Hugo Julcher was last seen on Oliver River Camp 47 Nautical Miles North of
Lockhart River QLD by friend Graeme ROBERTS, of Hicks Island.
Hugo
JUCLHER failed to meet a ship scheduled to transport him to Cairns QLF on
the 13/3/2003, and has not been located since this date.
Fears held for missing man
Posted
Police hold little hope of finding a man missing in a remote area near the tip
of Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland.
Hugo Julcher, 71, lived alone in a remote camp at the mouth of the Olive River,
about 75 kilometres north of Lockhart River.
A search on Sunday failed to find any trace of Mr Julcher.
Police Inspector John Harvey says the search will continue, but grave fears are
held for his safety.
"He's gone missing a number of days ago, anything up to a month ago, concerned
people from a neighboring island went across to look for him and can't locate
him or any sign of him at his camp," he said.
I've met some strange and interesting
people travelling the world as a journalist over the years but
right up there near the top of the list come this pair on a boat
trip to Torres Strait in 1997, so read on: ________________________
THE ageless watchers on the bank would have heard us puttering
up river long before they spied Heather, Hugo and me stepping
from the dinghy into the pitch-tar blackness of a Cape York
Peninsula midnight.
We clattered about in muddy, knee-deep water dragging the
ancient tinnie and its battered outboard up the bank from which,
mere seconds before, the watchers had slid stealthily beneath
the Olive River to do whatever it is crocodiles do when
unaccustomed things go bump in their night.
For about 10 months of the year Hugo Julcher, 65, and Heather
Schlaegl, 58, share that little section of Temple Bay, near the tip of Cape
York, with about a dozen resident crocodiles and God only knows how many local
snakes and transient sharks.
So my guess is that Heather and Hugo not only would have seen
the two watchers on the bank in front of their shack as we approached out of
the night but most likely would have known them by first name.
You see, their's is but a small, exclusive colony of
crocodiles with almost daily eyeball-to-eyeball contact on the banks and in
the water that rushes past their front door ... make that their front half
door, because half a front door is all there is to this home away from home,
probably the least luxurious shack I have encountered since visiting black
townships in South Africa in apartheid days.
Most of the building material has come from combing the wide,
white beaches within easy walking distance of that lonely shack about 180km
south of the tip of Cape York. Material like the sail which makes up the eastern
wall and the railway tarp that provides about half the roof, fishing net, the
flotsam and jetsam, the odds and ends that have been turned into just about
every stick of furniture in the place.
Sure, it doesn't sound much, but it's a dream home to this
amazing couple, a 10-month-a-year haven from the rat race of Cairns where
Heather owns a small block of units.
Maybe it was the excitement of coming home to this tiny, often
damp outpost in the wilderness that caused them to overlook formal introductions
between myself and the reptiles but they failed to mention them altogether as we
disembarked.
Thus fortified by their lack of concern about deadly creatures of
the night, I stumbled through the water, the mud, the bush and the blackness
helping unload their meagre provisions.
This finished, we each had a can of beer to ward off the tropical
swelter, I flashed off a few photos of them filling a chaff bag with black-lip
oysters from the spot so recently vacated by their evil-eyed neighbours, and
returned a mile out to sea to board my transport to Torres Strait, Jardine
Shipping's mother ship, Torres Express. It was only next day that a Torres
Express crewman, who had been following our dinghy up the Olive the previous
night with more stores, mentioned the crocodiles just a few metres from us which
he had clearly seen in his spotlight. There was a torch in Hugo's tinnie but
after about 20 years fishing and living around the Olive, he doesn't need
spotlights, or any other new-fangled contraption for that matter, just his
instincts.
Well, that's not entirely true. He and Heather have a generator
that works a frig and a dim light. They also have a transistor radio which
receives the ABC at night and first thing in the morning but not during the day.
As well, Hugo made a giant technological leap into the future
this year when he purchased an EPIRB, an emergency radio beacon, which can beep
out an SOS in case of an emergency.
Before this historic event, all emergencies at that Olive River
outpost were tackled first-hand. That's the way they do it up that way. If you
get crook you look after yourself until you get better ... if you get better.
Seven years ago I was swigging rum (medicinal purposes only,
mind) with one of the Cape's pioneer cattlemen, the late Rod Heinemann, at his
station, Bramwell, about 50 inaccessible kilometres west of Hugo's shack. Old
Rod, well into his eighties then, mentioned one of his worst times on The Cape,
being bitten by a redback spider out on the track with a mob of cattle and miles
from anywhere.
"I was pretty crook and had to lie down for a fair while," said
Rod as if he was yarning about the bloody weather. "But I came good in the end."
Do they make 'em like that anymore, I wonder?
Hugo Julcher is of the same vanishing breed - tough, independent,
adventurous. If you were around in post-war years you will remember the type.
