‘With big money comes big risks, which is why the industry has always tended to attract tough people …’
AT sunset a curious scene unfolds in a windswept paddock overlooking Bass Strait. A mob of black steers stare and snort at the strange thing that has suddenly appeared in their quiet world. You would think they had never seen a man dressing himself in camouflage gear before. Cattle have short memories – the visitor has been here often, and each time follows the same routine, watched by his four-legged audience.
Minutes earlier he planted his car nearby, behind a friendly farmer’s shed. Now he’s under a tree, hidden from the road, kitting himself out in pants, jacket, hat, leggings and hiking boots. Camouflaged and waterproof, the big man grabs his bag and heads across the paddock towards the shoreline.
Out of sight, somewhere to his right, one of his mates is already settled in, sweeping the landscape with binoculars, watching his back.
He climbs a fence, vaults another, then crosses rough country close to the cliff, avoiding the skyline. He hides, melting into the gorse and long grass, and sets up a mounted telescope and scans the horizon through it. He looks like a sniper stalking and staking out the enemy and, in a way, he is. His name is Rod Barber and he is one of a small army fighting a guerrilla war against thieves who raid the seas for shellfish so prized they have been hunted to near extinction almost everywhere but southern Australia.
Back at his desk, pecking at a keyboard in a bland government office in a seaside town, he is another public servant with the Fisheries division of Victoria’s Department of Primary Industries. But out here – patrolling more than 200 kilometres of cliffs, beaches and bays on the Mornington Peninsula – he is the abalone ranger.
FOR an overgrown saltwater snail that can be as tough as tyre rubber, abalone has a big reputation and an even bigger price tag. In Asian cultures it is the cocaine of cuisine: from Tokyo to Hong Kong and in Chinatowns everywhere it is coveted for its distinctive taste and supposed aphrodisiac qualities, linked to the fact that the naked shellfish is traditionally seen as resembling female genitalia.
Until the 1960s the Asian taste for abalone barely registered in Australia, where so-called ‘mutton fish’ was dismissed as little better than bait. But as world abalone fisheries started to collapse, demand reached southern Australia. Fishermen and weekend divers started selling abalone to Chinese restaurants and a lucrative trade – both black market and legal – was born.
In one generation, the Australian abalone industry has become a multi-million dollar concern. In Tasmania and Victoria, the two strongest wild fisheries left in the world, it is the biggest fishing export earner of all. Along the way, it has made millionaires out of a relatively few people lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time – and bold and smart enough to grasp the opportunity.
The first Australian abalone licences were issued in the 1960s. In Victoria from 1962 to 1968, licence endorsements cost £3, or $6. In Tasmania the first two licence holders, who recall paying £10 each in 1965, still dive 40 years later. They are among 125 Tasmanian licensees who have seen their meagre investment turn into the equivalent of a lottery win. In a market based on a commodity that is as tightly controlled as De Beers diamonds, the price of a Victorian licence has jumped from $80,000 in 1981 to peak at roughly $7 million last year.
The abalone kings are rarely seen in the social pages but they could buy and sell some of those who are. One licence holder recently sold a huge house in one of Melbourne’s premier streets for $6 million. In Victoria, the most exclusive brotherhood of wealthy white males is not the Melbourne Club or the stock exchange, but the 71 millionaires created by a licence system set up to protect abalone stocks but which, in effect, also protects licensees. Not that it makes the task of diving for the shellfish any easier or safer.
With big money comes big risks, which is why the industry has always tended to attract tough people, some of them willing to bend or break the law. Australia’s biggest known amphetamine producer, John William Samuel Higgs, who has been jailed for manslaughter and drug trafficking, owned a seafood plant and a trawler that police suspect were fronts for illegal abalone processing. A man who owed Higgs money drowned in sinister circumstances in 1992.
When a Victorian undercover policeman, Lachlan McCulloch, arrested a heavy drug trafficker called Peter Pilarinos in the 1990s, he was astonished when Pilarinos asked him to invest $200,000 in illegal abalone to sell to Melbourne’s Chinatown restaurants.
‘He promised to double the money in a month,’ McCulloch says. He has little doubt the offer was genuine. Naturally, he refused, but being a keen recreational diver and fisherman, he was intrigued by the abalone scene.
Eating abalone might be healthy; supplying it often isn’t. The greatest hazard facing divers deep underwater is not sharks but the bends – the ill-effects of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream caused by diving too deep, too long and coming up too fast. Few of the early divers who ignored warnings about deep diving are now alive. Others have crumbling bones, ruined joints and addled brains.
Small boats and rough seas are also deadly. Victorian Fisheries officers know of at least three suspected poachers who have drowned in recent years. One poacher reputedly lost three deckhands in separate incidents, and is now so deeply affected by the tragedies – and the effects of diving and drugs – that he lives like a hermit in hidden bush camps on crown land. Serial poacher Cam Strachan once brought home the body of a diver who died of a brain haemorrhage in Bass Strait. Fearing he would be accused of manslaughter if police pulled him over, Strachan left the body in the boat as he towed it from Port Welshpool (on Victoria’s east coast) to a country hospital. ‘It was a horror show,’ Strachan recalls. ‘As rigor mortis set in, his arm raised up and stuck out of the boat as we drove along the highway.’
