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Angourie Crocodile part 2

FOOTPRINT CAST AND SCALE.
INSPECTED AT MUSEUM.

The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW)
Date: December 8, 1939
Page Number: 12

A plaster cast of a footprint of the supposed North Coast crocodile, and a scale from the body of an animal which, it is stated, may be either a crocodile or an alligator were received by the Australian Museum yesterday.
Mr. J. R. Kinghorn, zoologist at the Museum, said that while he was not certain what to make of the cast, he was satisfied that the scale, which was picked up by the police, was from the body of a crocodile, or from that of an alligator, which would have been introduced to Australia, as alligators were not native to it.
     "It is possible that a northern crocodile would stray down to the Clarence River of its own accord, but it is not probable," Mr. Kinghorn said. "I think that we may be able to get a cast of a footprint of a crocodile at Taronga Park to compare it with the one we have received from the Clarence.
     "Before I am convinced that the print is that of a crocodile, I would like to see the actual footprint itself, or photographs of the footprints in situ."

Expert Unable to Identify Cast
The Canberra Times (ACT)
Date: December 8, 1939
Page Number: 5

SYDNEY, Thursday.
     After inspecting a plaster cast sent to Sydney from Grafton, Mr. J. R. Kinghorn, the reptile expert of the Sydney Museum, said to-day that he was not prepared to say whether or not the footprints were made by a crocodile.
     The matter, he said, was certainly worth further investigation. He added that there was a possibility of the crocodile, if it were one, being of the fresh-water type, and if this were so it would not be dangerous.

James Roy Kinghorn
(1891–1983)

Cultural Heritage: Scottish

Religious Influence: Anglican, Presbyterian

Occupation: army officer, herpetologist, museum curator, radio entertainer, soldier, zoologist

CROCODILE MYSTERY
The Canberra Times (ACT)
Date: December 9, 1939
Page Number: 3

SYDNEY, Friday.
Mr. J. R. Kinghorn, reptile expert at the Sydney Museum, thinks that the cast of imprints sent to him from Grafton is that of a crocodile or alligator. "I think it is a crocodilee and if it is it would be approximately 12 feet in length." he said.
     He said that his opinion had been formed following a further examination of the cast to-day.

Right: Mr. R. J. Kinghorn, zoologist at the Australian Museum, examining the plaster cast of a depression in the ground, which is thought to have been made by a crocodile's claws at Angourie, near Grafton.

Left: A large Queensland crocodile, showing clearly the different formations of its front and hind claws.

Crocodile Drives "King" From Daughter's Home

The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld.)
Date: December 9, 1939
Page Number: 2

GRAFTON, Friday.
     Billy Boney, king of the Clarence blacks, has returned post-haste from Angourie to Grafton. He had gone there to live with his daughter after the death of his Queen recently.
     "Too much crocodile there, Boss," he said. "I no sleep. Crocodile, he sleep in water all day and walk about all night. Me got to do same."
     To the suggestion that a big goanna might be causing, the scare, Billy said: "No fear. You see goanna coming you. Goanna run like blazes. You see crocodile coming. He stop. You run like lightning." Billy claims he is a nervous wreck.
     Mrs. R. James, of Tyndale, said today that in October she saw what might have been crocodile tracks in a swamp near Angourie. She was cutting through the scrub to Yamba and saw the tracks on a bank in a black, slimy pool. Constable Jackson, who has organised a search party, said to-day that if indiscriminate hunting did not cease, the crocodile would stay in hiding. They possessed most sensitive hearing, and were the shyest and most cunning beasts in Australia, he said.

Yowieocalypse wishes to advise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visitors that this article contains names of deceased people.

