11-07-2025
Police diver's book on how the bleakest job brings relief for loved ones
Luke McCulloch had never used scuba equipment before he decided to become a police diver.
But as a young officer in Port Hedland, he was looking to specialise in one field when he saw an advertisement for police divers, so he threw his hat in the ring.
"I was always good in the water. I was comfortable in the water," Mr McCulloch told Nadia Mitsopoulos on ABC Radio Perth.
He has now written a book about his eight years working as a police diver, Tales of a Diver: Profundis, Obscurus, Sordidus (which is Latin for deep, dark and dirty).
Mr McCulloch said the subtitle aptly described the grim work of searching, often for human remains, in water that had such low visibility it was black.
"It was after quite a hectic job that … I just thought, I need to let my family know the ins and outs of this and what we actually do," he said.
In order to apply for the police diver selection course, Mr McCulloch hastily completed scuba diving training just 24 hours before the selection course started.
A few months later, a vacancy came up on the police diving team.
He said he knew, going in, how difficult the work would be.
"I definitely wasn't expecting to be diving around in the coral reefs of Rottnest Island … looking for buried treasure," he said.
"I don't really know what I was expecting. To be honest, as a young fellow, I just wanted to do something really well."
Much of the work was not in deep water, but it was often so dark he couldn't even see his hand in front of his face.
He developed ways of checking his instruments by touch.
"I think it was 90 per cent of our work was sub-5 metres," he said.
"It's not quite stand-up depths, but it's quite shallow. It's not your deep-sea diving that everyone might think it is, but it is just black water.
Mr McCulloch's first job was retrieving the body of someone who died by suicide from the Swan River.
He also attended the Australia Day plane crash in 2017, when two people died after their plane plunged into the Swan River during an air show, and in 2018, it was Mr McCulloch who retrieved Annabelle Chen's body from the same river, where it had been dumped in a suitcase.
He said retrieving bodies from dark water had, at times, made the job easier to handle, emotionally.
"So, you're bringing it up, you're passing it onto the officers on the shore and that makes it a little bit easier to be honest."
As grim as the discoveries often were, Mr McCulloch said he took heart from knowing he was returning remains to families looking for answers.
A self-preservation strategy he adopted was to know as little as possible about the person he was searching for.
"I tried, going into the water when I was doing it, not knowing even their name.
"I don't need to know their name. Otherwise it's going to get too personal.
While finding someone in the water "always sent a jerk though my body", Mr McCulloch said not finding a missing person was worse.
"I would always just try and imagine it as if it was one of my family members and we'd never gotten them back," he said.
Often, family members and friends of the missing person would be waiting on the shore while he did his work.
"There weren't a lot [of cases] where we didn't get them [the missing person], but you definitely remember them."
Two years ago, after eight years with the diving squad, Mr McCulloch left the police force.
He now trains people in how to escape from helicopters if they crash into water.
