Penfold: Life and Times of a Professional Hunting Guide From Down Under

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Hanley Sayers with his Australian buffalo, Australia’s premier trophy animal.

FORWARD

The Early Years

By Col Allison

Bob Penfold was always going to write a book. He just didn’t know it back then. Not in the early 1970s when I first met him in Newcastle, the-then steel and coal city north of Sydney on the east Australian coast.

He was too full of life, competitive energy, enthusiasm and a restless pioneering spirit not to pen his ultimately remarkable adventures and achievements in his later years.

But back in those days, Penfold – a tall, restless, raw-boned teetotaller, an ebullient raconteur with premature greying hair and a big voice (from industrial deafness) – was an auto panel beater, a family businessman, one of the nation’s best. He taught apprentices the lost art of shaping panels with hammers at night in the local tech and was well liked. He was also a superbly gifted freelance TV cameraman with an instant eye for a story and a unique way of telling it on film.

I would become a TV feature reporter myself in ensuing years but in the ‘70s I was a roving journo with The Sydney Morning Herald charged with setting up a northern office at the gateway to the Hunter Valley vineyards. This was a playground where Penfold hunted and fished, but never drank.

He wore a tee shirt, shorts and flip-flops and I dressed in shirt and tie and shiny slip-ons. The smoker and drinker and the non-puffing wowser - but fishing and hunting tragics alike.

In 1969, I’d written my first book, with Ian Coombes, The Australian Hunter, which featured up the front an up-to-date historical account of the introduction and current whereabouts of the deer Down Under. It got me into a lot of strife from the inner circle of deerstalkers who deeply resented their mythology being exposed for the good of the great unwashed. Penfold was on my side.

By then I was a well established hunting columnist and had been a professional buffalo hunter in the Top End – like Bob. With a German mate, I’d pioneered the market shooting of whitetail deer for export on Stewart Island, off the South Island of New Zealand where they were considered pests. I’d also shot a Grand Slam of Aussie deer and just about all the game animals of the South Pacific.

Penfold and I hit it off like long lost relatives as did our wives, Alita, aka The Redhead in my writings, and Kay Penfold. Having women with similar views is always helpful to mateship. Bob, a rally driver for fun and a top spearfisherman, wanted all the hunting thrills and spills I’d experienced and much, much more. We both had global sporting visions and I could listen to his piscatorial escapades for hours.

Speaking like a used-car salesman on speed and gesticulating like a drunken sailor (an irony, this!), he told of being grabbed on the elbow by the clam-crushing jaws of a wobbegong shark while trying to prise lobsters from rock shelfs deep down. There was the time he swam up a gushing rock channel on a reef at the run-out tide just as a black-tipped shark swam out. Both survived the encounter.

My favorite yarn was how he got tied up like a human sewing-machine bobbin by the chord of his speargun after nailing a massive six-foot kingfish in the gills. Before he knew it, the silver streak had spun around him in ever-decreasing circles until finally smashing his mask with the end of the spear. Only for his right hand being tied to the knife sheath on his leg – allowing him to cut himself free - he would have been a goner.

He was terrifying to dive with. Totally fearless, he would swim out off Nobby’s Head to a reef and then drop deeply in mid-ocean, with just a snorkel. I almost wrung my neck trying to spot the sharks in all 360-degrees of vision at once. Or night diving off the breakwall for blackfish, towing the fish float behind him on a long piece of nylon ski rope. This was fine until one evening he was jerked backwards by what he said felt like a submarine; it was about that size alright, but it carried a head like a VW bonnet filled with fist-sized white knives.

We hunted and fished together a lot in those times, sometimes with our families along. My son David called the big fella, Coca Cola Bob because he always had plenty of soft drinks on hand. Bob, who grew increasingly larger-than-life, always organized everything. He was simply good at it, which augured well for his later 27-year-long career as a safari operator.

We hunted fallow deer in the Australian New England area and decided the region needed better bloodlines to fix the split-palmed small heads on most bucks. With other mates we formed a club, the New South Wales Deerstalker’s Association. Mocked thirty years ago by the established elite, it is still going strong today. We talked– rather, Bob did – sixteen landholders into allowing us to manage their deer herds in another club venture at Glen Innes in return for anti-poacher patrols. No mean feat.

