Can crocodiles and canoeists coexist at Australia's 2032 Olympic Games?

The Guardian

6 hours ago

Andrew Miller is only minutes into a crash course on using a V8 ocean ski when he first drops the C-bomb.
The former red beret paratrooper and current president of a Rockhampton canoe club is explaining to a first-time paddler why he won't begin on a K1 – the kind of craft the world's best canoe sprinters will paddle when and if they come here to central Queensland to compete at 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 club secretary, John Mackenzie, admonishes: 'You had to use the C-word.'
To be fair to Miller, the proximity of the world's largest living reptile is not much of a secret. On the wall of the humble green shed belonging to the Fitzroy Canoe Club is a mascot of sorts: a toy croc called Fitzy. Pinned to the noticeboard are tips on being 'Croc Wise'. The club's paddling area is a known crocodile habitat, the note reads. Enter boats 'briskly'. Don't drag arms and legs in the water. If you capsize, get out as soon as possible.
In March, the Queensland government announced that the Fitzroy River in Rockhampton, about 500km north of Brisbane, would host rowing and canoeing events at the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Scattered along the banks of the Fitzroy are signs warning of injury or death from saltwater crocodiles. A four-metre croc can be right beside you in the water, invisible, one reads.
Visitors to the 'beef capital of Australia' are extremely unlikely to see a live saltie.
But they won't miss representations of the prehistoric ambush predator throughout 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 long and five metres high.
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 worry, the crocs aren't hungry – 'we feed them all the time'.
After the gags, Miller gets serious. You won't encounter a croc, he promises. Just enjoy the river, there isn't a better one between here and the mighty Murray.
And with that, as the pinks and purples of dawn filter through 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 still surface of the river. An osprey peers down from the branches of a dead tree. The kayak quivers as its rudder hits a clump of duckweed.
The canoeists paddle upstream, away from the city and the barrage that divides the Fitzroy between its salt and freshwater reaches.
This piece of infrastructure is one reason Miller contends the river is 'pristine'. Unlike those to the south, the freshwater Fitzroy is not swept by tides, lined by mud and mangrove or racked by wind and wave.
That concrete barrier, built as a water storage system to help meet the region's water supply needs, also marks a boundary on the government's Queensland crocodile management plan between targeted management and general management zones.
Upstream of the barrage for 20km, park rangers are tasked with removing 'all large crocodiles' and any croc 'displaying dangerous behaviour' from the water.
After a couple of kilometres, a pair of canoeists pass through a stretch of river they claim is the territory of a croc about the length at which it is officially considered 'large' – that is, longer than two metres.
A few kilometres farther upstream is the spot that one canoe club member sighted a 4.5 metre saltie two years ago. After several weeks, it was captured and removed.
This is winter, too – the same time of year that sunny Queensland will host the summer Olympics – and the period in which crocs are most easy to spot, basking their cold blood on riverbanks.
Yet, statistically, Miller is almost certain to be right. The Boyne River, more than 100km to the south, is officially considered the southern boundary of typical crocodile habitat.
Here in the lower reaches of croc country, the number and density of these apex predators is far lower than in the faraway tropics to the north. A government monitoring program estimates the number of crocodiles in rivers of the Cape York Peninsula – more than 1,500km to the north – at three crocodiles per kilometre. That ratio declines southward, down to 0.2 crocs per km on the Fitzroy.
The canoe club has been paddling here since the late 1970s without incident. They are on the water almost every day, often starting in the dark. So, too, their rowing counterparts, who are also looking forward to hosting the Olympics.
Mackenzie says he has been paddling in the river for the past seven years and has seen a croc upstream of the barrage only once.
It was during 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 worried at all.
'It was doing its thing, and I was doing mine,' Mackenzie says. 'It was quite a majestic encounter'.
Other local water users aren't so enamoured of sharing the water with these toothy reptiles.
Steve Diehm grew up five minutes from the boat ramp above the barrage on the banks of the Fitzroy and has spent his whole life in Rockhampton. An avid waterskier, Diehm had a boat before he had a car.
The Fifo oil and gas worker met his wife and raised his three children waterskiing. But, over recent years, Diehm began being gnawed by a sense of unease familiar to many north of the tropic of capricorn.
Since they were protected in the 1970s after being hunted to near annihilation, saltwater crocodiles – which despite their name also inhabit freshwater environments – have been steadily returning to their former range, reclaiming waterways that people swam for decades.
Diehm had always been aware he was in croc habitat but began to feel less and less safe. Then, when he saw a picture of that 4.5 metre saltie captured in 2023, a 'horrible feeling' wrenched his stomach. He had skied that 'exact bank' for 15 years. Diehm thought about his children.
The 46-year-old was devastated when he made the decision that it was no longer safe for his family to be on the Fitzroy.
Looking out across the river gives Diehm a pang of remorse. It is perfectly smooth, basking in sunshine, a 'skier's dream' – and there is 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 would be great for Rockhampton but, without a change to crocodile management, he reckons athletes will be 'running the gauntlet'.
The University of Queensland's crocodile expert, Prof Craig Franklin, runs the world's largest and longest active crocodile tracking 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 event sends the message that it is 'OK to go swimming' in places like the Fitzroy. But crocodiles travel vast distances over short periods, crossing barriers and moving overland for several 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, though, there is no other river like it.
Still flush from his early morning canoe as he sips a coffee at his regular cafe near the river, the retired financial planner reflects that many people worry about all the wrong things. In the year to early August, 178 people died on Queensland roads.
That morning, Mackenzie watched the Fitzroy's surface ripple with the movements of big catfish, barramundi and bum-breathing turtles.
So, yes, he knows there are risks when he gets on to the water, but they are ones Mackenzie gladly accepts.
One of the beauties of this river, he says, is that it's alive.