The whole of Australia and beyond was in the grip of gruesome deaths by pigs for more than a century. However, it was a different story in Ipswich, Queensland. I told a version of this story on West Bremer Radio.

In 1953 a twenty-three-year-old shearer Charles Edward Humphries went for a walk on Christmas day outside of Windorah in western Queensland and mysteriously was never seen again. It was decided by police that he’d been eaten by pigs.

Even in lovely island environments like Samoa, in 1933 a fourteen-month-old baby boy was killed and eaten by the family pig. In Auckland in New Zealand in 1925, a farmer’s wife Catherine Patterson had just slaughtered a chicken when her family pig took offence and attacked her. The pig persisted in biting her to death.

The year 1917 was a particularly bad one for being eaten by pigs with these three examples, all of them in New South Wales. At Batlow west of Canberra, seventeen-year-old Jeff Frizzle left home in a sledge drawn by two horses. He was later found two miles away, dead and partially eaten by pigs.

Then there was the forty-seven-year-old piggery worker William Keys. He died in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney after being bitten behind the knee by a pig. Septic arthritis developed and he died a painful death. This same hospital is the subject of the modern-day “RPA” television series in which no death by pigs ever featured.

The worst example in 1917 was Charles Coombes Senior of the Forbes River district. He met with a particularly dreadful death. He went to feed some pigs and was lifting a bucket of feed over the fence when he fell and spilt the food over his clothes. The pigs then started to eat the food, and eventually got hold of his flesh. They ate all the flesh from the poor man’s stomach and ribs.

Charles Snr’s son Charles Coombes Junior found his father’s remains. Seventeen years earlier Charles Jnr had been stuck up by Jimmy Governor on the family property. The saga of Governor was the basis for Thomas Keneally’s novel “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith”.  

In 1905 the nine-month-old baby Albert Joseph Harrison would have been eaten alive if not for the offending pig being chased by his mother. The boy was on the veranda of the family farmhouse near Colac in Victoria when he was seized by a pig which ran off with him into the bush. Both the boy’s arms and one leg were eaten to a pulp, and so tragically the wounds proved fatal.

In 1954 an Ipswich man did his best to join this long list of death by pig.

Leslie Wolski was a coalminer of Alice Street in Silkstone, Ipswich. He was on his motorbike heading to work at the Mount Elliott Collieries. A farm pig scampered along the road at about 6.30am and directly into the path of Wolski. Both the motorcyclist and the pig went flying.

Wolski was left in a serious condition with a fractured skull, abrasions to the back and elbow, and concussion. The pig escaped with a few scratches but later died from internal injuries.

And so the police in 1954 made another entry in their file marked “accidents caused by animals”. In the previous year in Queensland, animals were blamed for nine hundred and fifty-three accidents, causing four deaths and one hundred and eighty-seven injuries.

In the months leading up to the Wolski accident, a further two people had died and seventy-nine were injured in collisions with cattle, horses, dogs, cats, pigs, and kangaroos.

Wolski, however, fortunately survived and lived to his seventy-fifth year. He had earlier been charged with having committed a serious offence which was never publicly named, but no indictment was ever made. His son Allan Wolski had been killed in a head-on car crash, and his father Henry Wolski was killed when he fell off his horse. So for Leslie Wolski surviving a collision with a pig was a relatively easy thing to do.

While it seems the rest of the country was struggling to avoid being killed and eaten by pigs, Ipswich was made of sterner stuff.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD ON WEST BREMER RADIO.

Photo credits:
World’s Biggest Wild Pig Collection Moonie Roadhouse 2015 – Harold Peacock 20150803_120506.
Have Pigs Eaten Shearers Body – Longreach Leader, 12 June 1953, page 22.
Jimmy Governor – NSW archives Public Domain.