Renegade reptiles
How low, geographically speaking, can a crocodile go? It’s probably lower than you know.
WHEN I FIRST heard of a freshwater crocodile that lived for some years in the Wilsons River at Lismore, in northern NSW, I thought it was a prank.
It couldn’t be true, could it? It’s generally accepted that on the east coast, crocodile habitat doesn’t extend much further south than the Mary River, near Maryborough, Queensland. Lismore is more than 350km south of that.
Digging through old newspaper files, however, reveals that a freshie did once live here, from 1967 until 1974. The town’s local paper,
The Northern Star, even published a photograph of ‘Hector’, as locals called the 1.2m-long out-of-place crocodile sunning itself on the muddy banks of the river.
How did a crocodile come to be there? That’s where details get murky.
According to one version of local lore, a small number of crocodiles were transported in sugar bags from Darwin in 1967 and illegally dumped into Lismore’s river system. Several supposedly survived and at least one, namely Hector, thrived for many years.
A variation to the story suggests Hector arrived as part of a travelling show, The Northern Star reporting in 1974 that “the show’s owner,
Mr N. Lawson, of Melbourne, said he had two crocodiles in the show, Hector and Horrible, and that Hector escaped from his cage at the showground”.
However it arrived, Hector was occasionally spotted, for the best part of seven years, along a stretch of the river. At first it was the subject of fear – the city organised an intensive hunt for it. But its later years were marked by a noticeable tolerance.
Anecdotal reports indicate Hector was a shy and timid creature that kept to itself as it lazed in the sun, eating a variety of local foods for which it had little, if any, competition.
Hector had such an impact that in the 1990s, long after vanishing, a restaurant overlooking the river was named in its honour. Although now closed, its walls were decorated in all manner of crocodile memorabilia including a map of Lismore with coloured drawing pins marking the locations of each sighting of Hector. Guess what the most popular dish was at ‘Hector’s Place’? Crocodile!
Thankfully, Hector didn’t end up on a dinner plate because, following the 1974 flood that catastrophically washed through the town, it was never sighted again, sadly.
Intriguingly, if newspaper reports
in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Courier Mail are to be believed, Hector may not have been Australia’s southern-most croc. In 1939 a crocodile with an even catchier nickname was sighted at Angourie, near Yamba, some 75km south of Lismore.
Unlike Hector, however, there’s no photographic evidence to confirm the existence of ‘Jock the Croc’, which some believed may have been an escapee from a touring circus or the legacy of a practical joke.