Poachers stand to lose cars, boats, equipment and their liberty. They risk their lives because they take chances with bad weather, rough coastline and dark nights to dodge detection. One night, near where Rod Barber was recently staked out on the Mornington Peninsula, two wannabe poachers speeding back to Port Phillip Bay with no lights slammed their expensive Shark Cat into a rock called Pope’s Eye. One of them fractured his spine. He was lucky. People die poaching.
With Barber, it’s not a case of poacher turned gamekeeper, but he knows his enemy. Tall, strong and dangerously fit, he has been a diver since his teenage years and he understands the way poachers think and knows the risks they face. He watches the wind, tides and weather forecast the way the poachers do, and when the conditions are right – wind offshore, light swell, good visibility – he and his colleagues go out and watch and wait. Sometimes, if they have a tip-off, it’s for days at a time, crouching in hides with sandwiches and water bottles.
They joke about themselves being ‘fish pigs’ but at the sharp end their job is no laughing matter. Few junior police officers, for instance, would regularly pursue lawbreakers with so much to lose – or gain.
As in police crime squads, there is a competitive camaraderie among the Fisheries officers that encourages them to go the extra mile in an effort to beat the villains. Which is why, at Easter and long weekends – the times most people spend holidaying with family and friends – the keenest Fisheries officers often roster themselves on to work because it’s also a good time for part-time poachers to hit the coast.
It is a cat-and-mouse routine. Barber and his colleagues take up positions in hides above the shoreline, connected by radios and powerful binoculars. They watch the swell lapping below them for signs of a shore-based diver at work. They sweep the windswept paddocks behind them, trying to spot the lookouts that poachers also post. Surveillance breeds counter-surveillance. As in war, it is long hours of boredom punctuated with furious action. And it has its dangers, on both sides. The cruel sea ensures that. An added degree of risk for all concerned is that poachers tend to work under cover of darkness or in weather conditions or in places where few recreational divers would go.
In February 2005 Barber was awarded an Australian Bravery Medal for swimming through high seas in the dark to rescue an injured abalone poacher trapped on the rocks. A week after the medal presentation, Barber’s crew arrested another poacher on the same stretch of Victorian coast. A routine police check showed the man had just served eighteen years for murder. For Barber and his officers, who work unarmed, it was a reminder that the abalone business can be dangerous on both sides of the law. For a few, there is fast money – but there is never easy money.
ART imitates life, and so does Bryce Courtenay. No-one knows the value of true stories better than Australia’s most prolific producer of popular fiction. When he based his latest blockbuster, Brother Fish, on a Bass Strait fisherman, one of many people his researchers turned to for advice was Mike Munday, a colourful Tasmanian abalone diver turned poacher turned lawyer. Munday’s brief was to write about surviving the killer storms that make Bass Strait one of the most hazardous stretches of water in the world. He did it so well that Courtenay noted his help in Brother Fish and named a character after him.
Munday’s ‘perfect storm’ scene stands out in the book. Such experiences are part of a remarkable life. Put in an orphanage at three when his parents separated, he was taken to Fiji at ten, where he learned to dive on coral reefs. At fourteen he was in a Salesian seminary in Melbourne, training to be a priest. At sixteen he returned to Tasmania. He was a bank teller in 1966 when his big brother Terry started taking abalone at weekends, duck-diving from a tractor tube.
Mike joined him. ‘There were millions of abalone,’ he recalls. ‘We were only getting ten cents a pound but we could still make $100 in a day. I was getting $58 a week at the bank at the time.’
Later, when he worked night shift in a printing works to support university studies, he persuaded an older workmate it was worth bankrolling an abalone diving venture. ‘I took him down to Eaglehawk Neck and filled a spud bag with 120 pounds of abs in fifteen minutes.’ It was 24 times their pay rate on night shift. The investor bought a boat and a Land Rover to tow it; Munday and his brother each paid a few dollars for an abalone licence and went diving. He was eighteen.
The water was always cold and often dangerous – there was always the threat of running into a shark, stingray, octopus or killer whale – but it seemed to a bold youngster like picking up banknotes from the seabed. By the time he was 21, Munday was driving an E-type Jaguar and living in a waterfront apartment. He cut a figure that attracted equal parts admiration and jealousy. Success earns enemies.
‘Cops would pull up beside me in the E-type and call me a drug dealer.’ Some Fisheries officers of that era also resented younger men making big money, he claims. That he had been to university, was not a local fisherman’s son and was willing to argue earned him some lasting grudges.
By the early 1970s, abalone prices had already begun to rocket. On one outing Munday pulled up about 1900 kilograms of shellfish. At more than $1 a kilo, it was a year’s wages for a bank teller. But there were risks. His first brush with death came in 1971, when he was diving with Geoff Valentine, a big man who was to become a well-known stalwart in the industry.
