Can crocodiles and canoeists coexist at Australia’s 2032 Olympic Games? | Crocodiles

Andrew Miller is just minutes right into a crash course on how one can use a V8 ocean ski when he first drops the C-bomb. The former purple beret paratrooper and present president of a Rockhampton canoe membership is explaining to a first-time paddler why he gained’t start on a K1 – the sort of craft the world’s greatest canoe sprinters will paddle when and if they arrive right here to central Queensland to compete on the 2032 Olympic Games.

“It’s like sitting on a pencil,” Miller says. “If a crocodile so much as tapped your hull, you’d be straight into the drink!”

The membership secretary, John Mackenzie, admonishes him: “You had to use the C-word.”

To be honest to Miller, the proximity of the world’s largest residing reptile is just not a lot of a secret. On the wall of the standard inexperienced shed belonging to the Fitzroy Canoe Club is a mascot of kinds: a toy croc known as Fitzy. Pinned to the noticeboard are recommendations on being “Croc Wise”. The membership’s paddling space is a identified crocodile habitat, the be aware reads. Enter boats “briskly”. Don’t drag legs and arms within the water. If you capsize, get out as quickly as potential.

In March, the Queensland authorities introduced that the Fitzroy River in Rockhampton, about 500km north of Brisbane, would host rowing and canoeing occasions on the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

map of queensland

Scattered alongside the banks of the Fitzroy are indicators warning of damage or loss of life from saltwater crocodiles. A four-metre croc might be proper beside you within the water, invisible, one reads.

Visitors to the “beef capital of Australia” are extraordinarily unlikely to see a reside saltie.

But they gained’t miss representations of the prehistoric ambush predator all through the grand sandstone and wrought iron buildings of the river port. In the lane behind the newly refurbished Rockhampton Museum of Art is a crocodile mural, 18 metres lengthy and 5 metres excessive.

But now the C-bomb has been dropped, the jokes are carpeted.

We hop out to our boats atop the backs of crocodiles, Miller reckons. But don’t fear, the crocs aren’t hungry – “we feed them all the time”.

After the gags, Miller will get severe. You gained’t encounter a croc, he guarantees. Just benefit from the river, there isn’t a greater one between right here and the mighty Murray.

And with that, because the pinks and purples of daybreak filter via the leaves of paperbarks that line the Fitzroy’s banks, the canoeists paddle off into the mist that rises from the chalky brown water.

Corellas screech from towering gums. Pelicans break the nonetheless floor of the river. An osprey friends down from the branches of a lifeless tree. The kayak quivers as its rudder hits a clump of duckweed.

The canoeists paddle upstream, away from the town and the barrage that divides the Fitzroy between its salt and freshwater reaches.

This piece of infrastructure is one purpose Miller contends the river is “pristine”. Unlike these to the south, the freshwater Fitzroy is just not swept by tides, lined by mud and mangrove or racked by wind and wave.

That concrete barrier, constructed as a water storage system to assist meet the area’s water provide wants, additionally marks a boundary on the federal government’s Queensland crocodile administration plan between focused administration and basic administration zones.

Upstream of the barrage for 20km, park rangers are tasked with eradicating “all large crocodiles” and any croc “displaying dangerous behaviour” from the water.

After a few kilometres, a pair of canoeists cross via a stretch of river they declare is the territory of a croc in regards to the size at which it’s formally thought-about “large” – that’s, longer than 2 metres.

A number of kilometres farther upstream is the spot that one canoe membership member sighted a 4.5 metre saltie two years in the past. After a number of weeks, it was captured and eliminated.

This is winter, too – the identical time of 12 months that sunny Queensland will host the summer season Olympics – and the interval by which crocs are most simple to identify, basking their chilly blood on riverbanks.

Yet, statistically, Miller is nearly sure to be proper. The Boyne River, greater than 100km to the south, is formally thought-about the southern boundary of typical crocodile habitat.