Bob then solicited donations from various people and groups, flew to Tasmania - the ancestral home of Australia and New Zealand’s best fallow bucks - and brought back to the mainland 136 prime head, alive and well.

Bob has sometimes been criticized as a self-promoter by detractors, but Nimrods Down Under owe him a huge debt for this contribution alone to our sporting life.

As our interest in overseas trophies grew, long-standing friends decided to form a South Pacific chapter of SCI – Safari Club International. The foundation team read like a Who’s Who of Australian trophy hunting – Penfold – a safari entrepreneur – myself, the late restaurateur Joe Malek and deer stalking legend Gordon Alford, auto tycoon Arnold Glass, globe-trotting hunter Ray (Guyra) Hammond and another close hunting mate, Robert Borsak, now one of Australia’s three Shooting and Fishing Party politicians.

Over the years I had many enjoyable hunts with Bob, none more so than in the buffalo ranges we both loved so much.

One stinking hot day on his concession in the Northern Territory, he brought his rattly Toyota Land Cruiser to a halt on a bulldust track. When the envelope of chalk-fine dust settled over man and open machine, he pointed to a buff bull we’d just spotted across a dry gully about 150 yards away.

Man, that’s a big, wide head, he gushed. Look at the width beyond the ears – it’s 100-plus points easily.

I studied the brute critically through the Zeiss binos and agreed. He’ll do. Let’s go, I said.

Bob reversed the bag of bolts and parked under a pandanus palm. We did a circular stalk and at about sixty yards I slipped a 270-grain Nosler softpoint up the spout of my custom BRNO 602 in .375 H&H Magnum, sighted, and touched off the double-square-bridged Mauser. The bull dropped instantly.

After the backslapping and cheers, we walked up to the fallen prize and got the shock of our lives. Shit, it’s a tiny bull, Bob choked, with big eyes. It was, too. A diminutive critter, which made the horns seem so much bigger. But still a fine animal. Good enough to make the cover of Sporting Shooter in April, 1992 - picture of me by Penfold.

One of my most emotional hunting memories was set in the same surroundings – the hoof-pocked, black-soil plains of the harsh country adjoining what is now Kakadu National Park, an iconic wilderness. On board Bob’s grey rattler this time were our wives and my daughter Jane (then aged 8) and son David, 12, nervously cradling my custom Mauser .240 Weatherby Magnum loading with 100-grain Nosler partitions.

The goal was simple enough – get one of those pills into the brain cavity of a big buffalo bull. It should then drop dead, the grey matter scrambled. Friends thought I was nuts letting a kid use a peashooter on these buffalo – they can be as dangerous as African Cape bulls - but the then-lightly-built lad couldn’t handle a bigger cannon.

We drove around for hours until we found a fair bull, alone on the plains beside a paperbark swamp. High, wide and handsome were the horns.

You’re on, Dave, says I, jumping from the truck and grabbing the rifle. With Bob beside me we got David down on his right knee, rifle clasped on his left hand perpendicular above the other knee. I went through the shooting routine while the bull grazed on, unaware of our presence, about sixty yards away. David was glaze-faced, taking nothing in, just the huge size of the bull. He was shaking like a child on his first roller-coaster ride. Buck fever, I announced too sharply.

I tried again, but David’s face was now frozen. Trying to shake him out of it, I unforgivably lost my cool. Bob gently pushed me aside and took over. Let me talk to him.

Within a few minutes, the man who would become super-guide to celebrities from around the globe had my boy unwound and concentrating on the shot, not the horn size or sheer, brutal majesty of the living target. At the shot, David put the Nosler 1/8th inch off center in the great bull’s skull. That brute hit the deck faster than a dropped brick. A 1,000-pounder killed by a diminutive dual-core bullet, proving – as always – it’s bullet placement that counts most.

We went on to other hunts, to other friends and hunting ranges around the world. Hauled packs up mountains, drove on vast foreign plains and gum-shoed through the forests and jungles of the world, always after the biggest of the big of whatever species we chased. We were deer hunters mostly, but always adventurers on one unforgettable ride.

