5 days ago
Australia's ancient export brings new jobs to WA
Shark Bay or Gathaagudu is on Australia's most westerly point.
A world heritage area where the bronzed earth meets turquoise waters abundant with marine life.
Here you'll find turtles, dugongs, whale, dolphins and scattered across the sea floor a coveted delicacy containing centuries of seafaring history.
The sea cucumber is Australia's first ever export.
From the early 1700s, Makassan fisherman, from the island of Sulawesi - now Indonesia - sailed the trade winds south to Arnhem Land to trade with Aboriginal people. "From what the records show, they used to swap sea cucumbers for iron for their spears. So I thought it was incredible that there was a trade before colonisation and you can actually record it. So why not try and recreate it?" That's Malgana Traditional Owner Michael Wear.
He heads an Indigenous-owned business which is reviving the ancient industry. Tidal Moon draws on traditional knowledge to harvest sea cucumbers sustainably.
Hand-picked, one by one, the marine animal will soon be dried and processed at a brand-new export facility in the West Australian town of Denham. And then they're sent to a Singaporean partner for export across South East Asia. Tidal Moon also has its sights set on Western markets, with emerging research highlighting the potential health benefits of the marine animals. The hope is that as the business scales up, so too will employment opportunities in the region. "The lack of indigenous people in the commercial fishing industry is so, so unfortunate. If you can create a business that's sustainable, that's culturally directed, you can create jobs and a middle class within small coastal towns." Since 2017, the company has trained around a dozen Indigenous divers, including 28 year old Malgana and Amangu man Alex Dodd - the company's lead diver "Tidal Moon, what it's actually doing is making that middle class ground so people can move back home and have jobs and then buy a house, settle down with their family and kids up here and move back home. A lot of the time you get young fellas that grow up here and then they're moving away going to the mines or going to Perth or something like that because it's not sustainable for them to work here."
Conservation is also at the heart of the business
Gathaagudu is home to the planet's largest reserve of seagrass both a food source for marine life and a carbon storage powerhouse
But more than a quarter was razed in a marine heatwave in 2011, and it's still recovering while also grappling with a new heatwave. In February, the waters were four degrees warmer than usual.
Tidal Moon is leading one of the world's largest seagrass restoration projects. While scouring the seafloor for sea cucumbers, the divers also replant seagrass reserves. "One of the key things that we're trying to do is keep the carbon captured in the sea floor. So without seagrass restoration, you have these carbon bombs that go off and there's about 40 million tons of CO2 that are at risk in Shark Bay." The team have also catalogued over 4000 hours of footage – a 'living library' of marine observations noticing a symbiotic relationship between the seagrass and sea cucumbers. Jennifer Verduin, a marine scientist at Perth's Murdoch University, agrees that the relationship might be 'mutually beneficial,' saying sea cucumbers are 'the worms of the ocean.' "The function of sea cucumbers overturning the soil and redistributing nutrients. It's very good to get those nutrients in within the sediment. So it's good for the seagrasses and they grow better. But seagrasses, in turn, also then protect the sea cucumbers."
She says Tidal Moon's divers, have a 'careful' and 'circular' way of approaching marine conservation.
"We have lost the art of observation as western scientists, very often. And that's why I think Tidal Moon is really important to getting that back up to a better understanding of a circular ecosystem, if you like."
