reptiles added a new dimension to Worrell’s understanding of them. In his mid-teens, Worrell often travelled by tram to view Longley’s collection of lizards at his home in Bronte. As an active member of the Zoological Society, Longley was able to extend Worrell’s circle of acquaintances to include published naturalists, perhaps firing his desire to carve out a reputation as a naturalist himself one day. Later, when Longley died suddenly in July 1947, he left his collection in the care of the 22-year-old Worrell.

The raconteur Eric would become in later life was emerging even while he was still a youngster. At the age of ten, he created a menagerie in his family’s tiny backyard, and exercised his considerable charm and persuasive power in promoting it. Passers-by were waylaid by Worrell and his mates and enthusiastically invited to view the collection of a bantam, two rabbits, guinea pigs, a white mouse and a tortoise named Phar Lap for a penny a visit. Sometimes the boys would set up the display on the nearby Trumper Oval, hopeful of pulling in a bigger crowd. All of the animals were housed in cages specially designed and built by Percy Worrell. Later, goldfish, a variety of common lizards in glass cases and a stray dingo were added to the menagerie.

As he grew and as his knowledge of snakes increased, Worrell moved from just watching snake shows to keeping them himself. He began his collecting expeditions around Trumper Oval, on Glenmore Road, a few blocks from his Paddington home. When he was old enough to range further afield, he found his first large snake, a diamond python, near bustling Central Railway Station, opposite the Hotel Sydney. Twelve-year-old Eric rescued the snake, which was the unhappy target of rock-hurling boys, and took it back to his home, where he persuaded his reluctant parents to allow him to keep it. Oscar, as it was called, made a few attempts at escape, and it is likely that this was the snake that found its way into the outhouse of Worrell’s agitated neighbour a year or two later, when they had moved to Lilyfield. Oscar was eventually released into Centennial Park, a wild oasis that yielded snakes, lizards, frogs and fish to Eric and his schoolmates.

Worrell’s ability to catch snakes in central Sydney is a reminder of the ongoing presence and resilience of native fauna even in Australia’s largest city. Indeed, newspaper stories from the 1930s through to the 1960s regularly featured unfortunate snakes that had dared to show themselves in Sydney suburbs. A ‘6-foot’ (1.8 m) tiger snake, seen watching its reflection in a dressing-table mirror in Brookvale in 1935, was subsequently battered to death with a scrub hook, a sickle-shaped metal blade attached to a long wooden handle, generally used for clearing low bushes. A 5-foot (1.5 m) brown snake accidentally thrown into an Earlwood tram by the wheels of a passing truck in 1948 was feverishly killed by the conductor, using the iron point hook that he had ready to change the points to direct the tram onto another line of rails.²

Worrell’s father, Percy, a taxi driver, was a deep-thinking man of few words. His support for his son’s projects was practical – driving him in his taxi to see George Cann at La Perouse and building backyard cages and pits for his growing collection of animals. His mother, Rita, shared Eric’s love of animals, having kept her own pets as a child, and she welcomed his specialisation in reptiles. While Joyce, his sister, shied away from snakes, their mother had no fear of them, seeing them as objects of great interest. The Worrells continued to support and assist Eric with his reptile collection despite occasional escapes and the complaints of their neighbours. Worrell returned this family loyalty, looking after his sister, including her in his circle of friends when she was a teenager and paying bills for his parents as he started earning his own money.

Worrell enjoyed his years at Glenmore Road Public School in Paddington. Nature study, which was well established in the curricula of Australian primary schools by the 1930s, held a particular attraction for him as an art taught through drawing and painting as well as a science. He was dux when he completed studies at Glenmore Road in 1937, having his name inscribed on the school’s honour board, to his parents’ great joy.

Worrell continued his education at Sydney Boys High. The school had joined Sydney Girls High nine years earlier on the site vacated by the Moore Park Zoo in 1916. The animals had been moved to the Taronga Zoo site on the north shore of the harbour, but there were continuing reminders, such as the bear pits and the aquarium that was then used as a gymnasium.