Bob Penfold was always going to write a book. And I like it. It’s a jumbo-sized volume filled with big, honest stories that give you an idea of his tenacity and great joy of the wild and free hunt … ambition thwarted and achieved, of friends far and wide and campfires in remote and fascinating places. Here, there’s something to learn for most of us from a remarkable hunter.

Col Allison, Lake Cathie, NSW, Australia.

Chapter 1

Buffalo and Banteng: Australia’s Biggest Big Game

T he Australian Hunter, the book that Col Allison and Ian Coombes published in 1969, changed everything for me and for many other hunters across Australia. It became my bible, and I read it from cover to cover several times while absorbing the contents. It was the first book to give Australia’s ordinary sport hunters insight into where all of our big game animals were, how to find them, and how to hunt them. The chapters included information about every deer species introduced to our country, all of our native game, and more importantly, because I was very interested in hunting buffalo, details of where I might hunt buffalo.

That same year, the Leyland brothers produced a television documentary that showed buffalo catching and shooting in Northern Territory, and I visited them at their Newcastle home where they gave me numerous names and addresses of their contacts in the territory. I wrote everyone on their list, asking if I could work for them without a salary, just for the opportunity to shoot buffaloes. Only John Barling replied. I have always been thankful that he did because my life would have turned out much differently without knowing him. No one else was prepared to give a young amateur sport hunter the opportunity to experience such a great adventure.

John was running a wild-buffalo shooting operation and meat works on contract to the owners of Mudginberri, a station 250 km east of Darwin along what became the Arnhem Highway in the Northern Territory. He invited me to work for him without wages during the dry season, saying he would see that I had an opportunity to shoot buffaloes.

Years later, when I asked Kay what she had thought about my leaving her and our two young children for three weeks while I chased my dream, she would say that she wasn’t given a choice. God bless her. She never refused me anything she knew I wanted to do.

Author’s GMC Holden car on the road in Northern Territory, 1970.

I hunted all of the early months of 1970, shooting kangaroos and foxes for their skins to raise the money that I would need for the trip. Two hunting and spearfishing mates, the late Barry Smith and Alan Elias, agreed to accompany me. I built a new box trailer to carry our gear and fully serviced my 1960 Australian-built Holden car for the trip. We left for Mudginberri one Friday in August that year, stopping along the way only for fuel. As there were long sections without service stations and as the Holden only had an eight-gallon fuel tank, we carried numerous five-gallon fuel drums in the box trailer, enough to make long overnight runs. Much of the road was poor gravel surface and it had rained during the week before we departed.

We each drove long sections before changing drivers, rotating between fuelling stops. The third driver slept in the back seat while the second driver stayed awake to help navigate and watch for stock or kangaroos, both of which roamed free in their thousands in that fenceless country.

I drove one 300-mile section over a badly damaged gravel road from Longreach to Mount Isa between 7.00 at night and 7.00 the following morning and never saw one other car on this central Queensland highway.

We drove up through central New South Wales, through Dubbo and Bourke, then crossed the Queensland border and headed for Cunnamulla and Charleville on rain-affected gravel roads, then through the middle of Queensland and across the vast open spaces of Northern Territory. There was a sign inside the doorway of the border store just before we entered the territory. It read: Do not expect city prices because this is the sticks. Fuel that cost forty cents per gallon in Newcastle was one dollar per gallon at the border store.

Refueling stop Far west Queensland. Note authors brown hair.

Buffalo on the side of the road between Pine Creek and Goodparla.

We successfully registered our rifles at the Katherine police station, a tin shack on the side of the road. It could have been the setting for an old wild west movie. The casually dressed policeman was out of uniform, and rifles were stacked, ready to be used, along the walls. Next to them were several barramundi fishing rods. There was dust and grime on everything in sight. In stark contrast to the hostile welcome that we expected, the policeman was friendly and wished us well. (Previous visitors to Northern Territory had warned us that there was no way the police would let us hunt legally or register our hunting rifles.)