Like Munday, Valentine had quit a religious vocation, leaving a monastery because he was more interested in cars and girls than a monk should be. On his first day diving, Valentine made more money than his father earned in a week. He soon had a new Ford Customline and a girlfriend. By the time he and Munday started diving together, he had married and fathered the first of seven children.
Tasmania’s wild west coast was no place for outboard-powered runabouts – as opposed to trawler-sized ‘mother ships’ – but the pair risked it for the rich rewards of the abalone fields below the troubled waters. They loaded the runabout with two tonnes of the shellfish and were returning to the port of Strahan in the late afternoon. They didn’t realise they were over a reef until a huge breaker exploded on it, smashing the boat and rolling them deep underwater. They thought they would die. Valentine was underwater for more than a minute, Munday even longer. The boat was in tiny pieces but the men had their wetsuits on, which probably saved their lives. Munday found first his flippers, then the boat’s padded seat, floating in the debris. Both finds were minor miracles but they still needed a big miracle.
They were faced with a dreadful moral dilemma. Should they stick together and risk dying together – or was it each man for himself? Munday knew in his heart that the powerful Valentine had a good chance of saving himself but might perish trying to save his little mate. To his eternal gratitude the big man didn’t hesitate and vowed to stick with him. The pair hung onto the floating boat seat and kicked, even ‘surfing’ down big waves. They were in their early 20s.
Had they been younger and more rash they might have headed straight for shore and died on the breakers on the reefs. Instead, they took the long route sideways towards the Cape Sorell lighthouse, blinking in the distance. By the time they crawled ashore, cold and exhausted, Valentine’s nineteen-year-old wife, waiting back at Strahan with her baby, thought they were dead. At 3am a policeman knocked on her door to say her husband and his exhausted mate had staggered into the lighthouse up the coast.
Afterwards, Munday and Valentine went different ways. In 1972, Munday was working from a big boat with other divers when a cruiser called the Janthe sailed into Hobart and changed his life. At the helm was a man whose reputation preceded him. David Bryan Frith Strachan was then a rakish figure in his early 50s. A fighter pilot in World War II, he had flown airliners for TAA in the 1950s and ’60s. A skilled sailor with no respect for authority, he passed on his skill, daring and cavalier attitude to his two sons, who were at school at Melbourne Grammar, one of Australia’s finest and oldest private schools. By 1971 David Strachan was diving for abalone in Bass Strait from his nineteen-metre ‘gin palace’. Operating without a licence didn’t faze him, but when he decided to try his luck on Tasmania’s sheltered east coast he found the natives a little restless.
The Hobart Mercury newspaper noted the arrival of the ‘luxurious cruiser Janthe’ in February 1972. A reporter with a sharp eye for local pride and prejudice wrote that he found David Strachan ‘lounging in a chair with his feet on a stool and a glass of scotch in his hand’. Strachan politely denied plotting an onslaught on the local abalone industry, but local divers weren’t convinced. They elected the educated and articulate Mike Munday to confront the polished interloper with the message, ‘We don’t care where you poach, as long as it’s not here’. Munday boarded the Janthe heart in mouth, expecting to be thrown into the harbour by what he imagined would be a crew of Melbourne villains. Instead, Strachan greeted him with a Johnny Walker at the bar and Sinatra on the stereo and talked of flying Beaufighters against the Japanese. He could have been that great Tasmanian Errol Flynn. Munday was captivated. He swapped sides: as a licensed Tasmanian abalone diver, he agreed to dive for the Victorian from the Janthe.
Munday’s decision would ultimately cost him his ticket in the lucrative new industry. The authorities banned Strachan from sailing on his own boat after catching him diving, unlicensed, for abalone. When Munday helped sidestep this by taking over as skipper of the boat and paying Strachan a percentage of the catch, his cards were marked. One day in 1974 a Fisheries officer boarded the boat and measured more than 4000 abalone. In two nets in which the shellfish had not yet been checked, he found some that were slightly undersized – or, at least, that’s the way Munday remembers it, and it hasn’t been contradicted. The offence might seem trivial but it was enough to cost Munday his licence. In a stroke of a public service pen, Munday went from authorised diver to ‘predatory’ poacher, and stayed that way for 30 years. Ironically, he took far fewer abalone as a poacher than he would have been able to with a licence. (He saw licensed divers and unscrupulous processors collude to process vast numbers of ‘over-quota’ and sometimes undersized abalone.)
Along the way Munday enrolled in law school so he could defend himself. What he didn’t know then was that David Strachan’s older son would become a bigger Bass Strait poacher than Strachan senior had ever been. In fact, Munday’s finest hour as a bush lawyer came when he got young Strachan out of jail with an appeal to the Supreme Court.
