After 82 years of a life devoted to saltwater crocodiles, John Lever still fondly recalls the first “saltie” he ever caught on Rockhampton’s Fitzroy River, about 500km north of Brisbane.
The year was 1982, the crocodile was a three-metre long female and she’d just eaten “a lovely labrador dog” from a market garden in the central Queensland city.
More than four decades later, Lever runs a crocodile farm home to more than 3,000 of the world’s largest living reptiles on an mangrove-fringed island in a swampy estuary about 25 kilometres east of the central Queensland city known as the beef capital of Australia and, as of this week, officially set to host the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games rowing events.
Provided that World Rowing and the International Olympic Committee signs off on the plan – announced by Queensland premier David Crusafulli in Brisbane on Tuesday – that is.
But it may not just be the most feared apex predator of the tropical north that derails that plan.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
On the eve of Crusafulli’s much anticipated announcement, the national broadcaster reported the chief executive of Rowing Australia, Sarah Cook, as saying her organisation was concerned the Fitzroy would not meet World Rowing technical specifications.
On Monday the ABC published Cook’s comments that a “key criteria” of a standard international course was that “there should be no stream”.
“The issue for us at this point is that we know that World Rowing and the [International Olympic Committee] have not yet been consulted in relation to that venue,” Cook said.
“So, we simply don’t have the technical assessment to know whether it is a viable option or not.”
Cook was more relaxed about crocs, however, noting Rockhampton’s active rowing community and use as an Olympic training venue, while acknowledging the deadly reptiles could prove “quite shocking” for international visitors.
The Australian rowing team trained in the Rockhampton waterway before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and plans to do so again before the Los Angeles Games.
But it is not just foreigners surprised by the fact Olympic athletes will be asked to compete on water that even the local rowing club president acknowledges is natural crocodile habitat.
Just hours before the plan was officially unveiled, Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was asked on radio what he thought about the then unofficial reports of Rockhampton as an Olympic rowing venue – and if he himself would swim the Fitzroy.
“I’m not sure how sensible a proposition that is,” Albanese told Brisbane’s B105.
“My understanding is it was sort of listed eight out of eight as options, and if there were 15 options, it would have been 15.”
The prime minister went on to say that Rockhampton was a “fantastic place” and the Fitzroy a “great river” – to “walk along”.
“But I’m not sure that having rowing there, although I’ve got to say, people might break world records,” he said.
“They’d want to go pretty quickly wouldn’t they?”
But crocodile fears were dismissed by the Brisbane Olympic chief, Andrew Liveris, who called for a “can do, not can’t do” mindset at Tuesday’s live announcement.
“There are sharks in the ocean and we still do surfing,” Liveris said.
“Creatures below the water … that’s a bit kind of Hollywoodish, we’ll leave LA to worry about that.”
Rockhampton Fitzroy Rowing club president, Sarah Black, told a parliamentary inquiry into hosting the Olympics in February that Rockhampton rowers “have processes in place” for reporting crocodile sightings, working around crocodile behaviour and with crocodile managers.
“The Fitzroy River is a natural habitat for crocodiles, we’re well aware of that,” she said.
[But] I think some of the reports in the media have been sensationalised, with comments around it being ‘crocodile infested’”.
“It’s certainly risk managed and [that is] something that our sport does quite well, regularly”.
Lever, the crocodile farmer who was responsible for removing crocodiles from areas of human habitation for a decade in the 1980s until it was taken over by state wildlife rangers in the early 1990s, said the Fitzroy River delta was at the southern extremity of the saltwater crocodile’s range.
“Formally, when you look at them, that’s where the map stops,” he says.
Lever thinks the Olympic decision is “wonderful”, describing the Fitzroy as a “spectacular” tapestry of centuries old paperbark trees, floodplains, islands, swamps and houses.
The state’s environment department would have to rezone the Fitzroy from “targeted” to “active removal” he said, meaning all crocodiles, regardless of size or behaviour, were targeted for removal.
“Then it needs constant monitoring by surveys in the Fitzroy River,” he said. “And then, probably, you’d even go to the extent of putting out a couple of traps there and baiting them up once a week, just to see if anything pops up in the area, so that it might get caught.
“It’s all doable.”
In fact, he says, much of it is already being done, pointing to official crocodile removals in recent years. Less humanely, in 2017, a massive 5.2-metre male crocodile was found floating in the Fitzroy after it was shot in the head.
But Lever said “none of these crocodiles actually posed any sort of a problem” and that people regularly swim and use the river without being attacked.
He points to the Rockhampton’s crest, dating back to the 1800s, upon which the only animal is a crocodile – standing on rocks above a quadrant of images depicting city’s history of mining, shipping, machinery and commerce – as evidence to the longstanding coexistence of humans and crocodiles in the region.
Although Lever admits the city’s founders did “have to kill a lot of crocodiles to make it safe for people to load and unload boats there”.
While there are crocodiles responsible for fatal attacks farther north, where they occur in far greater numbers, he said crocodiles were remarkable creatures that had existed unchanged over millions of years, but had been “so much misjudged” over comparatively recent ones.
“The part that really got me besotted with them was their parental behaviour,” he said. “These are lovely, lovely, gentle dinosaurs with their offspring.”