AN ALLEGED CROCDILE

The Northern Miner (Charters Towers, Qld.)
Date: December 9, 1939
Page Number: 3

SOUTH GRAFTON, December 8.
     A serious rift has developed between the twin towns of Yamba and Angourie. It is all over the Angourie "crocodile."
     Donall Rutledge of Angourie is backing the "crocodile" to a man. He is the only man who has seen it.
Yamba people claim it was a big goanna.
     To-day Rutledge became very angry with Frank O'Grady, a Yamba hotel keeper. O'Grady hung the skin of a 5ft. goanna in his bar.
     Rutledge said "I am sick of being baited. People are asking me if the crocodile wore pink trousers. They make gestures like brushing snakes off their coaits. I saw it, I tell you. It stood up and glared at me."
     Someone in Yamba sent Rutledge a sun helmet.
     Angourie residents have posted a £50 reward for the capture of the "crocodile" dead or alive.
     The Yamba reply was to call on Tim Healy, 75-year-old astrologer. Healy lives like a hermit in a tin hut on the Wooloweyah marshes. He does horoscope readings for holiday tourists. He made calculations by the planets and said "There is not a crocodile within a thousand miles."
     Healy has foretold the deaths of Hitler, Goerlng and Stalin before next March. Their horoscopes, he claims, show the causes of death as: Hitler, suicide: Goering, assassination; Stalin, ptomaine poisoning.
     Constable Jackson has threatened to take rifles off amateur crocodile hunters. They are firing recklessly around the Angourie mangroves and might kill themselves, he says.
     George Bardell, of Roper River, saw claw prints in the swamp to-day. He says he has never seen a pigeon-toed crocodile. He suggests that the prints were made by bushy-tailed kangaroos.

CROCDILE TEARS.

The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW)
Date: December 12, 1939
Page Number: 10

"Once," said the Mock Turtle "I was a real Turtle." Which induces the hope that the Angourie Beach crocodile that has lately created such a stir on the North Coast will not, in the thrilling event of its capture, embarrass the huntsmen by exclaiming "Once I was a real crocodile!" For this unwanted apparition which was at first mistaken by an observant engine-driver for a fifteen-foot log (until it quaintly waddled into a swamp), otherwise remains as shadowy as Hamlets Ghost—"'Tis here! 'Tis here! 'Tis gone!" So shy and retiring is its disposition that despite the strenuous perambulations of armed search parties it has evaded eveiry human eye except the startled orb of the engine-driver who originally saw it. "'Tis here! 'Tis here! 'Tis gone!" Can it have gone west? Nobody, of course, doubts the credibility of the witness (as well question the existent a of real crocodiles), but it is equally certain that no authentic representative of the species, outside a zoo, has been discovered south of the Fitzroy River, in Queensland-several hundred miles north of Angourie Beach. On the other hand, Mr. Kinghorn, of the Australian Museum, has said that salt-water crocodiles are capable of travelling considerable distances by sea. Is it not conceivable, therefore, that this particular creature, hatched with an inexorable urge to see the world, actually achieved an epoch-marking tour? Or, what is more likely, could it not have been deposited in the innocent form of an egg? In the latter case it could readily be forgiven, in its loneliness, copious showers of crocodile tears-tears which it is probably shedding at this moment in utter solitude.
     Whether the visitation, if sufficiently prolonged, will encourage an influx of tourists and big-game hunters to the district remains to be demonstrated. The Loch Ness monster, which cultivated the quality of invisibility to such a degree as rarely to be seen in more than three places at once, proved, for example, a veritable treasure to the local Scottish inhabitants, as well as the British film and newspaper industries. But Australian monsters, on the whole, have been of the terrifying, rather than the lucrative, sort. They have "appeared" at intervals and in various shapes over the past 115 years (ever since Hume, the explorer, reported "a large beast of some unknown species" in Lake Bathurst), but have never been a financial success. Even when a "hairy nondescript" tactlessly materialised at Crystal Brook, South Australia, in 1876, and the Government was forced by a frightened countryside to offer a reward of fifty pounds for the animal's capture "dead or alive," the prize was not collected. The "hairy nondescript," like every other monster before and since, simply lost itself in a fog of mystery. Thus history teaches us that, should the Angourie crocodile eventually be bearded in its den or caught on the prowl, it will have established a notable precedent, especially if it turns out to be a "monster," and not, after all, a crocodile. In the present topsy-turvy state of the world far more improbable things are happening.