We arrived in Pine Creek on Sunday morning, fifty hours after leaving Newcastle, left the highway, and headed northeast, out through the trackless country on a dirt track, crossing numerous deep-running streams along the way. There were signs where cattle trucks had been deeply bogged prior to our passing. We saw lots of buffaloes feeding peacefully as we passed. The long, non-stop drive brought us to Mudginberri at 8:30 on Sunday night. We could hear the throbbing of the abattoir’s diesel generators through the still night air miles before we arrived. John invited us to sleep in a spare hut, and we slept really well even though it was hot and mosquitoes buzzed around us all night long.

The light breakfast of coffee and toast was before daylight. Over breakfast, John asked if we had registered our rifles or if we were going to shoot illegally. He was surprised that the cops in Katherine had welcomed us and had registered our rifles.

When he asked what rifles we had brought, and we replied that we had a .300 Winchester Magnum, a couple of .270s and a .308. He smiled and asked, What did you bring to shoot buffs with?

John assigned each of us to one of the professional buffalo shooters. Barry and Alan would go with a young American shooter and Harry Chandler, (the buffalo catcher and shooter who had appeared in the Leyland brothers’ documentary), and they departed in separate bullcatchers. I was lucky to accompany John on his early morning shoot.

Bullcatchers were stripped-down, short-wheelbase four-wheel-drive Toyota Landcruisers with heavy bullbars and tubular side rails to protect the bullcatcher from damage when charging through the bush and knocking down small trees to make new tracks through the virgin bush. I suppose that this protection also was there to protect the Toyotas from charging buffaloes. There were no doors, no roofs, no windscreens, no upholstery, no carpets or other accoutrements you might expect to find in a vehicle except for the original seats. This was strictly a machine designed to do a particular job, and they performed their allotted tasks very well.

There was a clamp on the dash and a boot screwed down onto the driver’s side of the gearbox hump. This was where John fitted his heavy-barrel Winchester .375 H&H. Its steel German-made Pecar telescope had been brazed into the mounts. This was a working rifle that not only had to stand the rigours of being thrashed around in the Toyota as it raced across buffalo-rutted, dried-out floodplains, but it also had to withstand thousands of shots from heavily loaded ammunition throughout the eight-month dry season.

A steel bar padded with thick felt had been welded to and above the Toyota’s dash for a rifle rest. A steel rod was stored in what had once been the driver’s door hinge-pin holes. This rod was used in an emergency to drive stuck fired cases out of the Winchester’s chamber when its extractor claw failed to extract a fired case. Towed behind each bullcatcher was a large and heavy four-wheel, flat-top trailer designed to carry four big buffalo bulls or five or six bulls if they were smaller. This was a daily harvesting operation and nothing was left to chance. There were thousands of wild cattle, buffaloes, and bantengs, and the daily quota of thirty-two buffs per day had to be harvested and delivered to the abattoir every day, six days per week, by each bullcatcher and shooter.

That first morning, John carried two boxes of handloaded .375 ammo and a water bottle to his Toyota while I carried my .270 with 150-grain Sierra handloads. We set off at a fast pace down the dusty track that led from the abattoir to the main road, which was just a two-wheel track through the bush for most of the way for 200 miles towards Darwin, where it changed into a good gravel surfaces road closer to the city.

The air was so still that we drove through the dust of the other two bullcatchers that had passed along this track some thirty or forty minutes earlier. The dust just hung in a cloud, sometimes drifting off to one side in the shifting, early-morning air. There was not a whisper of even a slight breeze.

We turned left onto the main road and tore through the bush at what seemed to me to be breakneck speed for about twenty minutes, our Toyota and trailer leaving its own massive dust storm behind us. A minute or so later, we turned off onto a two-wheel track that John and his hunters were using to access the hunting country. It meandered through the bush and into small clearings that ran out onto the floodplains. When we turned from the thick bush into a small clearing, we came upon five buffalo bulls that immediately started running. John jammed on the brakes and slid to a stop. While the Toyota still was sliding, he yanked his Winchester out and threw it onto the rifle rest, snicking off the safety catch as he did. He shot three buffaloes, each in the head before they got into the bush. Two fell dead, but the third was trying to raise his head when John jammed the Toyota into gear and raced to it. John swung the Winchester over the side of the Toyota and, with just one hand, shot the bull in the head again as we passed it, and then raced after the other two bulls. He reloaded the rifle as he drove the Toyota through the low bush and scrub.