The formality of secondary education in the period did not suit Worrell’s self-directed style of learning and he missed nature study. By the time he was 14, he had left school and embarked on a series of jobs, while continuing to develop his skills and knowledge in drawing, photography and first aid in his spare time. His sister recalled that ‘his brain was going all the time, you know, he was never still’. He excelled in several areas, and Percy and Rita at first expected their son to become a doctor, then they thought he would be a minister of religion. Whatever was to come, they had great expectations and were there to support Eric in whatever course he chose.

Worrell remembered his youth not as many people do, as an aimless series of experiences, but as a steady movement towards a specific goal. He recalled a particular day in Centennial Park when, as he threw cake crumbs to a colony of skinks, he formulated his life’s ambition. He would later write:

I wanted to live somewhere away from the city, on a large piece of land where I could keep all the strange reptiles I would bring back from my travels to all corners of Australia. I wanted to keep them in as near to natural conditions as possible so I could study their life histories, and so that people could look at them and learn that there was no reason to fear them.³

At age 14, having moved with his family to Cecily Street, Lilyfield, Worrell was wrestling with mates in a paddock when he fell on some broken glass and badly cut his ankle. A passing motorist took him to Balmain Hospital, where he was given surgery to rejoin the tendon. After developing septicaemia, he was transferred to Carrington Hospital in rural Camden to convalesce. The grounds of the hospital ran down to the Nepean River, giving Worrell an opportunity to watch the antics of water dragons climbing in the trees and plunging into the water. Sitting by the river one day, he was a little taken aback to be approached by a fortune teller who offered to read his palm. Much later, he wrote that she had given accurate personal insights and had predicted many of the major events of his professional life: that he would be involved with the sciences; that he would travel extensively with this work; and even that he would be awarded an MBE for his achievements.

Over the next decade, Worrell worked in an array of jobs, developing a range of skills, experiencing far-flung parts of Australia and observing the wildlife wherever he went. In the late 1930s, Percy Worrell was a travelling salesman and while he was away from home for long periods Rita and young Eric would scour the job ads in The Sydney Morning Herald, looking for work. One of these ads required a couple to work in a café and farmlet in Eden, in southern New South Wales. Rita answered the ad, but for reasons best known to herself decided to pose as Eric’s sister, lowering her age to 29 and raising Eric’s to 16. By this stage, Eric was of average build with dark wavy hair and could pass as a 16-year-old, while Rita was a good-looking woman with dark hair, Mediterranean looks and a slim, petite figure. Rita cooked and waited on tables – and as Worrell later recalled, did what she could to avoid the unwanted advances of an amorous lion tamer passing through town with a circus. Worrell combined chores such as chopping wood and washing up at the café with work on the associated farmlet: chipping Noogoora burrs and picking fruit.

When Percy found himself unemployed, he secured relief work in the Blue Mountains, ultimately gaining a permanent position on the railways as a ganger. Eric became the billy boy, providing the workers with tea during their breaks. He and his father also joined other Depression-era fossickers looking for gold in nearby Oberon. These early work experiences forged in Worrell resilience, a love of independence and a hunger for risk-taking and adventure which were traits of his character throughout the next decades of his life.

The Worrell family heard the announcement by Prime Minister Robert Menzies of the declaration of the World War II as they gathered around their radio in Lilyfield in September 1939, a month before Eric’s fifteenth birthday. His family, as did many others, remembered this time as the end of the Great Depression, when the demand for workers once again matched the supply. Percy was taken on by a railway workshop and Eric found a position in a plastics factory in Glebe. In the queue of men and women applying for work there, Worrell met another young hopeful, Wally Wickers, and the pair soon struck up a friendship. Wickers was a keen recreational shooter and invited Worrell to accompany him on hunting trips out to the Campbelltown area. This entailed travelling by train and hiking long distances, often carrying heavy equipment and specimens. On Friday afternoons, the two lads took the mail train to Glenfield and then made their way to a farm where they were allowed to sleep in the barn in exchange for catching rabbits, which they would later sell as food. Of course, they also found time for reptiles. They filled sugar bags with tortoises and sold them to Sydney pet shops.