Twin Elements Podcast · Hunting Stories
Bowhunting Banteng on Coburg Peninsula: Bulls, Blind Eyes, and a Dingo Den
Some hunts feel like more than a hunt. This one, up on the Coburg Peninsula with Pato and the crew at Dingo Creek Hunting Safaris, was one of those — six days chasing wild banteng bulls in one of the most remote corners of Australia, alongside James and Dad, in a landscape so untouched that a four-metre saltwater crocodile had been spotted eating a green sea turtle off our camp beach the week before we arrived.
Getting there is its own reminder of just how remote this country is: fly into Darwin, then travel out through the Jabiru township and on to Cobourg — a stretch of the Territory dotted with only a handful of small Indigenous communities and about as far from anywhere as mainland Australia gets.
In This Report
- A Species Most Australians Have Never Heard Of
- My Stalk: A Blind Eye and One Arrow
- James's Stalk: Cameras Dying at the Worst Possible Moment
- The Moment Neither of Us Expected
- Not a Pest-Control Mission
From the Field
A Species Most Australians Have Never Heard Of
Banteng are wild cattle, native to Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma. Ours descend from a small herd left behind when a British settlement at Port Essington on the Coburg Peninsula failed and was abandoned back in 1849 — domestic Bali cattle that went feral and, remarkably, have stayed genetically isolated ever since. There's no other wild herd anywhere near them to interbreed with, which makes this population — likely the largest pure wild banteng population left on Earth — a strange paradox: endangered globally, yet classified as a feral pest here in Australia.
That status only survives through outfitters like Pato, who pay serious money in tags back to the NLC and the local Indigenous communities to maintain legal, guided access. It's an uncomfortable truth of conservation economics — if hunting didn't put a dollar value on these animals, there'd be nothing stopping a cull that wipes the population out overnight, the same way we've seen happen with feral herds elsewhere. Whatever your view on trophy hunting, it's worth understanding that the alternative here likely isn't “the animals get left alone” — it's “the animals get removed entirely.”
The bulls themselves are striking — almost completely black with white stockings and rump markings, built with upright, forward-curving horns anchored by a solid boss, similar in structure to Cape buffalo. Younger bulls carry a noticeably different coat, a darker roan-brown, before maturing into that jet-black colouring with age. The cows run a caramel-brown colour with far more delicate, sometimes pendulous horns that occasionally curl back dangerously close to their own skulls, with nothing to trim them the way a station would with domestic cattle. And unlike buffalo, which just plough straight through timber, banteng move like deer — ducking, weaving, genuinely agile, and switched on enough to pick you out from well over a hundred metres if you're careless.
My Stalk: A Blind Eye and One Arrow
We spent the better part of our first morning finding nothing — just old game trails and a lot of birdlife — until we finally cut fresh sign and, not much later, laid eyes on our first lone bull at 37 metres. That wasn't the shooter; it was just the moment the whole trip clicked into focus.
By early afternoon, in stinking 30-to-40-degree heat, we found what I can only describe as a full rutting spectacle: over thirty bulls orbiting a single cow in season, jostling and chasing each other off in what amounted to a real-life bait ball. We closed the gap and let them do the rest of the work, and one detail still sticks with me — a cow kept presenting broadside at twenty metres, seemingly staring straight at us, and I couldn't work out how she hadn't blown the stalk. It wasn't until later, reviewing the footage, that we noticed she had a badly scarred, almost certainly blind left eye. That one detail was the difference-maker in getting drawn undetected.
Ayden's Stalk
“He went down inside a hundred metres on a single arrow — my first bull, taken on day one, and honestly one of the cleanest, most complete hunts I've had.”
It also bought James the rest of the trip to be properly selective rather than needing to fill a tag under time pressure.
James's Stalk: Cameras Dying at the Worst Possible Moment
James took his time, working the same stretch of spring for several days after we worked out the pattern — mature bulls tend to stay close to water and feed on the floodplain itself, while cows range further out toward the ridges. He found his bull bedded at 22 metres and settled in for what became a wait of the better part of an hour.
Then, just as he began to draw, our main camera overheated and died. I whistled him down from full draw, scrambled to switch cameras, and got him back to full draw a second time — only for the backup camera to die at the exact same moment he released. We captured the whole thing, but on the smaller, secondary lens, shakier and less framed than either of us would have liked after nearly an hour of patient setup. The bull had also shifted to a slightly more quartering angle in that final stretch, meaning the shot landed a touch further back than James was aiming for — still a clean, lethal hit thanks to a solid pilot-cut broadhead, but a reminder of how much can shift in the last few seconds of a long, patient stalk.
James's Successful Stalk
The Moment Neither of Us Expected
Some of the best footage from the whole trip wasn't even the hunting. On our last morning, returning to a lagoon where we'd had success on boars the night before, we came across a dingo bitch — protected in this part of the Territory and rarely, if ever, in contact with people — wading through mud with three or four pups in tow, clearly still nursing. I broke off from Dad and James to film her up close as she wandered through the paperbarks, looked directly at me like I was some strange, unthreatening object she'd genuinely never encountered before, and went straight back to her pups. In a landscape this remote, that kind of unguarded wildlife encounter is arguably rarer than the animal you came to hunt.
The Dingo Den
It wasn't the only reminder of how wild this country still is. Feral Timor ponies turned up more than once on the floodplain edges, and the birdlife was constant background noise the whole trip — kookaburras among them, echoing across camp most mornings before we'd even packed the truck.
Not a Pest-Control Mission
We got a few questions after the film dropped about why we didn't shoot more of the pigs we saw constantly through the trip. The honest answer: this was a focused banteng hunt with a tight six-day window, and we weren't going to burn arrows on sows and pigs just for content when the priority was finding James a mature bull. Pato and his crew handle pig numbers separately and effectively — some days coming back having taken fifty in an afternoon on the buggies. We did put a couple of boars down later in the trip once the banteng hunting was done, but it was never going to come at the expense of the animal we were actually there for.
The Adventure Continues
Join the Twin Elements team as they head back into the Australian bush.
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This piece is adapted from a Twin Elements Podcast episode covering the Coburg Peninsula banteng hunt with Dingo Creek Hunting Safaris.