Thousands of them came out here after the second war from all over Europe
seeking work but looking more for adventure.
They couldn't speak the lingo too well but they worked hard
and played hard and won a lot of respect for that, as well as with their
devil-may-care attitude and their mitts.
Hugo hit Australia from Austria in the early '50s on a
promise of work in his trade as a cabinet maker but it wasn't available when
he arrived and that sort of sent him off on a tangent. Since then he's
worked in every state at just about every job you care to name, including
buffalo shooting in the Territory.
He even has a kindly cop to thank for dragging him out of a
Melbourne gutter one time and sending him to a friend's farm up country to dry
out. He still doesn't mind a drop in the morning, the afternoon and the night,
but it gets awful dry on the Olive River when his meagre supply runs out after
the first couple of weeks.
Supplies simply don't come in because there is no way to order
them, so they take what will last longest when they catch the mother ship,
Torres Express, on its first run of the prawning season from Cairns to York
Island in Torres Strait.
When it has travelled close to 700km north from Cairns, Hugo and
Heather climb into their loaded tinnie, day or night, rough or
smooth, putter a mile or so from the mother ship across a dangerous bar, and hey
presto! Their paradise opens up.
The crew in a following dinghy unloads the rest of their supplies
and that's often the last they see of another soul for two or three months.
About 10 months later they catch the Torres Express on its last run of the
season and rejoin the rat race for Christmas.
Occasionally they have unannounced visits from passing fishermen,
yachties and some of the strangest wanderers imaginable.
Several people in kayaks have dropped in on their
circumnavigation of Australia. Others have come in on 14ft catamarans like the
one I sail in Bribie Passage. I'm mildly adventurous, not raving bonkers, see.
A bloke wearing a sarong and calling himself "Victor the Nomad"
sailed up the Olive some time ago in a most incredible craft on his way to New
Guinea where, he told Heather, he "just wanted to love people".
Someone farther down the coast had given him a near-wrecked 12ft
tinnie. He patched it up, found a piece of blue plastic tarp for a sail and
headed north with no rudder or centreboard. The last Heather and Hugo saw he was
sailing wonkily in the general direction of New Guinea. They believe we was
taken into protective custody a little farther up the coast, somewhere about
Thursday Island.
Another time a Yank calling himself "Friendly" wandered in off
the beach. He was walking up the coast to Bamaga from who knows where.
"Everything he owned was in a small sugar bag," said Heather with
the wide-eyed surprise you would expect from someone trying to explain away an
elderly couple who live with crocodiles way up Cape York for the hell of it.
"He didn't have any food. He was living completely off the land.
He said hello and had a bit of a talk then headed north along the beach."
As "Friendly" disappeared into the shimmering northern haze, life
returned to workaday normality for Hugo and Heather on the Olive River. That
includes a lot of time beach combing, looking for bush tucker, fishing and
crabbing, although crabbing is a mite unconventional.
Crab pots and dillies are out because the crocs gobble 'em up
getting at the bait or the crab. So Hugo sinks fish frames in shallow water near
the bank and when the muddies appear for a feed he spears them.
And you won't believe what this incredible duo do with those
delicious giant black-lip oysters. They use them for fish bait because they're
tired of eating them.
"It's not hard to get tired of oysters if you eat too many," Hugo
said. "But they're very good bait."They're tired of barramundi too. Just too
many of the bloody things in the creek.
"I've gone right off barra," Hugo said. "Give me mangrove jack
any day." They have an amazing selection of bush tucker (pictured) in the
district including fruit and nuts from a variety of natives like currajong,
lillypilly, wild grapes, passionfruit and especially coconuts. They get the
sweetest of fine honey by whipping grevillea blossoms on to plates. They also
grow what vegetables they can.
Hugo has a great recipe for fish cakes mixed in with roughly
grated fresh coconut. He also has some great recipes for the occasional feral
pig he bowls over.
In fact, Heather and Hugo could probably teach the Bush Tucker
Man a thing or two about scrub cuisine and thought they were about to be so
invited when the man himself, Les Hiddins, turned up at Heather's Cairns units a
couple of years ago.
But he was more interested in details of a RAAF fighter pilot who
crashed his F18 just a couple of miles from their Olive River shack. Much, much
earlier Heather and Hugo had given RAAF search parties information about a
strange noise they heard at the time the plane went missing, but as is often the
case, the advice appears to have been overlooked.
When the crash site was accidentally discovered a couple of years
later it was just about where Heather and Hugo figured it would be.
They don't miss much, the people who live by their wits in the
wilderness, and that particularly goes for what most of us regard as the
comforts of home.
Maybe you'd like living in a colony of crocodiles where you get
to know the neighbours on a first name basis. But think twice because it's like
Hugo told me when inviting me to stay for a week or two - you don't have to be
mad but it's an advantage.
