A poachers' paradise?

his life and crimes. Recent news that the Victorian state government has sacked half of the people who have boots on the ground and boats in the water to stop poaching of our natural resources. This is very bad news for all Victorians. Already it seems that the poaches, the thieves, the sneaky people are encroaching on diminishing resources, diminishing fisheries. Here are some small stories that tell us about a bigger truth. Early morning walkers walking from Point Lonstyle to

Queenscliff around the bay. There's a path there people often go walking early in the morning. Among them asks some people who get out before dawn, and those people say that sometimes when there are low tides, they notice a peculiar thing. They see men coming out of the water in wetsuits, with masks on and with often a spear gun in one hand and a netting bag under the other. They have no doubt that these people are in fact swimming across into the nearby marine park, and they also

have no doubt that they're probably taking abaloni. And one of the reasons I think that is that these people never engage with locals who are walking past. When they see them, they sprint towards their cars. They leave their masks on, and they run towards their cars and jump in the cars and drive away in to the dawnlight. And this would suggest that they're up to no good.

Now around the corner in Queenscliff and Saint Leonard's and across the bay places like Wherriby, South Williamstown and so on, there are boats coming in and they will have their bag limit of flathead or whiting or squid, whatever it

is that's going at that stage. And if there are no fisheries offices around, or if they think that there will be no fisheries officers around, the chances are that some of these people the dishonest ones, the opportunists, the thieves, will take a look around, take their bag, limit bag ashore, stash it somewhere in an eski or in a friend's car or whatever, and then within a little while reappear

on the water for a fresh lot of fishing. Now they might change their jumpers, they might move things around a bit, They might go and have a cup of coffee and then return. But those people, if they've got a chance to get away with it, some of them will, and they go out and they get more fish, more squid. And some of them, of course, are selling it on the black market to restaurants and to fish shops and the like for cash, because if they get the opportunity

to do it, they will do it. This is human nature. And the only thing that stands between human nature and theft or any other sort of wrongdoing is the law and the enforcement of the law. The law doesn't really work unless most of us think that it.

cat's away, the mice will play. And you can guarantee that these people, some of them, if they're not filling freezers at the expense of more honest anglers, you can bet they're actually selling to restaurants for cash. Now, when the government announced that they were going to cut the numbers of fisheries officers in half, there was a bureaucrat, a dithering bureaucrat, who said a ridiculous thing. He said

that recreational anglers would regulate themselves. He said something like, there's not a big problem, is there, Because if someone comes into the boat ramp, you know, boasting that they've got three hundred fish, they'll get a punch on the nose, won't they. And essentially he's saying that other anglers, other fishes should police their fellow anglers, and you inspect their catch and if they think they've got too many fish

punch them on the nose. Now, that is a very silly thing, because no one is going to go and inspect other people's catch. No one is going to inspect the catch of someone who's by definition armed. People who go fishing have knives, fishing knives to fill it fish.

You aren't going to insert yourself into that conversation, particularly with the thought of people that you suspect might be poaching fish, because by definition they're going to be law breakers and nasty pieces of work and possibly threatening and defensive. So it's exactly what you would not do. And I'm sure that the police would not advocate doing it. And why some lunatic bureaucrat would think that was a good thing to say, I don't know, but it's certainly not

sustainable or sensible. If anyone acted on it, it could in fact lead to some very ugly scenes, and you know, we could end up with cases in court where the defense is well, you know, we heard a bureaucrat tell us that we should police other fishermen, and I just tried to do it, and you know, then he tried to stab me and then I hit him with a boathook. It's not going to wash. It's not going to go

well in court. So I think the idea of vigilantes doing it wild West style and starting some fishing war is absolutely ridiculous and it distracts us from the realities of this situation. It's hard to believe that government bean counters would actually believe their own propaganda. The evidence is that abaloni and other marine life are under attack, and that's there for anyone to see. That's an uncomfortable fact

for the state government. And the reality is if you cut the fish officers numbers in half, this can only get worse. Now every other abaloney fishery in the world, and I'm talking from South Africa to northern California to Southeast Asia has collapsed from overfishing and from poaching that ultimately escalated, particularly in South Africa, into pillaging. They just raped and pillaged all the reefs until the reefs were bare of abalone, all shell fish. And once that happens,

there is no breeding stock at all. It cannot breed up again. It cannot replace itself because all the breeding stock is gone. The only way to replenish it would be to introduce stock from somewhere else and try and graft it onto.

of the way spots. One of the remote spots they go to is a way around the coast on South Gippsland, and it's hard to get to this particular place, as he says, one hundred meter cliff and to get down to the waves below at this very dangerous stretch of water which can have good waves, which so it attracts

some surface not many. He said, You've got to slip and slide down this very rough, dangerous track, down down down through the rocky slopes and the shale and the bush that sticks into you and all the rest of it. And when you get down to the bottom, if the conditions are suitable, you can get a good surf there. But not a lot of people do this because you know, you've got to climb back out again and so on.

