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Australia Weighs Tactics to Thin Crocodile Numbers

A crocodile moves from the riverbank into the waters of the Adelaide River in Wak Wak, Northern Territory, Australia, July 19, 2024, in this screengrab obtained from a Reuters video. REUTERS/Stefica Nicol Bikes
A crocodile moves from the riverbank into the waters of the Adelaide River in Wak Wak, Northern Territory, Australia, July 19, 2024, in this screengrab obtained from a Reuters video. REUTERS/Stefica Nicol Bikes
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Australia Weighs Tactics to Thin Crocodile Numbers

A crocodile moves from the riverbank into the waters of the Adelaide River in Wak Wak, Northern Territory, Australia, July 19, 2024, in this screengrab obtained from a Reuters video. REUTERS/Stefica Nicol Bikes
A crocodile moves from the riverbank into the waters of the Adelaide River in Wak Wak, Northern Territory, Australia, July 19, 2024, in this screengrab obtained from a Reuters video. REUTERS/Stefica Nicol Bikes

A mottled yellow-green and brown saltwater crocodile lies mostly submerged in the muddy waters of an Australian river, only its ochre eyes visible above a triangular snout as it scans for prey.
When just such a reptile killed Charlene O'Sullivan's daughter 15 years ago, her first thought was that every one of the predators should be killed or caught around her home city of Darwin, to spare others from similar heartbreak.
Now she prefers a less drastic safety measure: education.
"I initially probably supported removing every crocodile," said O'Sullivan, whose daughter Briony was 11 when she was taken while swimming with friends at a waterhole in 2009.
"But you remove one crocodile from a creek or a waterway, another one's just going to move in," Reuters quoted the former real estate agent as saying.
"We need to respect the environment we're in, know they are there, and think smart about what sort of situation you put yourself in."
O'Sullivan's change of heart is emblematic of a growing debate in Australia's tropical north, where unrestricted hunting nearly eradicated "salties" by about 1970, only to have strict conservation rules drive up their numbers ever since.
Now authorities are making tentative efforts - from more proactive messaging to physical removal of animals - to reduce the frequency of attacks, after 18 nationwide since the start of 2023, five of them fatal, database CrocAttack shows.
But they need to do that without threatening the survival of a species enmeshed with the economy and identity of the Top End, becoming a key part of the Northern Territory's A$1.5-billion ($980-million) tourism industry.
In the past two months, crocodiles have killed an Aboriginal girl in the Northern Territory and a doctor in the neighboring state of Queensland.
But even a modest culling quota, unveiled in April, has rattled conservationists, Aboriginal elders and owners of tourism businesses.
The government wants to rid the territory of 1,200 reptiles each year from an estimated population of 100,000, to keep numbers where they were before a free-for-all by hunters drove them below 3,000 in the period from World War Two to the 1970s.
Queensland, estimated to be home to 30,000, raised the stakes this year by saying it would try to keep the animals away by shooting them with non-fatal rubber bullets.
It demurred from a recommendation by its chief scientist three years earlier to consider catching or killing larger animals.
Allowing crocodiles free rein would lead to deaths, said Hugh Possingham, the former Queensland chief scientist, whose 2021 study targeted animals longer than 2.4 m (8 ft).
"Wiping all the crocodiles out is ridiculous as well," he added. "You're between a rock and a hard place."
Conservation authorities in Western Australia, home to several thousand saltwater crocodiles, ruled out culling, said a spokesperson, adding there was no scientific evidence that it reduced the risk of attacks.
BITING BACK
But for the Northern Territory, the setting of Australia's top-grossing movie, "Crocodile Dundee", and with the world's highest ratio of saltwater crocodiles to people, awareness campaigns alone no longer suffice, the government says.
The 250,000 people who live there could soon be outnumbered by the animals, whose numbers have exploded by 3,000% in 50 years, it says.
That rankles those who work and live near crocodiles.
"The new Northern Territory plan is entirely unnecessary, wasteful and potentially dangerous," said Brandon Sideleau of Charles Darwin University, who started the CrocAttack database.
It could even bring increased attacks, if it led the public to believe that areas previously off-limits were safe, he added.
"If it hasn't got tiles on the bottom of it, don't swim in it," is the advice Tony Blums, owner of the Original Adelaide River Jumping Crocodile Cruises, gives to visitors, adding that better public education would save more lives than culls.
Tibby Quall, an Aboriginal elder of the Dungalaba, or saltwater crocodile, clan, also opposed culling.
"It's something you live with, something that's cemented to your culture, who you are and what you are," he said.
O'Sullivan, who with her partner now runs a crocodile farm that breeds thousands of the animals for meat and skins, says the venture has helped her to better understand and respect the predator that took her daughter's life.
"I don't for a moment blame the animal for what happened," she said. "It's an animal, Briony was in the waterway, the animal did what the animal does."