We found the two bulls where they had stopped in a small clearing to look back. John quickly shot the closest bull up the nose and then shot the second bull just behind his eye as he turned to run. Both lay dead in the middle of the clearing.

That will do us for our first load this morning, Bob, John said, smiling. You can let go of the Jesus Handle now.

It was all over so fast that I had not even lifted my rifle up off the floor from where I had it pressed, recoil pad down on the floor with one hand while I held desperately on to the Jesus Handle on the dash in front of me with my other hand to avoid being thrown out of the car.

John cut the throats of the two bulls and then drove the Toyota just past where they lay. When the trailer was sideways on to them, he unhitched it and drove the Toyota around to the other side of the trailer and parked with the vehicle facing it. He hooked the loop in the end of his steel cable to the hook on the Toyota’s bumper bar and then threw the wire cable over the trailer. There was a wooden skid some two meters long and one metre wide tied down in the back of the Toyota. John lifted the skid and hooked it over the edge of the trailer with its low end in front of one of the bulls. Next, he looped a steel cable around the bull’s nose and horn before pulling it tight, then put the Toyota in reverse gear and skidded the bull up the skid and onto the front of trailer, leaving the bull’s head hanging over the side, blood still gushing from the bull’s neck.

John repeated the process to load the other four bulls, and we headed back to the road, winding through the bush dragging our heavy load. We met an aborigine who was driving another Toyota with another trailer attached. We swapped trailers, then while the aborigine towed the first load back to the abattoirs, we headed back into the bush to get our second load for the morning.

While we cruised the edge of the floodplains looking for suitable bulls to shoot, John explained that his Winchester was sighted to shoot exactly on point of aim at fifty yards and that if possible I should use an up the nose shot. He said that by shooting them in their noses as they looked at us with their heads held low and their noses in the air, his .300-grain Hornady round-nose bullets would jump into one nostril or the other and slip up the hollow nostril channel and into the brain. This shot caused instant death, on the spot. It created no meat damage and there was no fuss having to make sure that the bull was dead. Simply cut his throat and load him up, he said.

As we were shooting only for human consumption for the abattoirs, all buffs were shot in their heads or necks. Any bull that was accidentally shot in the body was not acceptable at the meat works.

When John invited me to shoot the second load, he also made me do the laborious work of loading the bulls and tying them onto the trailer. He seemed pleased with me as we drove back to the abattoir with a full, well-shot load.

John taught me that only the .300-grain bullet was heavy enough and that the Hornady bullet was constructed for nose shots. Lesser calibers and lesser-constructed bullets simply will not do the job. Even a 220-grain Hornady in a .300 Winchester Magnum does not have the horsepower to get consistent kills using the nose shot. It is just not enough gun, he said.

Aborigine worker splitting a buffalo carcass at Mudginberry Abbaioirs. Meat was for McDonald’s hamburgers in USA.

I learned where to shoot buffaloes from every angle over the next couple of days: One inch below their eyes if they were standing head-on and looking at us but with their heads down disallowing an opportunity for a nose shot. Just under and behind the eye on a running-sideways shot, and in the ear hole if they have their heads turned away. When they ran with their heads below their shoulder humps while running away, there was no opportunity to shoot.

Taking a load of buffaloes to Mudginberry Abbatoirs. Buffs had to be delivered to the abattoir within one hour of being shot.

Author driving a fresh load of buffs to the abattoir.

We followed buffaloes in John’s bullcatcher until they turned to look back at us, then I took whatever shooting opportunity arose as they presented a possible shooting pose.

Over tea after my first morning’s shoot, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I told John that I was astonished to see him shoot one-handed. I’d thought his .375 elephant gun would tear his arm off shooting it one hand.

That’s when John made the irrefutable argument. If you have a gun that you are frightened of, you want to burn it.

It was a statement that I will never forget, nor will I forget all the other firearms and hunting advice he gave me. John had shot 30,000 buffaloes in Northern Territory, so he knew and clearly understood what serious big game hunting and shooting were all about.