And he said, the fascinating thing about this place, though, is that around out of sight, pretty well out of sight, there's a little hut being built of driftwood and crap. Is the way this gorib driftwood and crap. So it's a bit of brush and a bit of a few rocks and driftwood, and this little shelter, crude little shelter sort of blends into the environment. It's hard to see.

And inside it, he says, is a sauceman sitting over a little campfire, and a few odds and means that would indicate that somebody camps in that hut for several hours and or overnight. And he said clearly what it is is ab poaches. They're they're waiting for the tides to turn from one tide to the next so that they can go out duck diving for abs, you know,

maybe one hundred meters out or whatever it is. Because because it's such a dangerous stretch of water and so inaccessible, the abs there have had a chance to breed up, and so it's a relatively rich reef for these poaches to pillage. And he said, clearly that's what they're up to, and he said the last thing he would want to do would be to catch them at it, or to try and discourage them from doing it, because they will be armed with knives. And there's two things about ab poaches.

One is they want to avoid the attention of witnesses, and if they can't do that, the other thing they might want to do is to intimidate witnesses. Now, these ab poaches, they're in a dangerous game. I've took to some of these poaches over the years that they're sort

of highly organized, quite professional poaches. One of them, a fellow in Tasmania, told me that the scariest thing that ever happened to him was that he was underwater, and he went into like a cave thing, a hole in the rock underwater, and it was full of big fat abaloni and he thought, how good's this. And he's in there with his ab knife they call it. It's like a long squared lever knife. And he's leaving abs off and jamming him into his net bag and counting each

one's a fifty dollar note or whatever it is. And suddenly he senses that it's gone darker, the water's darker, and something brushes against him. He turns around and the entrance to this hole. He's just in a hole. It's only you know, big enough for him to get into. It's only maybe a meat up high and a meter wide. The whole entrance is covered by a giant octopus. And he thought, oh no, this is where the giant octopus lives in this hole, and I'm in its way. And

he was terrified. He said it was worse than being near a shark. And he said the tentacles were enormously long and very powerful, and in the end he had to hack his way out using his knife. He had to cut one of the tentacles to get past this giant octopus. And I found that to be the most not merish scenario you could think of. And he told me other stories about his adventures as an abaloni diver.

I think early doors he might have been a legal abalone diver, and then at some point he had a disagreement with the authorities and he kept doing it without a license, and someone but he and another guy who was a big diver in Tasmania, they loaded a real small boat speedboat overloaded. He said, we had far too many. We'd run across a big reef and we've got a heap of abaloni and we were well down in the water because of the weight of them. And we're speeding back towards the.

But they were abled us, i think, sort of tear it in half, and they had a bit each or something and they used those to kick their way into shore. It was miles they had to go miles, and they were scared, and they were cold, and they were hungry. It was all bad. And he said, ultimately we got in and we were washed onto this empty beach, and we were so exhausted that we both just lay on the sand and we actually fell into this sort of

deep sleep. And he said we were woken by cattle walking up to somebody's cows that was wandering up and down the coast as they might in Tasmania. And he said, these cows came up and were sort of rubbing their noses on us to see what we were, to see if they were edible, these strange black things lying on

the beach. And it was the two ab divers, and he said that was the most astonishing adventure to s And those are the sort of stories that these ab poaches will tell you if they've been out in Bass Strait doing this stuff for a number of years. Of course, one of the most famous of them. He's a fellow called cam Strawn, and cam Strawn briefly is probably the most notorious ab poacher in the English speaking world. He, like the late Barry Humphreys, is a graduate of Melbourne

Grammar School. He could be Melbourn Grammar School's greatest ever villain. And his father was a spitfire pilot in World War Two who later had a big boat that he used to drive around between Victoria and Tasmania. His father used to dive for abaloni. He was a very fearless man because he'd flown spitfires in the war and didn't really care much about the law or protocol or anything else.

And Cam young Cam learned to poach abaloney at his father's knee, and Cam became an abalone poacher diver, and he became an expert boat builder. He would build beautiful hulls, these long, thin like semi racing holes that were fast boats but also seaworthy, and people prize them very highly.

And among the people that prized them highly, it's the Tasmanian water Police, because they've arrested cam Strawn so many times that they would confiscate his boats from him, which they can under the law, and they would equip themselves with his boats, so that next time they chased him, they would be using his boat to chase him. So he would have to build one that's a bit faster and a bit bigger motor in order to stay one

step ahead of them. And in fact, there was one notorious chase across bas Strait which is known as the Big Chase, where they had police helicopters, boats, they had I think a navy boat or something, and they're all chasing cam Strawn. And somebody said later, well, you can't really admire him, but that is the finest feat of seamanship I've ever seen him, staying ahead of us and racing through those sort of seas in that sort of boat.