LIKE most schools, Melbourne Grammar has produced its mavericks. Two stand out. One now divides his life between London, Switzerland and New York and often appears in public and on television wearing women’s clothes and thick make-up. His name is Barry Humphries. The other is – or was – the best-known abalone poacher in Australia, maybe the world. He is David Campbell Strachan, known as Cam. When he quit school at sixteen to work with his hands, he was the envy of more conventional classmates – many of them condemned to become mere leaders of industry, politics and the professions.
The entertainer and the abalone diver have little in common except perhaps a benign contempt for the old school tie and a manic edge that age has softened in Humphries but is still obvious in the younger man. Strachan admits to an obsessive compulsive personality. He buzzes with nervous energy, fidgets like a kid on red cordial, and has tunnel vision – turning the high beam of a sharp practical intelligence on whatever has his attention, ignoring all else. Now, at 53, he is facing the fact that his past may ruin what is left of his life. The Grammar boy who made bad has a big reputation to live down if he is ever to get back on the water. Bail conditions on charges he is currently fighting ban him from being within one kilometre of the sea, except to work in one Westernport Bay boatshed.
Fisheries officers, police, prosecutors and magistrates have painted Strachan as the Black Prince of the illegal abalone market. In court, in headlines and news bulletins, he has been labelled a pirate, a thief and ‘king of poachers’. The exhibitionist part of Strachan’s character revels in this but he knows that his reputation has caused him more grief than pleasure or profit. He has made untold amounts of ‘black money’ but, as so often happens with unlawful enterprises and gamblers, he has lost all or most of it feeding his appetite for risk.
Even Strachan’s opponents admire his ability as diver and seaman. Some have a soft spot for his larrikin style. In the boatshed where he works is a blown-up photograph of him driving a fast boat pursued by a police helicopter. It’s like a scene from a Bond movie. On the back of the photograph is scrawled a chirpy message from particular Victorian Fisheries officers who have enjoyed hunting him for years. They are the best of enemies.
But Rod Barber says that the flip side of the Strachan legend is that for all his skill as a diver, seaman and boat builder, he is a failure as a criminal ‘because given the years he’s been in the game, he hasn’t got a lot to show for it. He’s been caught a hell of a lot’. Barber also points out that although Strachan correctly argues he has done much of his poaching around distant Bass Strait islands not usually harvested by licensed divers, he has caused long-term and ongoing damage to the fishery in both states by teaching a younger generation of divers how to poach. Although some – especially the man himself – might see Strachan as a Bass Strait ‘bushranger’ – part Robin Hood and part pied piper – to the authorities he is an opportunistic predator.
For all his acknowledged skill on and below the water, over 34 years Strachan has had more than 100 convictions, paid more than a million dollars in fines and still owes about $800,000, mostly in Tasmania. In the 1970s and 1980s, he would plead guilty and then go diving to pay for it. But asset seizure, massively increased fines and the threat of long jail sentences have scuppered his poaching career.
Strachan has had ‘about twenty’ boats confiscated. He has lost his own house and two belonging to his 85-year-old mother, all in blue-chip Brighton, one of Melbourne’s most sought-after bayside suburbs. At the time of writing he rents a pleasant but small house in a modest outer suburb, drives a battered van and, when not in custody, works seven days a week building boats for game fishermen who fancy owning a Cam Strachan special. It’s hard to believe that anyone who didn’t have to, would work such punishing hours among fibreglass and polyester fumes.
‘They’ve made it too tough. I can’t do five years jail, and that’s what I’m facing if I get caught again because poaching is now an indictable offence,’ Strachan says. He always poached by boat rather than from the shore, but ‘all the technology and modern communications mean you just can’t do it any more. There’s always someone with binoculars and a satellite telephone watching you.’
For a man who has smiled and cracked jokes while handcuffed, during high-speed chases and after being arrested at gunpoint by police, he is uncharacteristically sombre. Convicted of offering 690 kilos of black-market abalone to an undercover officer in 2003, he has been on bail since then pending an appeal. If the appeal fails, he faces up to eighteen months jail.
He has been jailed before – four times, in Tasmania and Victoria – but in mid-2005 he had two new reasons to stay out of trouble. Strachan’s long-time partner, Samantha Seale, gave birth to twins, the result of prolonged treatment through an IVF program. His baby son and daughter mean a new start for Strachan. There is also a tragic echo in their arrival: a son and daughter borne by his first wife were killed in a car crash in 1984. His surviving daughter, now an adult, has a life-threatening illness. Some who know Strachan say the tragedy sent him into a frenzy of self-destructive behaviour from which he is still recovering. He was a man who didn’t care. Now, he says, he does care.
There are other big abalone poachers – and many small ones – but Strachan always drew the most publicity. Where more discreet operators bent or broke the rules quietly, he flouted them. Where they mouthed apologies or feigned remorse, he was defiant and flippant. He built high-powered boats and drove them fearlessly through dangerous waters to outrun the law. He has crossed Bass Strait’s notoriously treacherous waters hundreds of times. From Eden to Hobart, fishing and yachting people talk about Cam’s exploits. He has the rare distinction of being known by his first name – even by virtual strangers who know him only by reputation.