Harry Chandler had shot 60,000 buffaloes, but was best-known for shooting the largest crocodile ever killed by a hunter in Australia, a twenty-four-foot monster that he had shot on Mudginberri some years before. According to Harry, the owner of Mudginberri Station also owned the Sea Breeze Hotel at Nelson Bay, an ocean port and holiday destination thirty miles up the coast from where I lived in Newcastle. I had seen the crocodile’s massive skin on the hotel’s wall. Harry said when Mudginberri’s owner wanted to buy the skin, he had it tanned and sent it to the man. However, according to Harry, he never was paid for it.

I thought that I had found paradise when I got to shoot with both Harry and the American whose name I cannot remember. Each had a different approach to the business. The American treated the job like a sport while Harry just plodded along, going about the business as a profession. Each filled his daily contract obligations every day, six days each week. Each also found time to service and repair their Toyotas that frequently required major work such as fitting new clutches overnight to be ready for work again before daybreak next morning.

Harry let me do all of the shooting when I was with him. I really appreciated that opportunity, to shoot thirty-two buffalo bulls every day. Harry taught me a lot about buff shooting, especially how to stay alive.

One morning, after we had run out of .375 and .300 mag ammo, I was shooting all of the bulls with my .270 and 150-grain Sierra hand-loads. I suppose I was feeling a bit presumptuous, I knew exactly how and where to shoot a buffalo, and I was confident with my .270.

When you shoot a bull dead with a head shot, they all react the same way. He will throw his head up, fold his front legs and crash to the ground on his forelegs, and then his rear end follows. If he is dead, he will not twitch or move, but a buffalo always dies with his eyes open. The proper procedure now is to reload your rifle, watching the round slide into the rifle’s chamber. Then, with the safety catch in the off position, sneak up behind the bull as quietly as you can. (This was easy for me as I never wore shoes or footwear when I was hunting in the daily heat of the Northern Territory. I felt much more comfortable hunting barefoot.) Holding the rifle at the back of the buff’s head, ready to shoot quickly if required to do so, you reach over from behind the bull and flick his eyelashes with the tip of your knife. If he blinks, shoot him in the back of the head right now! If he does not blink, he is dead.

I had ten straight one-shot kills on bulls that morning with my .270. I was really on fire and thought that I was God’s gift to the buffalo-shooting game. Suitable bulls were difficult to find that day, however, and we were running a bit late when we suddenly drove up on one and Harry stopped the truck. I threw the .270 over the rifle rest and shot the bull just under the ear as he turned to run. He threw his head in the air when the shot hit him, and then collapsed, front first. His rear end followed and he crashed to the ground in a pall of dust—a classic example of a proper head-shot kill. He was dead and I was sure of it.

I left my rifle in the car and ran to the bull. I grabbed his horn and shoved it up, twisting his head around and kicking his chin backwards so that his neck was exposed. I jammed my knife in to its hilt but, before I could complete cutting his throat, he suddenly jumped to his feet. His horn bumped me back a bit as it hit me in the chest as he jumped up, but I was still hanging on to it. I still held the knife jammed in his throat and now we were eye-to-eye, and from my point of view it was not a pretty sight. I let go of his horn and the knife and jumped back, a gigantic jump, away from the bull before turning and running like hell for the truck. It was only thirty yards to the Toyota but I knew that I could not outrun a buffalo and that he would have me before I could get to it. My legs were like jelly and I could not breathe.

I was relieved when I rushed around to the far side of the Toyota without the bull crushing me from behind as I ran. That’s when I noticed that Harry was sitting in the bullcatcher, calmly rolling a cigarette. When I looked back, the buff still was standing where he was when I shot him. He had his front legs spread, trying to stay on his feet. Blood was streaming to the ground from his nose and from the knife still stuck in his throat. His eyes were rolled back in his head and he was dying. It seemed to take me forever to gather up my rifle, reload it and take a rest on the spare tire on the hood over the engine compartment. I was shaking wildly, but was able to put in a finishing shot that dumped the bull back down into the dust, dead this time I hoped.

Hunting partner Alan Elias taking a shot at a buff from the bullcatcher.

Harry was laughing at me. He stopped rolling his cigarette and said in a stern voice. That is how you die in this country, young fellah. You never break the rules or you die.

He finished rolling his cigarette before telling me to get my knife. You have a bull to load, he said.