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Varieties

Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
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Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)

The world knew Jimmy Carter as a president and humanitarian, but he also was a woodworker, painter and poet, creating a body of artistic work that reflects deeply personal views of the global community — and himself.
His portfolio illuminates his closest relationships, his spartan sensibilities and his place in the evolution of American race relations. And it continues to improve the finances of The Carter Center, his enduring legacy, The Associated Press said.
Creating art provided “the rare opportunity for privacy” in his otherwise public life, Carter said. “These times of solitude are like being in another very pleasant world.”
‘One of the best gifts of my life' Mourners at Carter’s hometown funeral will see the altar cross he carved in maple and collection plates he turned on his lathe. Great-grandchildren in the front pews at Maranatha Baptist Church slept as infants in cradles he fashioned.
The former president measured himself a “fairly proficient” craftsman. Chris Bagby, an Atlanta woodworker whose shop Carter frequented, elevated that assessment to “rather accomplished.”
Carter gleaned the basics on his father’s farm, where the Great Depression meant being a jack-of-all-trades. He learned more in shop class and with Future Farmers of America. “I made a miniature of the White House,” he recalled, insisting it was not about his ambitions.
During his Navy years, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter chose unfurnished military housing to stretch his $300 monthly wage, and he built their furniture himself in a shop on base.
As president, Carter nurtured woodworking rather than his golf game, spending hours in a wood shop at Camp David to make small presents for family and friends. And when he left the White House, West Wing aides and Cabinet members pooled money for a shopping spree at Sears, Roebuck & Co. so he could finally assemble a full-scale home woodshop.
“One of the best gifts of my life,” Carter said.
Working in their converted garage, he previewed decades of Habitat for Humanity work by refurbishing their one-story house in Plains. He also improved his fine woodworking skills, joining wood without nails or screws. He also bought Japanese carving tools, and fashioned a chess set later owned by a Saudi prince.
Not just any customer Carter frequented Atlanta’s Highland Woodworking, a shop replete with a library of how-to books and hard-to-find tools, and recruited the world’s preeminent handmade furniture maker, Tage Frid, as an instructor, Bagby said.
Still hanging near the store entrance is a picture of Frid, who died in 2004, teaching students including a smiling former president at the front of the class.
“He was like a regular customer,” Bagby said, other than the “Secret Service agents who came with him.”
Carter built four ladder-back chairs out of hickory in 1983, and Sotheby’s auctioned them for $21,000 each at the time, the first of many sales of Carter paintings and furniture that raised millions to benefit The Carter Center.
It was rarely about the money, though. Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend who would have the Carters over to her home in Plains, recalled seeing the former president carrying out one of her chairs.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘It’s broken. I’m going to take it home and fix it.’”
He was at her back door at 7:30 the next morning, holding her repaired chair.
Carter compared woodworking to the results of his labor as a Navy engineer, or as a boy on the farm: “I like to see what I have done, what I have made.”
‘No special talent,' but his paintings drive auctions Carter employed a folk-art style as a late-in-life amateur painter and claimed “no special talent,” but a 2020 Carter Center auction drew $340,000 for his painting titled “Cardinals," and his oil-on-canvas of an eagle sold for $225,000 in 2023, months after he entered hospice care.
Carter’s work hangs throughout the center’s campus. A room where he met with dignitaries is encircled with birds he painted after he and Rosalynn took on bird watching as a hobby.
Near the executive offices are a self-portrait and a painting of Rosalynn in their early post-presidential years, hanging across from a trio of Andy Warhol prints showing Carter in office.
Carter’s earliest years predominate, with boyhood farm scenes and portraits of influential figures like his father James Earl Carter Sr., whose death in 1953 led him to abandon a Navy career and eventually enter politics in Georgia.
Some of his subjects, including both of his parents, are looking away. Carter's likeness of his mother shows “Miss Lillian” as a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India. Jason Carter said the piece was particularly meaningful to his grandfather, who lost reelection at a relatively youthful 56.
“When he got out of the White House, she was standing there saying, ’Well, I turned 70 in the Peace Corps. What are you going to do?” Jason Carter said.
One Carter subject who meets his gaze is a young Rosalynn — they married when she was 18 and he was 21. He described her as “remarkably beautiful, almost painfully shy, obviously intelligent, and yet unrestrained in our discussions.”
Another who doesn’t look away is Rachel Clark, a Black sharecropper who had hosted the future president after they worked in the fields. “Except for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me,” Carter wrote of his childhood.
'Just a word of praise' Carter wrote more than 30 books — even a novel — but was most introspective in poetry.
On his first real recognition of Jim Crow segregation: “A silent line was drawn between friend and friend, race and race.”
On his Cold War submarine’s delicate dance with enemies: “We wanted them to understand ... to share our love of solitude ... the peace we yearned to keep.”
Rosalynn’s smile, he gushed, silenced the birds, “or may be I failed to hear their song.”
Perhaps Carter’s most revealing poem, “I Wanted to Share My Father’s World,” concerns the man who never got to see his namesake son’s achievements. He wrote that he despised Earl’s discipline, and swallowed hunger for “just a word of praise.”
Only when he brought his own sons to visit his dying father did he “put aside the past resentments of the boy” and see “the father who will never cease to be alive in me.”