He has been pursued often but the ‘Big Chase’ was in March 1998 when a fixed-wing aircraft, a police helicopter, five boats and 22 officers followed him across Bass Strait and along the Victorian coast for more than fourteen hours. A veteran Tasmanian marine police officer admitted grudgingly that it was the most outstanding display of boat handling he had seen.
Strachan tells stories – and produces photographs – of ferrying abalone from isolated Bass Strait islands by helicopter. On one poaching trip, he and a pilot (who later worked in war zones) crash-landed a light plane on a rough island airstrip, knocking off the wing tips when a mob of suicidal wallabies jumped into their path. Within two weeks he had conjured up a purpose-built catamaran to salvage the crippled aircraft and ship it to Victoria for rebuilding. It is still flying somewhere interstate.
Such exploits have made him a poster boy for poachers – and a whipping boy for the authorities. Which is understandable but not necessarily fair, says his friend Mike Munday, who sees desperation behind the bravado. ‘Cam said to me after his kids were killed, “I’ve got nothing to lose.” But now he has got something to lose.’
Munday argues that Strachan has provided a convenient scapegoat, targeted in Tasmania despite taking far less than the ‘over quota’ abalone that some licensed divers secretly sold through the back door to unscrupulous processors involved in both the black market and the legitimate market.
An example: Strachan made headlines in 1997 when caught with a few hundred abalone, at the same time that a well-known licensed diver barely raised a ripple when convicted by a Tasmanian magistrate of landing 9275 abalone ‘without documentation’.
Munday says because Strachan’s father was disliked in Tasmania, ‘it’s a case of the sins of the father being visited on the son’. But he stresses that his friend is now right out of chances. ‘I’ve told him that if he gets caught again in Tasmanian waters – don’t call me. I don’t consider I’ve got a right to continue poaching because of the public money wasted trying to prosecute me. They spent maybe a million dollars of taxpayers’ money chasing me around for three years with a net result that they lost when I took them to the Supreme Court in 2004 and proved the legislation was faulty. If it’s good enough for me to give up, it’s good enough for Cam.’
Strachan claims that since the early 1980s he has almost exclusively confined his ‘fishing’ to remote Bass Strait islands too distant and too difficult for Tasmanian divers, who get easier abalone closer to home. He circles a speck on the map called Albatross Island, off north-west Tasmania, and says that is where he has done most ‘work’. The prevailing westerly winds there prevent diving most days, he says, and abalone-bearing ‘rock bottom’ runs out into deep water, kilometres from land, ensuring that millions of abalone stay safely out of reach forever. Strachan reckons Tasmanian authorities were fixed on making an example of him to deter other would-be poachers. But he claims no-one else is willing to risk death running small boats across the most dangerous stretch of water in the southern hemisphere. ‘It’s too hard,’ he says. ‘Since I stopped, where are they? No-one is crossing Bass Strait to dive because it’s serious stuff, like climbing Everest without oxygen.’
So much for the past. As for the future, Strachan says he can let go of the fast money but not the fast boats. He is proud of his boat-building, and delighted that the Tasmanian police share his confidence: they have used a boat he built in his backyard ever since they confiscated it in 1997.
This opens up the potential for his own version of poacher-turned-gamekeeper. His client list already includes people like television fishing guru Rex Hunt, and now the lion wants to lie down with the lamb … he has a standing offer to Fisheries officers and water police to test any government craft against his home-grown ‘Formula Extreme’ prototype: ‘If they can outperform one of mine in rough water, I will supply one for nothing’.
Meanwhile, he has finally learned that you can’t beat City Hall. He wants to be around to see his twins grow up. Maybe even take them fishing one day … but only with a rod and reel, he told the author in early 2005. Strachan swears he is a reformed character, but an appeal court did not see it that way. In August 2005 he was sentenced to ten months jail, with the threat of another suspended sentence also looming that could keep him in prison for eighteen months. By the time he gets out, his baby twins will be walking and perhaps even talking. Boats and money are not the only things he has lost.
ANYONE who has survived years of abalone diving needs luck, especially if crossing Bass Strait regularly in conditions considered too dangerous for Fisheries officers, water police and licensed fishermen. Many remarkable stories have become lore. One that can now be told concerns a sometime pub bouncer-turned-poacher who currently leads a quiet life in Tasmania after surviving terrifying odds. Because of a usually-fatal combination of recklessness, greed and a Bass Strait storm, the poacher and his two young crewmates were caught in killer seas in a small boat in late 1998 while trying to run back to Victoria from the small islands off the north-west corner of Tasmania. The poacher had set off the boat’s emergency satellite beacon far too late to be rescued by conventional means. He was too foolhardy to sound the mayday alarm early because he was reluctant to jettison the load of abalone; until it was too late.
Just when it seemed certain that he would lose this insane gamble and that he and his mates would be drowned, salvation arrived in the unlikely form of a passing US Navy battleship, one of few craft big enough to brave a Bass Strait storm with relative impunity.