Have you ever heard the expression that My heart jumped up in my chest? Well I can guarantee you that it is absolutely possible. My heart had jumped up inside my chest and it was firmly jammed in the base of my throat, stopping me from taking a breath for several minutes. My throat was dry and I could not swallow as much as I tried. I was trying to force my heart back down where it belonged.

I never forgot that very important lesson. Forever after, I always followed the rules when hunting dangerous big game. When I became a professional big game hunting guide and outfitter many years later, I always sat my staff down for a one-on-one with a very strict lesson on the safety rules that they should apply and adhere to. You die in this country if you break these rules, I told them.

Hunting partner the late Barry Smith posing with his trophy buff on the meat trailer.

Mudginberri Station was close to the aborigine reserve, Arnhem Land. There was a crossing on the East Alligator River that was used to access Arnhem Land and Cobourg Peninsula, however no white person was allowed to cross into this mysterious area. We knew that there were buffaloes and other wild animals out there, but they were off limits to us until many years later.

One day I saw a hunter driving a new Toyota into camp. He wore no shoes, just shorts and a bush shirt. He had a rich-looking guy sitting in the Toyota with him. The passenger wore a big American-cowboy hat, a wide belt with a rodeo rider’s massive buckle, pressed long trousers, and sunglasses. He was smoking a big cigar.

That was Don McGregor, the buffalo guide, with a rich client. He was asking if I had seen any old bulls with big horns that he could take the American to shoot, John said after they drove off.

We often found really old and skinny bulls that we did not shoot because they had no meat worth the shot or the work. John had told McGregor where he could find one particular old bull that had massive horns that we had seen every day as we passed.

Do not laugh Bob. Don charges these rich Yanks a thousand dollars for a five-day hunt. That’s more money than we could earn working our guts out six days a week for three months, John said.

Fancy anyone paying a guide to take him buffalo shooting. I am here shooting thirty-two bulls every day for fun and not paying or getting paid to shoot them, I said.

Later that afternoon, I saw the old bull’s carcass laying in the dust. Its head had been removed. Little did I know that some years later I would be charging my international hunters US$1,000 per day to guide them to their buffaloes.

What an adventure for a young hunter that trip was. If I had not had a wife and two young daughters at home, I would never have left the Northern Territory. I would have become one of the old drunks, the used to be outcasts of a forgotten and past era. There are many of them still holding out in the Territory.

When we returned to Newcastle and our wives and families, retracing our trail back home over the rough gravel and often unformed roads, the sense of high adventure remained and was now instilled in my blood. It would never leave me. I can clearly remember every detail of my first buffalo hunt as if it were only yesterday, and the memories are all good.

After I became an international big game hunting guide and returned to the Territory, it was vastly different. There were tar-sealed roads where there had been two-wheel tracks and geologists scratching rocks from the streambeds looking for the uranium deposits that they knew were there. Each of them carried a Geiger counter as they examined their rock collections by the gas lanterns in their tents on the side of the tracks. Now there was a huge uranium mine and a town complete with super markets and service stations where there used to be a huge pandanus swamp where I shot big buffalo bulls and wild cattle bulls most days. There also was a massive world-famous national park, Kakadu, with rangers and rules to play by where there was none before. It sure had changed, and I was not sure the change was for the better. I missed what it used to be.

On one trip, I towed my custom-built, eighteen-foot aluminium boat to Goodparla and used it to explore many offshore islands looking for game populations. We eventually discovered Goulbourn Island had thousands of massive-horned goats in residence and added trophy goat hunting safaris to our buffalo hunts from Goodparla Station by towing the boat into Arnhem Land and using it to access the offshore island.

I had to deal with the Northern Land Council to arrange the contracts to hunt North Goulbourn Island. Their officers made me pay for their flights and trips out there to examine the hunting prospects, but all they did was charge me for their exclusive hunting trips on the island. Our relationship, if you can call it that, started on a very poor foundation. It would end the same way.

