Crocodile hunter bonded with the biggest specimen in captivity

GEORGE CRAIG: 1930–2024

George Craig, who has died aged 94, captured alive some of the world’s largest crocodiles. English by descent, he started shooting the beasts for their skins in 1951 on the Adelaide and Daly rivers in Australia’s Northern Territory, and then on the Fly River in Papua New Guinea, where he stayed from 1956 until 1971, on occasion narrowly escaping the clutches of head-hunters.

But the more he understood the ways of the crocodile, the less he wanted to kill them. He moved his business away from hides, bought a trading post with his wife and started to trap and keep live crocodiles.

George Craig feeds a chicken to saltwater crocodile “Cassius” at Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, 2011.Credit: AAP

One prize exhibit was Gomek, a 17ft 9in estuarine crocodile (or “saltie”) weighing more than 135 stone (857 kiograms) that he had captured in 1968, a supposed man-eater named “Louma Whalla Coremana Dikana” (loosely translated as “Evil Spirit, Very Large, Very Ferocious”). In captivity, Gomek was no longer aggressive but would still wolf down a four-foot crocodile. “No problem, straight down the hatch,” Craig recalled. “Always was a good eater. Liked a lot of mullet.”

In 1971, as the mood in PNG soured towards colonialists, and “salties” gained protected status in Australia, Craig moved his family, his three monster salties (Gomek, Oscar and Anega) and some 30 juvenile crocodiles to Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef, in the far north of Queensland, where he set up a wildlife park called Marineland Melanesia, later described by the Los Angeles Times as “a sort of saurian Alcatraz”. By 1986, boosted by the box-office success of Crocodile Dundee, starring Paul Hogan as a crocodile hunter, the park was attracting tourists from across the world.

By then Gomek had been sold, ending up in Florida, where he became such a feature of local life that on his death he received a full-page obituary in the St Augustine Record. Craig, meanwhile, found a new star crocodile to replace him, a three-legged, man-eating bruiser called Cassius, which he transported from the Northern Territory on four mattresses.

Crocodile hunter George Craig.Credit: greenislandcrocs.com.au

In 1990, a journalist witnessed feeding time for Cassius and Oscar, when Craig would “coax the two giants from the camouflage of their murky pools with big chunks of meat … the water stirs and tons of reptile wrapped in big, brown-green scales rise as if stirred from the deep”.

Oscar died in 1994, but Cassius lived on to be recognised as the world’s largest crocodile in captivity, celebrating his birthdays with chicken “cake”, and dying at an estimated age of 120 in October 2024.

Cassius had declined sharply after Craig was forced by ill health to leave Green Island. They had developed a bond that was, in the words of one crocodile expert, “absolutely odd”, with Cassius “bolting out of the water” to greet his keeper.

A copy photo taken in 1984 of Marineland Melanisia owner George Craig (left) with saltwater crocodile “Cassius” after he caught him near Darwin.Credit: AAP

But Craig always resisted a romantic interpretation, claiming he had “never felt for a crocodile. He is tough. He will kill his brother, he will eat you. You do get fond of them but don’t let that fool you ...

George Craig crocodile hunter.Credit: Internet

“A lot of people say, ‘Ahh, the poor thing, he is in such a small cage’, but as long as he is getting his food he is quite happy – that’s my thought. Better off free, sure, but when he is free, he is killing.”

George James Craig was born to English parents on July 10, 1930 in Peru. He spent the Second World War in London, where a 500lb bomb landed on his street but failed to explode.

As a teenager he nearly enlisted in the French Foreign Legion but instead stowed away on a tanker and picked bananas in Jamaica. Back in London, he performed in an aqua show alongside the Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller, saving up for a £47 ticket from Tilbury to Melbourne.

After a spell blowing up ordnance for the Royal Australian Air Force he decided to become a crocodile hunter, buying a .303 rifle in Adelaide.

George Craig’s wife, Shirley, died in 2022, and he is survived by their two daughters and a son.

The Telegraph, London