Here within the decrease reaches of croc nation, the quantity and density of those apex predators is much decrease than within the distant tropics to the north. A authorities monitoring program estimates the variety of crocodiles in rivers of the Cape York peninsula – greater than 1,500km to the north – at three crocodiles per kilometre. That ratio declines southward, all the way down to 0.2 crocs per km on the Fitzroy.

The canoe membership has been paddling right here for the reason that late Nineteen Seventies with out incident. They are on the water nearly every single day, typically beginning at midnight. So, too, their rowing counterparts, who’re additionally trying ahead to internet hosting the Olympics.

Mackenzie says he has been paddling within the river for the previous seven years and has seen a croc upstream of the barrage solely as soon as.

It was in the course of the colder months and the saltie had its snout out of the water. During the central Queensland winter, he says, crocodiles aren’t breeding, aren’t territorial and aren’t hungry. He wasn’t apprehensive in any respect.

“It was doing its thing, and I was doing mine,” Mackenzie says. “It was quite a majestic encounter”.

Other native water customers aren’t so enamoured of sharing the water with these toothy reptiles.

Steve Diehm grew up 5 minutes from the boat ramp above the barrage on the banks of the Fitzroy and has spent his complete life in Rockhampton. An avid waterskier, Diehm had a ship earlier than he had a automobile.

The Fifo oil and gasoline employee met his spouse and raised his three youngsters waterskiing. But, over current years, Diehm started being gnawed by a way of unease acquainted to many north of the tropic of capricorn.

Since they have been protected within the Nineteen Seventies after being hunted to close annihilation, saltwater crocodiles – which regardless of their title additionally inhabit freshwater environments – have been steadily returning to their former vary, reclaiming waterways that individuals swam for many years.

Diehm had at all times been conscious he was in croc habitat however started to really feel much less and fewer protected. Then, when he noticed an image of that 4.5 metre saltie captured in 2023, a “horrible feeling” wrenched his abdomen. He had skied that “exact bank” for 15 years. Diehm thought of his youngsters.

The 46-year-old was devastated when he made the choice that it was now not protected for his household to be on the Fitzroy.

Looking out throughout the river offers Diehm a pang of regret. It is completely clean, basking in sunshine, a “skier’s dream” – and there may be not a soul on the water.

“This should be like the Murray Darling,” he says. “There should be houseboats workin’ on here. There should be, you know, park a houseboat, swim off it, ski off it.

“All this, all the way up here, there’s this ability for tourism, for so much good, old-fashioned, outdoor fun.”

Diehm believes the Olympics can be nice for Rockhampton however, and not using a change to crocodile administration, he reckons athletes can be “running the gauntlet”.

The University of Queensland’s crocodile skilled, Prof Craig Franklin, runs the world’s largest and longest energetic crocodile monitoring program.

The Fitzroy Olympics plan “worries” him “on a number of levels”.

“No. I don’t believe it’s safe,” he says. “I think it’s foolish.”

Franklin fears the Olympic occasion sends the message that it’s “OK to go swimming” in locations just like the Fitzroy. But crocodiles journey huge distances over brief durations, crossing boundaries and shifting overland for a number of kilometres.

“Rowing in a place where it’s the natural habitat of the world’s largest species of crocodilian and, arguably, the most dangerous?” he says. “Why would you do that?”

For Mackenzie, although, there is no such thing as a different river prefer it.

Still flush from his early morning canoe as he sips a espresso at his common cafe close to the river, the retired monetary planner displays that many individuals fear about all of the flawed issues. In the 12 months to early August, 178 individuals have died on Queensland roads.

That morning, Mackenzie watched the Fitzroy’s floor ripple with the actions of massive catfish, barramundi and bum-breathing turtles.

So, sure, he is aware of there are dangers when he will get on to the water, however they’re ones Mackenzie gladly accepts.

One of the beauties of this river, he says, is that it’s alive.