Lion Crushes Datsun with Newlyweds Inside: A 1970s Adelaide Nightmare

The day an adult lion climbed atop Dave's Datsun 1200 and crushed the roof while he was inside with his newlywed wife is a moment the South Australian will never forget. "He jumped up on the roof and it caved in," Dave told ABC Radio Adelaide. "When we got back to town, we saw my wife's parents and they thought we'd rolled the car." The couple had made an on-the-spot decision to visit Bullen's African Lion Safari Park in Two Wells, north of Adelaide, on the way home from their honeymoon during the summer of 1973. It was one of eight such parks established across the country by the Bullen family, which had been running circuses since the 1920s before deciding to establish year-round experiences with safari parks in the '70s and '80s. The park in Adelaide offered visitors the chance to drive into fenced-off paddocks — windows wound up — as lions roamed and checked them out at close quarters. Dave told an ABC Radio Adelaide history segment that they had seen the sign for the park — which closed in 1981 — on the side of the road and decided to visit. "We saw this little bow shelter and all of a sudden these little lion cubs appeared and my wife said, 'Let's go take a look,'" he said. "So we drove up a bit closer and all of a sudden this big male lion appeared from behind the shelter, came up and started sniffing the grille. "We were in panic stations because my wife thought he was going to eat the car. After the lion jumped onto their roof, Dave saw another visitor in a car towing a caravan about 50 metres away with "his window down an inch". "He said, 'Why don't you get out and shoo it off?'" Dave said. "I said, 'Yeah, right. Funny one.' And he was taking photos, and of course we never got any evidence of this, so we've been trying to find this fella." Another listener spoke about the time he visited the park with his children and watched as a woman fed the lions while being towed in a caged trailer. "The lions would come up all around the cage, and there was one big lion on top of the cage and suddenly she yelled, 'Bob! He's got my thumb,'" the listener said. Others remembered a sign out the front of the park that announced, among ticketing prices, "Poms on pushbikes admitted free." Other signs included warnings like, "Trespassers will be eaten." There were also unsubstantiated stories about escaped lions — although one incident that prompted panic was potentially down to a case of mistaken identify with a great Dane. Lions on the loose Many of the rumours may have stemmed back to an incident the previous decade in 1964 when four lions escaped a circus at Windsor in Adelaide's north. The Canberra Times's coverage on December 23 and 24 that year reported that the lions roamed free for two and a half hours after mauling and killing their 49-year-old keeper, George Herzog, who was believed to have been feeding them. One lion returned to its cage when called, but three others were shot dead by police marksmen and gun shop owner Bill Hambly-Clark, who said he shot a lion from "25 yards" (22.8 metres) as it was devouring Mr Herzog's body. He shot the other lion as it charged him "through the bushes". "I shot once, and then again. I could see the whites of his eyes, you might say." ABC Radio Adelaide listener Freddy said he was staying with friends as a 10-year-old in Gepps Cross at the time. "There was about a five-hour period one afternoon in the school holidays where we all had to stay inside while they allegedly caught all the lions," he said. In 1973, after leaving the park with his beaten-up brown Datsun 1200, Dave said he was able to push the folded roof back out, and the bonnet, "but there were all these little pin dents, which we never got rid of". He and his wife never managed to find the person who took photos of the incident but they did see their car again in Alice Springs, many years after selling it "slightly used". "I saw the car up there some years later — someone else had bought it and it still had the pin dents in the roof and the bonnet," Dave said.