The battleship had been serving in the Gulf and was steaming along the Australian coast to visit Melbourne when it picked up the distress signal and diverted course to search for the stricken fishing boat.
After a tense and dangerous rescue the three shaken, half-frozen and grateful men were dragged on board and placed in the sick bay, where they were plied with soup, cigarettes and curious questions about what the hell they thought they were doing in the middle of one of the world’s most dangerous stretches of water in a glorified plastic runabout. Well before they reached Port Melbourne, the poacher skipper had recovered well enough from the ordeal to work out that the authorities would be waiting for him with difficult questions – and perhaps handcuffs. Determined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, he turned his considerable charm on the battleship’s bemused officers, impressing them with tales of working the Strait and the injustice of the system.
When the battleship docked, Fisheries officers and water police requested permission to come aboard and interview the rescued ‘fishermen’. But the American captain promptly refused, pointing out that his ship was technically United States soil and that they had no authority to board it, let alone arrest anyone.
Being trained strategists, the Americans knew how to avoid a stalemate and pre-empt a possible siege situation with a decisive tactical decision. They quietly bundled the three poachers into a small helicopter and landed them on a quiet beach at Seaford, where they were met by friends in a car. For the second time in 48 hours, they were the ones that got away.
The poacher skipper learned his lesson, according to Cam Strachan, who knows him well. Realising he could not afford to tempt fate again, he leads a quiet life on a salmon farm, never more than swimming distance from shore.
ABALONE diving is risky, abalone poaching even more so. But not all poachers are reckless. A few discreet operators have never been caught and remain unknown. Others might be suspected but stay out of trouble. One of them – ‘Jim’ – lives in the house that abalone built on the farm that abalone bought in a remote and beautiful part of Victoria’s west coast. Jim describes himself drily as an ‘ethical poacher’ – and in the past tense. He says he gave up poaching after a few lucrative years because of the increased policing and massive rise in penalties which put abalone and lobster trafficking in the same league as drug trafficking.
But even when he was diving for abalone, he says, he did not strip beds, take huge catches, or take undersized abalone. In all ways, except the lack of a licence, he behaved the way that legitimate abalone divers should. He says he always went ‘softly softly’ – and had the discipline to give it up once he had set himself up so that he could pursue less dangerous pursuits.
As a young man he was a good sportsman, and he came to western Victoria to play football. He worked in a local business with an older man who introduced him to abalone diving off Warrnambool, Port Fairy and Portland.
The shellfish wasn’t worth nearly as much then, but it was plentiful – the old timers called it ‘mutton fish’ and reckoned it was good for bait – but even back then a few hours diving could get him half a week’s wages. The older man bought a licence for a few dollars and urged young Jim to do the same. ‘He used to say to me “buy a licence, there’ll be money in this one day”. He’s a multi-millionaire now.’
Jim sounds a bit wistful but says he has no regrets. He didn’t see the missed opportunity until it was too late – and didn’t care when he was young. By the time he realised that abalone could have made him rich too, he felt he couldn’t justify the cost of going ‘legit’. Each time the price of licences rose, he thought it was too expensive to take the plunge. When the authorities imposed a $200 licence fee in the mid-1970s – about two weeks ordinary wages – it shook scores of divers out of the game, which was the intended effect.
Those who decided $200 was too much outlay sold out to those hardier and farsighted divers who had to comply with a new ruling that they needed to buy two licences in order to consolidate them into one. Within months, the number of licensed divers halved – and the foundations had been laid for a closed shop of a few dozen potential millionaires. Every time the licences changed hands for more and more money, the harder it seemed for Jim and others like him to justify coming up with the money. Instead, he says, he started poaching regularly. The secret of his modest success, he says, was that he wasn’t greedy. ‘I was an ethical sort of poacher,’ he muses. ‘I only took sized abalone and went into areas the professionals wouldn’t.’
In those days, regional Fisheries officers were scarce and fairly regular in their habits. Jim would always go out before dawn or after dark. In the mid- 1980s, he was getting about $14 a kilogram for abalone, mostly from trusted clients who ran Chinese restaurants. In three busy years, he made enough to buy several acres of prime coastal land and to build a house. A few hours diving would subsidise several days of building. When he finished the house and had everything paid off, he says, he walked away from poaching.
‘I had a goal and achieved that goal,’ he says. Not everyone is so wise.
Of course, it takes nerve just to dive some of the reefs. Around Julia Percy Island, where the great white sharks hunt seal pups, for instance. ‘I know a few who have lost their nerve,’ says the modest poacher. But the days are gone when you could ‘set your watch’ by the Fisheries officers starting and stopping work. ‘I would never dive in office hours’, he explains. Now policing is much more stringent.
Jim isn’t the only poacher to quit while ahead. A lot of other poachers have ‘pulled up’ because of the savage penalties abalone (and lobster) trafficking carry. A repeat offender caught with a trafficable quantity could get nearly as much jail time as a ‘cleanskin’ first offender might get for manslaughter. They can also have assets seized and sold under draconian provisions that treat abalone poachers like drug dealers. There are men in every coastal community who have lost cars, boats and diving equipment to the Fisheries officers.
