4
The sound of gunfire in the bush that surrounded Lagoona kept ten-year-old Glenn McGrath awake until the early hours of the morning. It was exactly as it sounded – a battle: the latest engagement in the age-old war between farmers and the vermin that stalked and mutilated their newly born lambs. Like Dale, Glenn lay in his bed wide-eyed and excited by the action. He could hear the engines of the gunmen’s souped-up utes rev and groan as they chased the prey. Sometimes the spotlights – ‘spotties’ – would briefly illuminate his room as the men scoured the scrub for another fox or feral cat.
Glenn and Dale heard their father describe foxes as ‘bastards’ whenever he came across lambs that had been butchered in the night. The foxes normally killed with a single bite to a lamb’s neck and, as if to add salt to the farmers’ wounds, they ate only the tongue and tail – it was, as any man of the land would swear, an infuriating waste. ‘Bastards,’ Kevin McGrath would curse.
The McGrath boys witnessed firsthand that foxes are surplus killers – they slaughter more creatures than they can possibly eat. The lambing season – when the scent of the ewes’ afterbirth lures foxes from their dens deep within the bush – was the annual call to arms for neighbours to try to eradicate their common foe.
Glenn and Dale lay wondering how anything could survive as they listened to volley after volley of shotgun blasts. Glenn, while buzzing at the action going on just a few hundred metres from his window, was disappointed to have been confined to the barracks by his father. But he was far too young to be exposed to the many dangers that came with being among a troupe of armed men shooting in the dark.
In time, the boys realised their father did not like guns. He hadn’t fired a shot until he was in his twenties and had to defend his livestock from the predators that would raid the paddocks and the chicken coops. The only reason Kevin owned a rifle at all was to keep at bay the foxes and feral cats that threatened his family’s livelihood. Unlike the other members of his posse, he wasn’t attached to the weapon and he dreaded that his boys would one day want to become shooters.
‘I didn’t hate guns, but like a lot of parents I was nervy about the kids using them,’ says Kevin. ‘The boys’ mother was more concerned about it than me, but I just wanted them to realise to be careful and to appreciate they were dangerous. I didn’t want them to use the gun until they were old enough to take responsibility and to take notice of what I had to say on the subject.’
While McGrath knew the men spent the darkened hours shooting and killing foxes, he was still shocked by the scene that confronted him before breakfast one morning when he opened the door to his father’s workshop. The sight of three animals sprawled on the grease-stained concrete floor made him recoil in horror. While McGrath had seen dead stock before, this was different – not only because their bullet wounds were still fresh, but also because they’d been killed by his father’s hand. For the first time in his life, McGrath felt scared at being so close to death.
‘The rifle fire sounded exciting,’ he says. ‘However, when I saw those three dead foxes on the workshop floor that morning I felt a bit ... well, I felt a bit scared of them ... of their being dead.’
Despite the fear he felt for those three foxes, Glenn and his brother were eventually called upon to join the men in the firing line.
McGrath’s first night shooting was during the lambing season. When they shone the spotlight into the darkness, the boy could see what looked like hundreds of foxes surrounding the sheep and their lambs. And then everyone started shooting.
‘Someone would flick the spotty on, I’d sight the fox, shoot, kill it and reload,’ he recalls. ‘The light would go on again and I’d shoot again. Sometimes they’d bolt and we’d chase them. It was my first shoot and I still remember the adrenaline rush. It wasn’t the thrill of the kill; it was the idea I was helping to save the lambs.
‘We covered about 5000 acres over the three nights and we killed a total of 99 foxes, which gives you an idea of how rampant the foxes are out there. Like the pigs, they were an introduced species and they’re doing terrible damage to the environment. I know people have varying ideas on shooting, but the feral animals are doing lots of damage out in the bush.’
Despite Kevin’s loathing for shooting, the McGrath family is steeped in the traditions of the sport. In the early 1900s, his grandfather Jim and four uncles formed the McGrath Brothers Rifle Team in the Hargraves District near Mudgee. For competitions the fab five wore military tunics and slouch hats of the style favoured by Australia’s colonial troops during the Boer War. When they moved en masse to Cooyal, the New South Wales National Rifle Association granted them permission to form a new club, for which the lads were careful to select the safest spot possible – the paddock of local farmer Andrew Baker. As Muriel Marks notes in Cooyal Stories, ‘It is an ideal site for a rifle range, with the high mountain in the background where there is no danger of stray bullets doing any harm.’