Loch Ness Monster

The Hairy Nondescript of Crystal Brook

CROCODILE AWAKES CARETAKER.
"Heard Snorting, Bellowing"
The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW)
Date: December 15, 1939
Page Number: 12

GRAFTON, Thursday.
     A caretaker declares that he heard the Angourie crocodile outside the walls of his hut last night.
     L. Johnson, who is employed as a farrier and caretaker by the Beach Mining Company, at Angourie, say's that the crocodile came very close to his hut about midnight, when he was awakened by snorting and bellowing.
     Johnson, who was alone, immediately locked and barricaded the doors of the hut, which is nearly three miles fiom where tracks were found.
     Searchers have found fresh tracks, believed to have been made by the crocodile.

The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.)
Date: December 19, 1939
Page Number: 6

With the holidays approaching Grafton people are hoping that the alleged crocodile in the Angourie swamps will be forgotten as crocodiles are bad for tourist business. The latest report from the district is that the crocodile has gone hiking to other parts and hotel and guest house proprietors are hoping the report is true. However Mr. C. Price Conigrave, the explorer and author believes that there is a crocodile in the Angourie swamps. I'ts hard to live a crocodile down.

IN 1937 a survey party was sent out to assess a possible route around Australia for a car rally to celebrate Australia's 150th anniversary of white settlement.
     Australian newspaper journalist C. Price Conigrave recorded the trip in his book Around Australia in a Pontiac.
     The trip was completed in two standard Pontiacs, each fitted with an additional 270-litre petrol tank to give them a range of 1600km.
     Conigrave reports they travelled on good and bad roads, good and bad tracks and over no tracks at all and records opening and shutting every station gate that was passed.
     He wrote: "Whilst our two trusty cars were still running perfectly as ever despite the rough gruelling they had we ourselves were completely fagged out when at last we arrived" at Norseman.

Charles Price Conigrave c. 1937

Crocodile Escaped During Salt Water "Cure"

The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld.)
Date: December 19, 1939
Page Number: 17

GRAFTON, Monday.— Following an assurance by Mr. G. Marshall, the Sydney zoologist, that there is a crocodile roaming the Angourie district, William Hart, engineer, of Burwood, has informed the Burwood police that in 1930, in the Tamworth district, he saw two men, one of whom was a Japanese, exhibiting an eight-foot crocodile.
      They told him that the reptile was sick, and would have to be taken to the seaside for salt water treatment. He advised them to take it to Yamba. Three months later he met one of the men, who told him that the crocodile had escaped at Yamba, and they had been unable to find it.

Tracks Of Second Crocodile In Clarence Area

The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld.)
Date: January 13, 1940
Page Number: 3

GRAFTON, Friday.
     Discovery of strange tracks near the Yamba golf links has led to the belief that more than one crocodile is at large in the district. Armed with rifles, a party led by Constable Jackson, and including the chairman of the Yamba Urban Committee (Mr. J. H. Ford) found tracks apparently made by a crocodile visiting a rubbish tip near the golf links. Constable Jackson and Mr. Ford were of opinion that these were not tracks of the crocodile which had been the object of search in the Angourie district, as the size was different. Now it is feared that there is more than one crocodile in the district. Aborigines camped near the spot have reported hearing bellowings at night. W. Kirke, who has been searching every morning at daylight for the Angourie crocodile, found many fresh tracks through grass and reeds.

The Angourie "Crocodile"
BEACH MYSTERY

The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld.)
Date: January 15, 1940
Page Number: 6

It is not unusual for "tigers" and "lions" to be seen in various parts of New South Wales. Reports of these strange animals filter in to country towns, gain currency, and finally arouse the interest of a jaded city during slack periods of the year. Often these animals are figments of fertile country imaginations ; sometimes, when a hunt has been organised, and the creature finally shot, it proves to be some huge cross between a kangaroo dog and a dingo, a breed whose deprecations in sheep areas are considerable. The latest creature to arouse interest is the "Angourie crocodile." Angourie is a beach near Grafton, on the north coast of New South Wales, and well out of the tropical zone in which one might expect to find crocodiles. The crocodile has not actually been seen; but tracks have been discovered leading to swamps. Spring traps and extensive searches have so far failed to bring the reptile, if it exists, to book.