Murky waters, murky pasts: the dark personal history of an Australian icon

The lives of these men are certainly more interesting than the movie they inspired, and perhaps a testament to the capacity for the Australian outback to swallow complicated figures whole.

I once overheard an American tourist in the pick-up area of Sydney airport asking “so how do we get to the outback? Is there a taxi that goes there?” This popular Australian anecdote, attributable to no one in particular — and perhaps universally held — tells much about how Australia is seen overseas. Whilst the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House are iconic images of our country, it is the outback that perhaps inspires foreign imagination the most. “Do you ride kangaroos to school?” is a question that most Australians are familiar with in some way or another, and the punchline to many jokes about “dumb” Americans.

But where does this conception of the outback come from? Australia, unbeknownst to many overseas, is an overwhelmingly urban society, even more so than the United States. A vast majority of our population clings onto the more conventionally-hospitable edges of the continent, whilst most of the rest populate the “inner” bush. The actual outback — a loaded term with no official definition, but normally accepted as starting around Cobar in NSW or Roma in Queensland — is incredibly sparse. More people live in Canterbury-Bankstown Council Area than the entire Northern Territory (within the range of 100,000 people, in fact). Yet this is the image of Australia for many overseas.

It's impossible to pin down just one origin of this idea. It’s probably quite old, linked in some ways to how we see ourselves as Australians. Historian Russell Ward’s “Bush Myth”, and its competitive sibling the “Pioneer Myth” have formed important anchors to Australia’s settler-society national consciousness — bush and outback-based anchors, to be specific. Yet there is a particular film that has had an outsized effect on how Australia is understood overseas, especially in America.

When Crocodile Dundee was released in 1986, it eviscerated box office records like shotgun pellets in a South Australian road sign. Paul Hogan’s ocker, crocodile-hunting hero propelled the film to become the highest grossing Australian movie of all time, and importantly the highest grossing Australian film overseas. In America it reached number two at the box office in 1986, solidifying this grinning bushman as the image of Australia in foreign imaginations.

Yet Mick Dundee didn’t come from nowhere. Many claim to have inspired the infamous character, yet only two historic individuals still have serious competition. These are pastoralist Rod Ansell and Arvids “Crocodile Harry” Blumentals, both eccentric characters with deeply troubled histories.

Arvids Blumentals was born in rural Latvia in 1925. To his grave he claimed to be a Latvian baron, a claim as dubious as his complicated character. His famous house in Coober Pedy is open to tourists today, a labyrinth of sculpted naked women, kitsch nick-nacks and “trophy” bras. Websites dedicated to the structure — a series of tunnels into a desert hill — focus on his crocodile hunting in the Northern Territory through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, along with his womanising upon retirement to the South Australian outback town (famous for its underground houses and location as far away from pretty much anywhere as you can get). Yet there is another detail in Coober Pedy’s official tourism website that belies a darker past: Crocodile Harry is labelled as “a baron from Latvia who fought for Germany in WWII”. This was the sentence that perhaps reveals most about the man, particularly his apparent desire to escape anywhere remotely urban.

According to historian Harry Merritt, a 17-year-old Blumentals discarded his formal education and volunteered for the Nazi Auxiliary Police in occupied Latvia. To do so, he had to lie about his age. He served on the Eastern Front, first in Ukraine in the 25th Abava Battalion, who presumably earned their “green devils” moniker through the characteristic brutality of the German army in Eastern Europe. In 1943, Blumentals transferred to the SS Latvian Legion, whom he fought with until the Battle of Berlin in 1945. Merritt doesn’t discuss the specific things that Crocodile Harry got up to during this two-year period but considering the pitiless war waged by Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front in WWII, it’s almost certain that Blumentals was involved in something horrific - or at the very least knew people who were.

Amongst the ruthless fighting around Berlin, where the last death throes of the Nazi regime thrashed against the colossal weight of an exhausted and brutal Red Army, Blumentals decided that being in the SS perhaps wasn’t very conducive to long-term survival. According to Merritt, Blumentals discarded his uniform and convinced a doctor to cover up his SS blood-type tattoo, before convincing occupation authorities that he had been a Latvian forced labourer.

This wasn’t the last time Blumentals would fight in a morally bankrupt war, however. Merritt writes that Crocodile Harry volunteered alongside 200 other ex-SS Latvians in the French Foreign Legion in 1947, in order to fight in that country’s colonial war in Indochina. Lasting until French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the First Indochina War was characterised by racism and brutality, laying the groundwork for future American involvement in Vietnam.

