German Jack

"A Tribute to the German"

In this tribute I’ll give you the insight on what the German was like as a   person and how he taught me my now trade, in the crocodile industry. The German had two sides to his character; one was an intellectual, caring, considerate, gentleman. The other side was the German when he was pissed, “drunk”. He was arrogant, rude, and obnoxious and couldn’t give a stuff about anything.

He was a very private man with his personal affairs, divulging quite a few of them to me and very few of them to other people. This came from the many years “a decade of poaching crocodiles together ”, all through the top end of North Queensland to New Guinea. We spent many nights in secluded spots and faraway places with very little home comforts. It was a hard life, but we enjoyed every minute of it.
German JackThe German originally ended up in Australia as an immigrant in his early twenties and like many immigrants worked on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. Jack worked there for several years and accumulated sufficient funds to enable him to explore Australia. The first thing Jack did was head North to the tropics (Cairns, North Queensland). As you’ll see throughout this tribute in some sections there will be very little information due to the fact Jack told me never to divulge a lot of his personal business and to instead concentrate on his crocodile career.

Jack then headed further North and started his career in crocodiles in the late fifties/ early sixties. Working from the Fly River in New Guinea, to the Northern Territory and Queensland in the skin market only. It was in New Guinea where Jack learnt the taxidermy of crocodiles; he started because they had an abundance of small animals, which never fetched much on the skin market due to their size. This encouraged Jack to venture out into the value adding of crocodiles. There was more money in doing the small croc’s as stuffed croc’s, so he did some investigation on the basic taxidermy of them, worked out his formulas and proceeded. His first few were pretty rough according to him, but it’s like everything, the more you do, the better you get. So it wasn’t long before the German had it down pat and was stuffing up to half a dozen two to three foot crocs per day.

Which by today’s standards would be netting him up to $2250 a day. It wasn’t long before the German stuffed his first big one, some fifteen and a half foot long. After a full day of stuffing the German and his three helpers had had enough and in true “German Jack style”, when he’d had enough for the day he’d hit the piss and that’s exactly what they did. Meanwhile they’d forgotten about the taxidermy crocodile.

By the time they got back to it the next day, the crocodile had dried out considerably and was looking like a boomerang on four legs. It was stuffed literally. One experience the German had instilled into me after that waste was to always finish the job on the animal then play. His experience in tanning skins was very limited until the early eighties, when him, my partner and myself started to experiment with different types of tanning methods, from chemical to natural tanning. It was then we worked out that the natural bark tan leather was far superior to any leather tanned by chemicals. One example was a skin that we had played with some fifteen months earlier, which mysteriously disappeared. I was down in front of my camp one day and noticed a bit of brown stuff stuck around the root of a mangrove. I walked over and checked it out and it was a small croc skin.

I grabbed the skin and gave it a bit of a brush off and a quick examination. This skin had been out in the elements for some fifteen months and was in nearly perfect condition. I raced down in my dinghy to the German’s place some five km’s down the river and showed him the skin. He looked at the skin and said, “ That’s the way to go. Start bark tanning and we can’t go wrong.” This was a grade one skin once we had put a bit of leather conditioner on it. And that is how we tan our skins to this day using natural tanning methods. But the taxidermy side of things was a lot more Labor intensive and slower process. First he taught me how to put the animals down before the skinning process without damaging the animal’s head.

We did this with a sharp thrust of a screwdriver in the croc’s eye and straight into the brain ‘ like brain-spiking a fish’, death was instantaneous. The next step was to skin the animal with a minimum amount of cutting underneath the belly. We make an incision of around two inches in front of the bum and cut through to two inches from the tip of the tail. My job for quite a few months was to do this section of the animal only. The reason being for this is because the skin around the tail is thick and harder to damage. Therefore a slip with a knife while skinning wouldn’t hurt that part of the skin. But in the more softer areas, like the sides of the belly and around the legs one slip could render the animal non-saleable, as you could slice the whole leg off. When I became good enough on the tails he then said “ You’re ready to progress to the rest of the body and skin it out to the head and I’ll watch you in case you need any help.”

I only had one drama the first time I skinned the whole body out and that was around the head, luckily the German was there to advise me in what to do. I pulled through with flying colours. I put this down to how the German made me watch his every cut and movement he made. With everything he did, as a good teacher would, he’d make you watch and he’d ask questions about the process he performed until it was instilled in me. After the removal of the croc’s hide, fingernails and head, it was time to soak it in our secret solution, for a certain period of time. After that period of time is up, it is then down to the stuffing of the animal. The first one I saw Jack do was around three foot long. There’s no frame in the animal at all, it is packed with sawdust only. By the time Jack had finished he had poked one and a half beer cartons of sawdust into this small crocodile.

I was amazed at how much sawdust could be packed into such a small area. I asked Jack, “What is that job equivalent to?”. He replied it was like grabbing hold of a small bar fridge while sitting on the ground and pushing it backward and forward at least a thousand times. Then it was my turn to stuff a croc. Jack pulled out a three footer and gave me all the required stuffing equipment. He told me to make a start and warned me that it’s a lot harder than it looks. But he would be there if any problems arise. Jack had stuffed his animal in about one and a half hours. By the time I got half way through mine three hours had passed.

The tools of the trade, namely the top half of an 8-ball cue was starting to make its mark on the palm of my hand, in the form of a huge blood blister. It was as round as a golf ball and it had subsequently burst by the time I got to stuffing the tail (we start from the head and work back to the tail). I couldn’t take the pain; the palm of my hand at this stage was now bleeding everywhere. I wanted to throw the towel in, when the German jumped in and told me, “This is the point where you find out whether you can do the taxidermy on crocodiles or not. It’s called beating the pain barrier.”

I persisted and beat the pain barrier and continued on mounting the croc. I finished the job and basically completed my apprenticeship with German Jack. Through the whole process I was glad the German taught me this trade as he was a perfectionist and had a lot of passion towards his work. With the time and many hours we spent together he explained and showed me every detail to do with the trade and instilled into me the same characteristics he had himself. It was a shame that our time together was cut short by a senseless act that took his life. We all thought the way the German used to carry on when he was pissed that he would either be taken by the ocean or by a crocodile, nobody expected the German to be stabbed and cut to pieces in his own local pub. But he still lives on as a legend throughout Northern Australia and New Guinea as one of the best in this field. His memorial stone is situated in Weipa on the mouth of Roberts creek and the Hey River. He was also known as the “Real Dundee”. The German will always be remembered through my work and he will remain in my memories forever.

It is a shame that he isn’t here today where he could see me with a license to deal in crocodiles after all the years he’d seen me potter around illegally .