The United States Department of Agriculture had decided that it would not allow meat from Australia to be imported if any of our cattle had tuberculosis or brucellosis (Bang’s disease), and a massive buffalo and wild cattle eradication program got underway to appease the Americans. They knew we had both diseases in our wild herds, so a multi-million-dollar total-eradication federal program was under way, paid for by Australian taxpayers. It seemed not to matter that the United States imported meat from New Zealand and Argentina, which were both riddled with TB and brucellosis. What a complete waste of money and a viable resource! This total eradication program suited Kakadu Park officials, though. They wanted every buffalo, feral cattle beast, pig and horse eradicated from the multi-million-acre park.

I negotiated a trophy buffalo-shooting contract with the 840-square-mile Goodparla Station, 170 km east-southeast of Darwin. Despite an ongoing eradication project, there still were 10,000 buffaloes and plenty of wild pigs on the area. I entered into the contract for a short term because I knew that as soon as the buffalo were eradicated Goodparla Station would become part of the park and hunting and hunters would not be allowed. (That proved to be true, and three years later I would have to shift my operation to a new area.)

At first, we drove up from Newcastle, towing my old box trailer loaded with camp equipment. We set up a rudimentary camp on the end of the Goodparla airstrip and began guiding clients. We had a great time, as did our hunters who harvested many massive old buffalo bulls and huge wild boars. After numerous hunts, we would return to Newcastle by road and transport more loads of construction materials to Goodparla until we had a well-organized camp.

After three years of successful hunting on Goodparla, we shifted the camp to Eva Valley, an adjoining aborigine-owned working cattle and buffalo property. We hunted there for two years until we were notified they were turning the property into a tourism venture and would not consider having us hunting there when tourists were experiencing bush-tucker tours.

Author’s first trophy buffalo taken while meat shooting, Northern Territory 1970.

We next set up camp at Mountain Valley Station. Its owner, John Harrower, also owned Mainoru, the adjacent property. With a combined total of 1.5 million acres, this area provided us with a multitude of opportunities. They had some pigs, some good barramundi fishing, and thousands of feral donkeys. More importantly, there were large numbers of free-roaming buffaloes migrating from Arnhem Land into the station every year, providing trophies for our clients and live roundups by Mountain Valley Station.

We began harvesting trophy buffalo bulls and trophy boars before branching out into barramundi fishing and feral donkey shooting. This expanded program gave us great hunting and the diversity to operate during every dry season, May until October.

John Harrower’s brother, Tony, owned Dorisvale Station. John introduced me to him and we set up our boar-hunting operation at Dorisvale. This later led to us conducting feral animal control hunts there for some time until we had reduced the populations of feral donkeys and horses to an annually manageable number consummate with our trophy boar hunting operation.

During the eradication campaign the inspectors would go into an area and shoot a number of buffaloes and wild cattle to check for TB and brucellosis. If they had any symptom of infection, the area was grid-referenced and totally eradicated of all cattle and buffaloes. That area then had to be completely fenced to stop traveling cattle or buffalo from entering. Fenced and contained areas were tested by rounding up the stock and testing them in the yards. In unfenced areas, the feral animals were eradicated by shooting them from helicopters. (One ranger told me he had shot 80,000 buffaloes and cattle from helicopters during this project.) The authorities then moved to the next grid and conducted the same survey. If infections were found, the process was repeated. After a year had passed, the areas were again inspected until the infections were eradicated completely. In areas where testing found no infections, no culling was conducted. There was no culling required in any area within Arnhem Land so its huge population of buffaloes was left alone and still provides trophy hunting opportunities for organized safari hunting companies. Eventually, the whole of Australia was declared to be TB and brucellosis free. As of this writing, there are no ongoing eradication programs.

We were continually expanding our operations and now offered combination hunts for buffaloes, boars, goats and feral game culling in Northern Territory as well as hunts in New Zealand and New Caledonia. We also offered game ranch hunts in numerous areas within Australia and New Zealand for other game animals that are not normally available wild and free. However, when John Harrower decided that he could make more money by restricting our operation to Mountain Valley and offering Mainoru hunting to other operators, we left Mountain Valley.

At that time, Noel Bleakley, a former shareholder in Wimray Safaris and air charter companies, had taken over the Wimray hunting operations, which included a great buffalo-hunting area in Arnhem Land and a contract for banteng hunting on Cobourg Peninsula.

Banteng, fallow deer, sambar deer and barasingha deer had all been released on