Glenn remembers his grandfather Lyle McGrath’s many shooting trophies. ‘But my dad didn’t share his father’s love for the sport. He was anti-guns and would get very angry whenever he found out Dale and I had sneaked his.22 rifle out of the house to shoot at some targets in the back paddock. It was a rubbish gun. The firing pin was worn out and it was a bit like playing Russian roulette in that it’d only fire every 20 shots. We’d take it in turns to take aim at the target and squeeze the trigger, only for it to go click, click, click, bang !’
Despite Kevin’s best attempts to steer Glenn and Dale away from shooting, they embraced it.
‘Glenn was absolutely mad on it from the start,’ Kevin says. ‘I noticed when he went overseas on cricket tours, he would always be photographed or filmed talking to the guards in places like India or South Africa and asking about a submachine gun. He has a photo album of wild pigs that he has shot ... That’s a bit different.’
The brothers became accurate shots and sure-footed hunters, and made good money from selling fox and feral cat skins to the wool traders. Skinning the animals was messy work, but it was much more profitable than their alternate means of making extra cash – collecting aluminium cans to trade for one cent each.
McGrath soon set his sights on wild pigs, which he grew to admire for their intelligence and heartiness. But that did not spare them from the bullet, for they massacre lambs. Wild pigs are said to kill and eat up to 40 per cent of the lambs born in some areas.
‘They crunch through the lambs like we do toast,’ says Dale about the old enemy. They also damage crops and fences, and can carry diseases like foot-and-mouth disease as well as a variety of parasites, including the screw-worm fly.
As he matured as a hunter, McGrath would challenge himself not only to stalk the wild pigs, but to sit in their midst and observe them.
‘That to me is the thrill of the hunt,’ he enthuses. ‘If I’m hunting something that is 400 metres away, I’d rather stalk it than take it out with a long-range shot. That’s when skills come into play. It’s then a matter of tracking the prey, studying it, observing its actions and then making my move. It’s a process, a calculated one at that, and when I make my decision to take the shot – it’s the only thing that matters in that split second, and I do everything to ensure it is a clean shot. Sometimes I don’t fire. If the pig is a mother with babies that can’t fend for themselves, I won’t take it. There are some blokes who shoot everything they can, but I don’t.’
For McGrath, hunting is as much about mateship as any thing else. Some of his best friends are hunters. ‘They’re not rednecks that go around shooting anything that moves,’ he says. ‘They’re actually responsible, community-based people and environmentally conscious. They’re some of the best people you could ever hope to meet.’
In 2005, Glenn McGrath and two cricket mates, Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie – the cream of Australia’s fast bowling talent – were sitting around a campfire in outback New South Wales discussing everything from their sport to the day’s hunting. They were at McGrath’s 34,000-acre property outside Bourke, one of the trappings of his success as the world’s leading strike bowler. Divided by the Cuttaburra River and reaching the Queensland border in some parts, the property was where McGrath would go to reinvigorate his body and spirit after a gruelling cricket campaign. On this particular night, with the smell of ash in the air and a billy of tea boiling on a low flame, the trio marvelled at ‘the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars’, as Banjo Paterson had described the night sky over a century earlier in his poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’.
For Gillespie, hunting with McGrath had been a tough experience. He was more comfortable targeting batsmen’s wickets than feral pigs, but he was happy to be with two of his mates from the Fast Bowlers’ Cartel (the team within the Australian team whose membership was restricted to individuals who could hurl a ball from one end of a wicket to the other at speed in baking heat, when they were bone-weary and mentally hammered).
‘I think I shot the gun twice in the four days I was there,’ says Gillespie. ‘I’d never really been around guns before; the first time was when we were in Zimbabwe and I went with Glenn to a couple’s place in the middle of nowhere – it was Tarzan territory. But going to his property was brilliant.’
Lee – a self-proclaimed country boy from Wollongong, south of Sydney – understands McGrath’s passion for pitting his tracking and shooting skills against the beasts.
‘It’s not the hunting,’ Lee says. ‘For me, it’s being out there in the open and camping ... getting away from the cricket world for a while. I’m definitely a country boy at heart – any chance I get to go out to the wilderness and sleep in a tent, do some fishing, and be in a place that’s without electricity, well, it’s great fun. Glenn loves it. It seems to me to be where he’s most relaxed.’
For the teenage McGrath, stalking and hunting vermin was a lot more enjoyable pursuit than attending school. Shyness made the blackboard jungle a place of absolute terror.