The unusual pair aren't living with crocodiles these days because
Heather died back in Cairns a few years after I met her, but Hugo kept going
back to his lonely hut for several years. Then, in the early 2000s, he just
disappeared from his lonely hut on the Olive River. There is no prize for
guessing how he met his maker.
Hermits and spaceports may come and go, but the owners of the
Olive River abide
The crocodiles, they say up north, finally got old Hugo, the hermit of the Olive
River.
Hugo went missing from his hut in early 2003. Considering he shared his
riverbank camp with a large number of salt-water crocodiles, no one needed many
guesses to figure out his fate.
Hugo Julcher, who'd migrated in the 1950s from war-wrecked Austria, took to
beach combing about as far from the populated world as possible. He built a
rough shack at the mouth of the Olive River where it spills into the Coral Sea,
way up at the most northerly and remote tip of the Australian mainland, Cape
York Peninsula.
Eventually, he married Heather, from Cairns, and brought her 700km north. They
lived mostly on fish and bush tucker, and according to the occasional visitor,
didn't spend time worrying about the crocodiles that lived within a few steps of
their hut, which lacked a front wall.
Hugo was back to living alone when he vanished. Heather had died some years
before.
In March 2003, he failed to meet a boat that was scheduled to take him to fetch
supplies from Cairns.
The only sign you can find today of Hugo Julcher is his picture on the
Queensland police missing persons file: a smiling fellow in singlet and
underpants, a fresh-caught barramundi dangling from his fishing line.
The old hermit isn't the only fleeting figure of fascination that has come and
gone from this remotest of places in recent times.
An entire space station went missing from the steaming savannah south of the
Olive River while Hugo was living there.
In the late 1980s, the Queensland government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen got
tremendously excited about the idea of establishing a world-leading
"spaceport" on Cape York's Temple Bay, just south of Hugo's lonely dwelling.
It would be the first commercial space facility in the world, its proximity
to the equator (12 degrees south) giving it the edge for launching
satellites into equatorial orbit. Australia would hurtle to world leadership
in the space race.
After feasibility studies and varied proposals from two different groups, a
consortium called the Cape York Space Agency was chosen to develop the
spaceport.
Spacecraft using a new Soviet rocket called the Zenit would launch mostly
US satellites carrying commercial payloads. What could go wrong? The
consortium assured everyone that the first space shots would occur in 1992.
Queensland's Minister for Industry and Technology, Rob Borbidge (who later
became premier), could barely contain himself.
"It is the single most important development project in the history of
Australia," he declared in 1989.
His enthusiasm turned out to be premature.
An article in the New
Scientist at the time gave a hint that progress mightn't be as smooth
as Borbidge imagined. "A series of delicate issues await resolution," the
article stated. "They include the effects of the spaceport on Aboriginal
tribes living on Cape York and on the environment."
The article by journalist Ian Hamilton, published in June, 1989, ended with
prescient words: "Last week, the Wuthathi people, descendants of the early
Aboriginal inhabitants of the area, called on all Australians to oppose the
launch site. They said it threatens their way of life."
Indeed.
The Wuthathi and Kukuy'au people were the original inhabitants of the land
thereabouts, and they'd been removed in the 1920s, '30s and '40s by often
brutal methods and dispersed all across Queensland's north, apparently
expected to live in silent exile forever.
Here, however, were people who had no mere fleeting relationship with this
country.
In 1991, the Koori
Mail published an article about a meeting of representatives of tribal
groups from throughout Cape York and the Torres Strait Islands. The meeting
took place at Lockhart River, about 75 kilometres south of the site of the
proposed spaceport near the Olive River. All the groups in attendance
decided to oppose the space station.
"Aboriginal representatives say the main reasons for this stance are that it
infringes on traditional lands, it is not a viable enterprise that will
benefit the rightful owner, it is merely an excuse to open up Cape York to
massive tourist and unaboriginal development, and that the development of
such a project will have a catastrophic result on the environment," The Koori
Mail reported. The Australian Conservation Foundation decided to stand
with the indigenous people and to use its legal and political muscle.
By 1992, when the indigenous owners had won a High Court ruling in their
favour, when the Hawke federal government had become unimpressed enough to
demand environmental hurdles too high to be jumped and it was becoming clear
the vast amounts of money required for a spaceport weren't forthcoming, the
whole idea melted away.
But those who inhabited this dreaming country for many thousands of years
before Hugo the hermit and the fancy of a spaceport came by?
They've not gone the same way, whatever those authorities with colder hearts
than crocodiles might have hoped in the early 20th century.
This week, around 165,000 hectares of Cape York around the Olive River was
handed back to the Wuthathi, Kukuya'u and Northern Kaanju peoples.
This time, under a legal process known as the Cape York Tenure Resolution
Program, through which another 3 million hectares have been returned to
traditional owners, it's forever.
Others may visit and vanish, but the land, and its real owners, abide.