Rod Ansell:
The Real Crocodile Dundee
A photo of Rod Ansell taken in 1988, two years after his protracted wilderness survival ordeal in the wilds of Australia. This guy was a lunatic.
Back in 1986, I was walking alone through the middle of no place in the Alaskan bush when I came upon a big guy with a scraggly beard, a fearsome German Shepherd dog and an M14 rifle. I was just a kid at the time and had not lived long enough to be skeptical of others. I just said, “Hi, I’m Will from Mississippi. Nice to meet you.”
This man and I had a delightful visit. I got to know his dog and pawed over his rifle a bit. When I asked what he was doing living alone so far from civilization, he just said he had had some difficulties back in the world. Dude likely ate his family or something. Regardless, I didn’t get murdered, and we parted company amicably.
When I actually lived in Alaska in the 1990s, there were roughly as many folks who listed “The Bush” as their address as lived in Fairbanks. There’s just a certain type of person who gravitates toward these untamed spaces. It seems that Australia has those people, too.
Crikey ...
Rodney William Ansell was born on Oct. 1, 1954, in Murgon, Queensland, to Eva May and George William Ansell. He was the third of their four kids. At age 15, the family moved to the Northern Territory, where Rod lived a rugged life. As a young man, he made his living hunting feral water buffalo and selling the meat.
In May 1977, at the age of 22, Rod had just finished a sizeable buffalo catching job in Kununurra, Western Australia, and decided to treat himself to a protracted solo fishing trip. He told his girlfriend he would be gone for a few months and then struck out onboard his big motor launch. Deep down the Victoria River, he struck something sizeable, and his boat capsized. Ansell later claimed it was a whale. In short order, Rod Ansell found himself in the middle of no place in a tiny dinghy. He had salvaged a single oar, his hunting rifle, a knife, a bedroll, a little canned food, and his two twin 8-week-old bull terriers, one of which had a broken leg. He was 120 miles from the nearest human.
Unable to control his little boat, Ansell eventually floated out to sea. By paddling furiously for the next two days, he made landfall on a tiny island at the mouth of the Fitzmaurice River. By this point, he was getting pretty thirsty.
After a diligent search, Ansell found a source of fresh water above the tidal range. From there, he set up camp and began hunting feral cattle and buffalo to keep him and his dogs alive. At one point, he followed bees back to their hive and scored some honey. Ansell and his dogs slept in trees to avoid hungry crocodiles. One particular evening, while up in a tree, he got mixed up with a venomous brown tree snake. While hunting for subsistence, he killed a 16-foot crocodile — the head of which he retained as a trophy.
Realizing he would never be rescued, Ansell resolved to walk out of the bush. He eventually encountered a pair of aboriginal stockmen along with their cattle manager, a man named Luke McCall. Though a bit thin, Ansell was none the worse for the wear. He had survived alone in the wild for 56 days.
The movie Crocodile Dundee debuted in 1986 and
returned $328 million against an $8.8 million investment.
Paul Hogan’s character in the movie was based on the life of Rod Ansell.
The Dangers of Fame …
Once word of his ordeal got out, Ansell got more attention than he really wanted. Documentary filmmaker Donald Oxenburgh did a film and a book, and he was interviewed by English journalist Michael Parkinson. While staying in the 5-star Sebel Townhouse Hotel in Sydney on Parkinson’s dime, he slept on the floor and found himself thoroughly vexed by the bathroom’s bidet. He also spoke fluent Urapunga and was rated a “fully initiated white man” among the local aboriginal tribes. If any of that sounds familiar, it is because the actor Paul Hogan heard the story and patterned his character Crocodile Dundee after Rod Ansell.
In 1985, Ansell took out a loan and established a pastoral lease in northern Arnhem Land. Such an arrangement gave him the right to manage the feral buffalo and cattle he found there. An edict from the government of the Northern Territory concerning the Bovine Brucellosis and Tuberculosis Eradication Campaign forced him to slaughter 3,000 head of feral buffalo and torpedoed his business. He was forced to sell his cattle station in 1991.
Ansell later moved to an Aboriginal Outstation on the Roper River some 300 miles south of Darwin. Over time, he and his girlfriend Cherie Hewson got deeper and deeper into drugs, specifically methamphetamines. By 1999, the pair were having frank psychotic episodes.
The Proverbial Blaze of Glory
On Aug. 3, 1999, a pair of local police officers confronted Ansell and his girlfriend over some infraction or other. Ansell shot one of the officers with his Winchester .30-30 rifle, striking him below his vest and killing him. This same round severely wounded an otherwise uninvolved bystander named Jonathan Anthonysz. The remaining police officer then engaged Ansell in a running gun battle. After emptying his GLOCK pistol to no effect, the officer shot Ansell squarely with a load of buckshot from his 12-gauge. His autopsy showed him to have suffered 30 separate wounds in the exchange.
Prior to his shootout with police, Rod Ansell had been complaining about Freemasons having kidnapped his children and stalking him wherever he went. In retrospect, the man was clearly suffering from psychotic delusions secondary to amphetamine use. All in all, it was a pretty sordid way to go for the original Crocodile Dundee.