The tough new laws are particularly discouraging for the sophisticated ‘boat poachers’ like Cam Strachan and others, who use expensive, high-powered boats – often custom made – fitted with air compressors to supply air to divers through ‘hookah’ air lines. Some poachers use expensive imported ‘re-breathing’ equipment – painted in camouflage colours to match camouflage wetsuits – which does not release tell-tale bubbles to the surface.
Big boat poachers who stand to make big money fast are rarely seen on the job by the public. These offenders, in the slang used by Fisheries officers, are mostly ‘corkies’ – Caucasian – whereas organised teams of shore poachers tend to be Asian. The latter stand out to the public because they arrive in carloads to hit accessible areas at low tide to duck-dive on shallow reefs, mostly in daylight. These bogus ‘recreational’ divers exploit a legal loophole: breaking the spirit if not the letter of the law by taking the recreational limit of ten abalone a day, every day that they can.
They take more if they can get away with it, stashing their catch in the tea-tree to be retrieved later, then going back in for another bag. If they are caught with only a few over the limit, they avoid full-scale trafficking charges. It is not unknown for them to bring extra carloads of ‘mules’ – children and old people – who each return to the suburbs clutching their ‘catch’ of ten abalone each.
The big risks – physical and legal – are taken by divers working at night, either from shore using scuba tanks or from boats. These offenders can take substantial catches, risking trafficking charges to cash in on black market prices of up to $50 a kilogram for abalone meat. Some can make $5000 in a night.
A serious poacher who doesn’t get caught could theoretically make close to a million dollars cash in a year. But most do get caught.
The combination of big money and willingness to risk jail attracts a criminal element that is a long way from the ‘respectable’ local poachers like Jim.
THE ruthless tag-team approach by the organised gangs of recreational poachers in the tidal zones within two hours of Melbourne is a death of a thousand cuts for once-plentiful recreational abalone stocks close to shore. In the quiet roads in the tea-tree hugging the ocean beaches on the Mornington Peninsula, the locals can easily pick the shore poachers’ cars. They are almost always early model Commodores or Falcons – cheap, disposable and relatively anonymous, with plenty of room to carry five passengers and a boot full of abalone back to suburbs like Springvale and Oakleigh, where they are quietly sold to restaurants or illegally processed for sale – often to Asian tourists who prize the shellfish.
Locals, notably male surfers, wage a silent guerrilla war with the shore poachers. They let down tyres, kick in panels and smash windows but they don’t want to identify themselves in print because of potential repercussions.
Ken de Heer has run the kiosk at Sorrento back beach for ten years, and has seen the suburban poachers turn up in increasing numbers every time the weather and tide are suitable – meaning a northerly wind blowing offshore and a low tide. He says these ‘tidal zone’ poachers now leave someone minding their cars. Four wear wetsuits and blue kitchen gloves and carry mesh onion bags; one watches the car to stop vigilante locals disabling it.
The ‘sentry’ often carries a spear gun or diving knife. A lot of locals are nervous of them.
‘In the beginning there was a lot of anger and angst when they would come back up from the beach to the car park with their bags full,’ de Heer explains. After a series of clashes between surfers and poachers ‘we were told to back off and get car (registration) numbers.’ The poachers have taken to avoiding the main car parks, although the locals can pick their cars along back beach roads.
Simon is a Sorrento local in his 40s who swims in the surf every day. He is tanned, fit, stocky and angry, in a laid-back way. He sees the same faces and the same cars month after month when tide and winds suit. ‘They walk in, wearing wetsuits and goggles and a bum bag. They travel pretty light. I took some photos once. Later on, we got our tyres slashed. I can’t say it was them (the poachers) but I reckon it was because the surfers let their tyres down. It’s a bit of a silent war.
‘Twenty years ago you used to put your hands under the rocks and pull the abs off, and there were shellfish all over the peninsula. But now it’s all gone.’ He points to a big abalone shell sitting on a table on his verandah. ‘That size used to be common,’ he says, ‘but you could dive all day now to find one that big around here.’ He is referring specifically to the beaches accessible from shore. Not all shore poachers are Asian, he adds. ‘An Aussie bloke was doing a fair bit of poaching here. He saw me looking at him and he said “I know where you live, so don’t say anything”.’
POACHERS were always good at hiding abalone but, as fines increased and authorities began confiscating cars, boats and equipment, their scams have grown more elaborate. One former poacher – now a car dealer – showed the author a modified scuba tank, with a small air reservoir at the top but able to be filled with abalone through a false bottom.
Other ruses include gutted ‘spare’ outboard motors containing abalone instead of engines, hollow life jackets with hidden zips, dummy fuel tanks and secret compartments in boats. David Strachan’s cruiser Janthe had one such compartment that could hide three illegal divers who were willing to lie underneath an enormous water tank that slid on hidden tracks.
