One hundred and twenty years ago, you might have passed Lizzie in the street. Everywhere that Lizzie went, she went for a wander. This was Lizzie the wonder elephant. I told a version of this story on West Bremer Radio.

In Bendigo, Victoria, in 1901, Lizzie got loose in the wee hours of the morning and wandered the city streets unrestrained. In 1902, Lizzie got loose again, this time in Euroa in north-east Victoria. She strolled into the yard of the North-Eastern Hotel wanting a drink with the other patrons.

And in 1903, Lizzie got loose in Ipswich, Queensland, and meandered up towards Queen’s Park. Along the way an unsuspecting Ipswich lad was minding his own business and carrying a basket of pumpkins. Lizzie appropriated the pumpkins, and the boy bolted. It’s not recorded what he told his mum about losing the produc on the way home.

Elephants and their travelling circuses and zoos were a regular thing back then. In 1906 in Ipswich, there was a herd of six elephants, along with three camels, two water-buffalos, a Ceylon Zebu, a calf with five legs, a pony with three legs, and a horn-hoofed pony. They went to Ipswich and similar places across Australia with Wirth Brothers Circus and others.

Wirth Brothers and Lizzie teamed up to visit Ipswich in 1912, and the following year they were in Melbourne when and age-old question was finally answered – which would win, an elephant or a camel.

The camel showed very bad temper, and after mauling one of the circus attendants, turned its attention to Lizzie the elephant, and snapped at her ears. It then turned on the buffalo, threw him down, and knelt on him. The buffalo retaliated by goring the camel. This infuriated the camel which then rushed back to attack Lizzie. Lizzie lost her temper when her ear was neatly bitten through. She wound her trunk round the neck of the camel, dragged it to the ground, and strangled it.

In 1920, elephant enthusiasts across Australia were in mourning because Lizzie died after an illness of some weeks. And if you ever wondered what they do with a dead elephant, Lizzie got taken to a soap factory to be boiled down.

Places like Ipswich didn’t end its love affair with elephants even when disaster struck. The deadly storms of 1941 resulted in the drowning of thirteen people across four Australian states, including two in the Ipswich region. One was Leo Toohill from Aratula near Boonah. He drowned when trying unsuccessfully to cross the creek at a point ironically called Toohill’s Crossing. Then there was Bernard Carey from Rosewood. In the six months prior to the storms, Carey managed to get married, and banned from all dance halls. He drowned in the flooded Bremer River when a log tipped over his dinghy.

Meanwhile, a cargo launch by the name of “Bremer” was washed onto the riverbank at Basin Pocket. An elephant was borrowed from a passing circus to refloat the vessel by pushing it back into the water. But even the elephant wasn’t strong enough and the boat remained on dry land for some time longer.

In 1949, four elephants from Wirth Brothers shocked Ipswich locals when they went for an early morning walk along Mary Street in front of St Mary’s church. Scenes like this were repeated around the country by shrewd marketing people utilising the world’s biggest living land animal to gain headlines for the circus.

But the best elephant story was witnessed by Ipswich’s own George Twidale. He’d served in the First World War and was badly wounded. He was the beneficiary of a revolutionary bone graft operation that helped him walk again. When he got home from the war, he ran off with the Wirth Brothers Circus to play in their band. In about 1922, Twidale was on hand in Albury, New South Wales, when an elephant actually saved the life of one of the workers.

A cranky elephant called “Cardie” grabbed in his trunk an attendant named Snowy Lea. Cardie was about to smash him to the ground when another elephant called “Alice”, realising what was about to happen, reared up on her hind legs and with all her strength brought her trunk down on Cardie’s head, saving Snowy’s life.

Snowy took off to America and joined Barnum’s Circus. The following year 1923, the circus was in Brisbane just days after visiting Ipswich, when Cardie mauled the ringmaster. This was an aggressive act too far. Cardie was taken to Kedron Brook in Alderley where he too was dispatched to the glue factory.

Cardie’s skeleton was actually acquired by the Queensland Museum where presumably he is archived today.

But let’s celebrate the lives of “Alice the lifesaver” and “Lizzie the wonder elephant”, noble representatives of the biggest and greatest land animal alive today.

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Photo credits:
Young boys walking beside Wirth Brothers Circus elephant across the Grey Street Bridge, Brisbane, 1953 – State Library of Queensland.
Wirth Brothers Circus parade in Vulture Street, South Brisbane c1915 – Taylor Family UQ eSpace.
Arrival of Wirth’s Circus at Ipswich, 21st February 1912 – National Museum of Australia.
Land force needed reinforcements – Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 28th January 1941, page 3.
Looked like India – Queensland Times, Ipswich, 21st June 1949, page 3.
Catherine Kate Twidale with her son George Twidale, 1916 – Picture Ipswich.
Cardie the Circus Elephant was shot by Constable Bowering James, 1923 – Queensland Police Museum PM1296.