Towards the end of his life the American anthropologist and author, Robert Ardrey, retired to Kalk Bay. I was to get to know him for a few brief weeks. In a conversation in January 1980, he spoke with enthusiasm about ‘some guy up in Zululand who is saying that crocodiles have maternal instincts. ‘Crocodiles are reptiles,” he said. ‘They aren’t supposed to harbour those sort of feelings.”
I was able to tell Ardrey that the ‘guy in Zululand’s” name was Tony Pooley and that he was a good friend. Now, with a feeling of deep loss, I report that last week Tony died in Durban, after a long struggle with declining health. Where can I begin in paying tribute to an extraordinary human being that I knew and loved for close on 40 years? The playwright, Denis Potter, once remarked that nostalgia is a curiously second-rate emotion. But it is also usually a very private one and there is little chance that recollections of incident and occasion can, in long retrospect, be remitted to others in the true substance of the experiences. For those who knew Tony Pooley there will, after the sadness, remain the brightest remembrance. His life was an accomplishment of purpose, of vision, of often dogged persistence. We knew him happy and fulfilled, we knew him enraged by the cruel idiocies of politicians, bureaucratic inertia, the rapacity of corporate business. But always, a generosity of soul and mind tumbled through, a wicked humour and an optimism that even wretched illness could not extinguish.
Tony was born in Isipingo, just south of Durban. His boyhood days in the tidal reaches and among the still unspoilt mangroves were to introduce him, untutored and individual, to the greater community of nature and its endless fascination and discovery. In the days of the 1940s and 1950s the ethics and persuasions of wildlife conservation in South Africa had yet to be establish a biography. Some game reserves were still managed by the agricultural authorities. Trips to them were for imaginative local tourists who wanted to spend their holidays at more rewarding locations than popular beaches and resorts. A journey up muddy roads to a reserve like Hluhluwe was considered quite an adventure.
It was inevitable to Tony that he would find his career in nature conservation. After school there were some short and dreary jobs and then, after several failed applications, his tenacity paid off and he was accepted as a learner game ranger by the Natal Parks Board. Dispatched to Hluhluwe for his introductory training, he received much of his tutelage at the hands of the Zulu game guards with whom he spent most of his time on anti-poaching patrols. As the conservationist, Ian Player, was to write, ‘[there was] an empathy between them which one prays could be emulated by all South Africans”.
After initial training, Tony was appointed as a game ranger in Mkuze reserve. He met and married Elsa Bond, herself scarcely out of school. Then came Ndumu, on the Makatini Flats, where he set himself in his free hours to a project of recording birdsong. The products of this work were realised in some remarkable long-playing records. At some stage he earned his Zulu name, Mashesha, ‘he who hurries and takes”, a wry observation of his style of investigation.
It was at Ndumu that Tony began what was to become a canon of internationally acknowledged new research on the Nile crocodile. He established an experimental crocodile-rearing station and, in a curious metamorphosis, ranger slowly transmogrified to scientist. On the basis of his publications he was accepted as a candidate and awarded a MSc degree in zoology by Natal University.
There came a period of overseas travel, collaboration with others involved in saurian research. This while Elsa began her own work in a study of the vegetation of Ndumu and the first of her exquisite watercolours of flowers, palms and trees. She is today the author of the definitive works on South African trees and wild flowers.
The crocodile research was moved to the St Lucia estuary where Tony continued the work on a wider scale. He was a founder member of the IUCN crocodile specialist group. Leaving the Natal Parks Board, he worked, until his death, as an independent wildlife consultant. From this latter period flowed a formidable body of writing, television programmes and films.
In the broadest detail, that was Tony Pooley’s professional life. Another record exists in the memories of those of us simply lucky enough to have known him and to have shared the generous purview of his personality and friendship. His love of jazz along with his laughter and delight in what he was making of his life will remain etched in us. To walk with Tony in the long shadows of the Ndumu fig forest, to share for a few hours in his patient inquisition of the natural world, to gain discreet insights into the continuity and interdependence of the wilderness, was also to be given a glimpse of what he had sensed among the chaos of the wilderness: a natural morality far exceeding the merely human. We are both diminished and in the greatest of reward by his splendid life and giving.
Anthony Charles Pooley was 66 when he died and leaves Elsa and three sons, Simon, Justin and Thomas.