Some gangs have been known to cut open fibreglass decks with compressed-air-driven power tools, fill the hollow hull with abalone, then re-cover the hole and throw the tools overboard before returning to port.
For years, one illegal abalone gang used an ice-cream delivery truck fitted with a powerful motor to collect abalone from poachers along the Victorian coast. ‘The ice-cream in the back of the truck was about two years old,’ says an insider whose family has worked the fish markets for two generations. ‘But the abalone was always fresh.’ A ‘runner’ was recently caught with a utility converted to a giant icebox, with insulation panels fitted to the bottom and sides. Another Victorian gang used cars fitted with LP gas so the petrol tanks could be used to carry abalone. It worked well until officers smelt something fishy.
Large-scale poaching depends on a ready market. There is a difference between selling a few abalone to the local Chinese restaurant and a large-scale criminal enterprise.
As long as there are processors – illegal ones without licences or unethical ones with a licence – there will be a few people willing to run the risk of poaching and running abalone. Which is why the authorities – Fisheries and police – are combining forces to crack the processors. This is the story of their greatest success so far…
LIKE many another Asian businessman, Tat Sang Loo is – or was – a gambler. He was not a high roller at casinos or card games but he played for high stakes. He bet against his liberty, and lost. If anyone knows who dobbed him in, it’s a well-kept secret. Later, the Fisheries people would say only that they thought it was an anonymous tip-off, which is as likely a story as any.
It’s not as if Tat Sang Loo was a known organised crime figure – although he was certainly committing a crime and was admirably organised, one reason his backyard abalone empire was so easy to unravel once the investigators got a sniff that it existed. A sniff, in fact, might have been Tat Sang’s undoing. He was drying abalone in the roof of his neat clinker brick house in Calembeena Street, Oakleigh, in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs.
The drying shellfish gave off a distinctive smell. Not an unpleasant odour, recalls the pleasant elderly woman who still lives next door. ‘It wasn’t a fishy smell,’ she says, ‘more sweet, like baking biscuits.’
Smell or no smell, it was a fishy business. Tat Sang Loo was in his 40s, married twice and with a young family. He had been a restaurant worker – manager or kitchen hand, depending on who’s telling the story – when fortune seemed to smile on him. He was home a lot, and started buying properties. Neighbours noticed that he was also becoming popular. People visited at all hours of day. And they brought ‘gifts’ in heavy-duty plastic bags.
By the time the Fisheries surveillance crew sat off Tat Sang Loo’s house, his social circle had expanded even further. The watchers followed his Commodore station wagon to a series of quiet suburban car parks, where he would do ‘tail-to-tail’ pick ups of the heavy black bags from other cars. Often, he would then go to a rundown weatherboard house tucked behind a commercial building on a busy main road a few blocks from his own home in Oakleigh.
The surveillance crew noticed that when the station wagon entered the driveway it well loaded down but later emerged (from behind tall gates) empty, riding much higher on its springs. At other times, it arrived empty and left loaded with sealed cardboard boxes. They got lucky one day, when the ‘target’ parked at a shopping centre and left the car briefly. Officers swiftly broke into it and opened one of the boxes. It was full of dried abalone.
The boxes were addressed to Sydney and Queensland and had stickers that identified a local road freight company, which meant that when our abalone runner got to the transport depot to unload, the investigators were already waiting for him, hidden with cameras ready.
After that, it was all over bar the shouting. There was plenty of that when about 60 Fisheries officers and police divided into teams raided four properties in Oakleigh and Huntingdale on a spring day in 1998. The investigators were well-briefed but surprised by what they found in one of them – the shabby weatherboard at 2 Leigh Street, Huntingdale, was fitted out inside like a professional processing plant. The living areas were sheathed in stainless steel and fitted with industrial kitchen benches, cryovac sealing machines, and a row of washing machines to tumble the abalone meat. A room fitted with a gas furnace was full of drying racks loaded with abalone. There were freezers full of abalone.
Among papers at the scene was a receipt that led the investigators to a self-storage depot in a nearby industrial estate. There they found boxes of dried abalone, a cache stored to send interstate.
The haul totalled 31,004 abalone – the biggest in Australia, before or since. When Tat Sang Loo appeared in court later, the prosecution led evidence that he had grossed $ 1.2 million in the year before his arrest and had an interest in five properties, including a city apartment and a new brick house.
The judge ordered him to pay $978,275 under the Confiscation Act of 1997, and sentenced him to more than a year in prison. Meanwhile, it seemed, he was also unlucky in love. His wife filed for divorce as soon as he was arrested, which meant she was entitled to half his considerable assets.
Fisheries officers believe she managed to keep their impressive new house in one of the best streets in East Oakleigh. It is opposite a school and has tall, black security gates that slide open and shut automatically as soon as a car comes or goes.
If you watch the house long enough, they say, you can still see a man who uncannily resembles Tat Sang Loo slipping in and out.
Perhaps he and his wife have managed to reconcile. Crime might have paid a bit, after all.