Following his service in Southeast Asia, Blumentals sought his fortune in Australia’s wild north, hunting crocodiles in the Top End for 20 years or so. It was here that he made his name as a bushman, and allegedly earned his status as inspiration for Crocodile Dundee. So proud is Latvia of this soldier-of-fortune that a crocodile statue has been erected in his hometown, and allegedly many Latvians will ardently insist that Arvids Blumentals is Mick Dundee.

However, there is another man with perhaps an even greater claim to inspirational fame than Blumentals. Rod Ansell was born in Burnett, rural Queensland, in 1954 — when Blumentals was already killing crocs in the NT. Ansell would make national headlines twice in his life, for very different reasons. It was the first of these 15 minutes of fame that possibly inspired Crocodile Dundee.

Journalist Bob Milliken, gives a solid account of Ansell’s life and adventures. In 1977, in a much publicised series of events, Ansell embarked on a “fishing trip” on the Victoria River, in the NT; the “fish” Ansell was catching later turned out to be illegally killed crocodiles. It was during this trip that his speed boat capsized after colliding with what Ansell later dubiously claimed to be a “whale”. Ansell managed to transfer his two young dogs, a rifle, a knife, some rations and a single oar to his unpowered dinghy. That night Ansell drifted out to sea on his dinghy, making the dangerous situation positively desperate. Unfortunately for Ansell, the illegal nature of his trip had led to a general vagueness in conveying his intentions to his then girlfriend: he simply said he would be gone for a couple of months. After beaching on an island in the Fitzmaurice rivermouth, and realising that rescue would not be forthcoming, Ansell decided he would trek overland to the nearest cattle station upon the coming of the wet, which would give him enough natural water to make the trip. More urgently, however, Ansell was trapped on saltwater mudflats, and allegedly survived two days without fresh water before finding a drink above the tide line.

Ansell shot water buffalo and feral cattle to sustain himself and his dogs, apparently drinking the raw blood of the animals to avoid dehydration. Eventually, a chance discovery by two First Nations stockmen proved deliverance for Ansell, who was rescued in a slightly emaciated but otherwise healthy state. The media ate up the story, and the 22-year-old Ansell found himself in an interview with the acclaimed Michael Parkinson. Ansell claimed that rather than sleeping on the bed in his Sydney hotel room, he preferred to sleep in a swag on the floor. It was this detail that apparently inspired Hogan to write Crocodile Dundee. Ansell bought a cattle property in the NT and married Joanne Van Os, sister of Leonie Hemsworth (yes, that Hemsworth — mother of the famous Hemsworth brothers).

However, Ansell became disgruntled when he received no royalties for inspiring the movie — a mood that only further soured when the government began a culling program of water buffalo to prevent cattle tuberculosis in 1988. Ansell was ordered to kill 3000 heads of buffalo that lived on his property, a wild herd that he had planned to domesticate for a living. Ansell despised the scheme, claiming that the money was “better spent on research on AIDS.” When Ansell’s marriage failed following the loss of his pastoral property, the increasingly erratic man continued to blame the culling scheme for his woes. By 1992 he was on a good behaviour bond after a conviction over cattle theft and assault, and ended up living in Urapunga, an Aboriginal township on the Roper River.

It was in this time that Ansell became addicted to amphetamines, contributing to a further disintegration of his mental health (although some who knew him suggested that Ansell had always been a drug user). This contributed to his second claim to fame (or in this case infamy): a 1999 shootout with NT Police that ended in his death. The events surrounding his death are recounted in the Herald Sun and the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Prior to the standoff, Ansell had shot and wounded two other men, all the while gibbering about freemasons — whom he believed were stalking him and had kidnapped his children. During the ensuing gun battle at Acacia Hills, 60km south of Darwin, Ansell murdered NT Police Sergeant Glen Anthony Huitson, before himself being killed by police. And thus ended the life of the man who apparently inspired Crocodile Dundee, indirectly producing a specific image of Australia for global consumption.

It’s impossible to tell for sure the extent to which either man — Blumentals or Ansell — inspired the film, but of the two Ansell’s claim is most corroborated. Regardless, both individuals have a chequered history. Given that these men inspired one of our most famous cultural exports, should more Australians know about their stories? What does this mean for how the world sees Australia, or moreover, how Australians see themselves?

Notwithstanding the answers to these questions, the lives of these men are certainly more interesting than the movie they inspired, and perhaps a testament to the capacity for the Australian outback to swallow complicated figures whole. More importantly, we shouldn’t forget that these people, despite their tall tales, had very real and very nasty impacts on the lives of other human beings — from Dundaga to Dundee Downs.