It's just astonishing. What's the point of telling us about camp cam Strawn has brought up teens of thousands of abalone over decades. He sold those four millions of dollars on the black market. Mostly he was out deep in Bastrada around little islands and things that you know, they're out beyond Flinder's Island, beyond King Island and so on. So he wasn't denuding the Victorian shoreline per se, there

is that about it. However, he was breaking the law, and he used to break the law a lot, and in fact he was arrested I think ninety nine times, and apart from having all his geared confiscated and paying massive fines, he did end up going to jail.

a brain hemorrhage. Now this is probably caused by coming up too fast from deep water, because these guys dive with heavy stuff on, so they go down to depth and they have these air pumps with lines all the way down so they can breathe down deep and if they're young and inexperienced, sometimes they come up too fast

and this young bloke had done this. He had a brain hemorrhage and he died and cam brought him into Port welsh Pool, which is South Gippsland, and he was frightened that he would be pulled up by the police and that he'd be charged with manslaughter for this young

fellow being dead. And he put him in the boat on the tiler, the boats on the boat trailer, put him on the boat and covered the boat over and then he drove to a hospital in South Gippsland, like curram Borough or land Gath at one of those places, and produced this young bloke. And there was no hope for him. Of course, he was dead on arrival. But that is the sort of risk that the poaches will take.

One of the officers I've spoken to in the past he had personally saved poaches who were poaching in you know, relatively close to shore, get into trouble with the ocean and waves and so on. Each swum out and saved more than one person. The poaches had rammed a boat a little bit like that Tasmanian story.

it for agreed and they do it for money. But it also tells you that if they're willing to take those risks personally, some of them are going to be willing to hurt other people as well, because they won't want to be caught, they won't want to be locked up, they won't want to lose their boats or their income. And so this whole black market poaching business is bad for everyone because it creates a class of criminal and.

people are already being hurt by these fire bombings. We've had a situation where firebombers are paid to go and burn places down. And just recently this year we've had a young woman burnt to death in the inner Western suburbs for no good reason at all, only because fire bombers were sent to burn down X house, they got the wrong house and they burnt to death an innocent young woman. This is a class of crime and of criminal that the government has created through badly thought out policies.

And the point of that is that the government, through a sin of omission, has effectively given crooks permission to go out and to go out and poach abalone, all.

towards the Victorian border. That is denuded of shellfish of abalone. Specifically, there are whole reefs that are now bare because the poaches have been allowed to just pillage it and to take undersigh abaloni. Abaloni needs about seven years to grow to a stage where it's big enough to reproduce. Now, if you let it do that, it will reproduce. And if you only take one in ten of the adult size abalone, it's not a problem. They will reproduce ad

nauseum forever. It's not a problem. If it took two of the adults out of ten, maybe you'd start to cramp its style a little bit. If you take more than that, you know it's a diminishing return. If you take everything, including the young ones, you will wipe it out in a matter of a few seasons. It'll just be gone. Because if you take all the little ones, they don't grow into big ones and they don't reproduce, and that is the end of that. And the problem with this mob out of the south coast of New

South Wales is they call them the Mogo mob. They are spreading further and further down the coast into Victoria and in January this year, this is six months ago when we still had enough fisheries offices in Victoria to police the place they caught the mogo mob at wing and Inlet. Now wing and Inlet is much towards Melbourne from Malicuta, so it's well into the Victorian waters. WinGen Inlet is roughly between Malicuta and all Boss, let's say.

And the authorities discovered this mob. They had hundreds and hundreds of abloni, many of them under sized, and this mob have moved down out of New South Wales into Victorian waters because there's still some wild abalone in Victorian waters, because our fisheries and our police have gone to some lengths to protect our waters from poaching, but now it

doesn't look as if that's going to happen. So now the go mob out of southern New South Wales from around Bateman's Bay, but they spread it north and south. They will probably have open slather and they don't get prosecuted effectively in the courts of New South Wales because they claim that it's an indigenous.

a matter of a handful of years. And meanwhile, and he's no doubt about this, they are selling to organized crime groups, many of them Asian triad groups, who take that abalone, dry it in illegal illicit factories and sheds, and they send it off shore, exported offshore, which is apparently relatively easy to do because of a glitch in export rules, and they are able to swap that for other contraband that comes in, such as drugs. So isn't

that a good idea? Our government wipes out fisheries officers and that promotes poaching, and that promotes extinction, and it also before the extinction, will promote the importation of more drugs that do more damage to the very communities that say they want the right to take all the abaloney that they can get. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True Crime Australia.

Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heraldsun dot com dot au, forward slash andrew rule one word.