The Crow Eaters Read online

  Nat Thomas was described in the Adelaide Observer in 1853 as, ‘a compound of a sailor, sealer, farmer and wild man … Place him on the western end of Kangaroo Island, with only a dog and a knife, and he will find his way out at the other.’ Thomas also had an Aboriginal partner, and Betty, as she was known, was written about as a heroic hunter, diver and companion, rather than a captured slave, though the truth is hard to glean completely because of the scarcity of records from the era. It is known that sometime after 1819, Betty was removed from Tasmania and taken to Kangaroo Island. Thomas and Betty had children and eventually settled at Antechamber Bay on the Dudley Peninsula outside Penneshaw on a farm overlooking the ocean. They raised livestock and trapped wildlife to supplement their income and there are descendants of Nat and Betty still on Kangaroo Island today.

  Modern Kangaroo Island still plays out many of the same narratives as the old days of the sealers, Nat Thomas and the duplicitous George Sutherland, albeit without the tension of dead seals and crow eating. I travel across to the island on the enormous ferry, squashed in between the new arrivals: the tourists on weekend tours armed with guidebooks, long lens cameras and walking poles, and the locals who call ‘KI’ home – the National Parks workers who now run seal education tours on the southern beaches, fishermen, cafe owners and farmers.

  As the boat rolls across the Backstairs Passage from Cape Jervis to the jetty in Penneshaw, a man wearing a flannelette shirt and thongs approaches me while tourists heave into brown paper bags around us. ‘I thought you’d missed the boat!’ he says, handing me a coffee and ignoring the roll and pitch of the ocean.

  Paul Polacco is South Australia’s only full-time scallop diver and the only one on Kangaroo Island. He lives for the ocean, its swells, currents and dodge tides. He is consumed with studying the wind direction obsessively and the bounty underneath the ocean’s surface. In an era of mass-produced and ‘farmed’ seafood, imported goods and enormous fisheries and trawlers on the ocean, the way Paul works – alone, with his second- hand rubber duckie Tequila in the Bay of Shoals – is unusual. It’s just one man, a red and faded rubber boat and a twine sack – and he sustainably sources some of the best shellfish on the planet.

  After we disembark from the ferry, we pass through Penneshaw, a tiny seaside town with gravel roads, beach shacks facing the water and a solitary pub. It reminds me of a different era, when I was growing up on mainland Australia 30 years ago – when bare feet and playing outside until after dark were the rule rather than the exception.

  Paul’s father was one of the pioneer abalone divers in South Australia in the 1960s around Beachport in the south-east. He was later invited to start diving around Streaky Bay on the Eyre Peninsula and it was lucrative enough that he could buy his own boat and start the abalone industry on Kangaroo Island. He then bought a crayfishing licence and Paul moved to Kangaroo Island to work with his father in 1992. It was a rough few years, working as a deckhand in a ‘small town place ruled with a closed fist’ he says, referring to the way many confrontations were settled back then. Paul tells me that Kangaroo Island people are very resistant to change and the influence of newcomers to ‘their rock’, as he puts it. After four years aboard a cray boat on the Southern Ocean, Paul left Kangaroo Island and the salt water for good, or so he thought.

  After 12 years working on land and in the hospitality industry in Adelaide, something changed with Paul. The long nights and fake smiles of working behind a bar eroded his façade and revealed something he’d kept submerged: ‘I was born on the ocean. I couldn’t escape it,’ he says as we wind along the road, past farms and caravans slung out on lonely beaches. A scallop licence came up for sale on Kangaroo Island and he decided to make a real sea change. He bought a second-hand boat – the Tequila – from the Batemans Bay Surf Life Saving Club in New South Wales and he began commuting between Kangaroo Island and Adelaide every week, with his new life to be dictated by the ocean once again.

  ‘You think it’s about the money,’ he says shifting gears up the hill, past roadkill wallabies and the view of American River below us. ‘But it’s something far deeper. It’s my past; it’s the emotional connection to the water. I was scared to death. Not of sharks; but that I’d fail miserably.’ Paul says he had no idea how to run a business or how to make it viable; he just wanted to be out on the ocean again. He started visiting farmers’ markets on weekends with his scallops and eventually he secured wholesalers in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney who take deliveries of his scallops only hours after he’s plucked them from the ocean floor. This streamlined process minimises the interference ‘from ocean to plate’ as he calls it. He ‘harvests’ the scallops, mostly off the ocean bottom and reef outcrops in 4 to 12 metres of water. Paul dives in the channel just off the Bay of Shoals at the moment, close to where the first ‘settlers’ arrived in 1836, though he tells me he’s also getting a cage built so he can dive more securely in great white shark corridors around the exposed water at Point Morrison and some of the areas more likely to have unwelcome visitors.

  ‘I’ve seen ten great whites and a big bronze whaler in nine years diving here,’ he says, not seeming overly bothered by it. ‘The last time I was at Point Morrison I was down picking scallops and I felt all the water move around me. I looked around and I saw this huge fin sweep past in the sand and it stirred up all the dust down there. I couldn’t see anything, but I had a shark shield on [an electromagnetic device which repels sharks] and it got buzzed and went away,’ he says of the great white as we drive through Kingscote to the jetty. ‘I stayed still for five minutes and then kept going.’

  We take Tequila down to the water and he prepares for the day. Pelicans float around on the still water, gurgling and flapping their beaks at the back of the boat, hoping for a feed. Paul wears two wetsuits for insulation, though because it’s the end of the season the knees are frayed and his neoprene gloves are full of holes because the terrain is so sharp down there with all the rocks, shells, spines and coral he works over. Paul rolls a cigarette as we push out into the water – a ritual he keeps for every trip out – and he opens the throttle into the channel. The boat is smaller than I expected, though he tells me not to worry, ‘I had half a tonne of scallops in here during peak season,’ he says, slapping Tequila’s sides like an old dog.

  ‘Do you know how to drive a boat?’ he asks as he puts his mask on and teeters on the edge.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, if the anchor breaks while I’m down, you’ll just drift a little towards Emu Bay [and the open ocean]. Don’t stress,’ he says as he tips into the water down below. His hookah pipe is connected to an air compressor on board and it allows him to stay down for up to 12 hours at a time. The yellow and black cord unfurls across the surface of the water like a sea snake, extending out further and further, disturbed only by the bubbles popping up from Paul’s regulator.

  Despite the modesty of his operation, I’m not the first visitor on Paul’s boat. In 2017, he had Maeve O’Meara from SBS’s Food Safari onboard and a few years earlier the late author AA Gill went out with him (dressed in a safari suit, according to Paul).

  One of the practices which makes Paul’s operation interesting and sustainable is the fertilisation he has engineered. Paul spent time on the Eyre Peninsula with marine scientists who were investigating the sustainability of aquaculture practices with the oysters there and their usage of antibiotics. From this he got the idea of manually promoting the scallops’ spawning in an area which is relatively sheltered, like the Bay of Shoals, rather than using medicines to synthesise immunity as the oyster industry does.

  ‘It’s pretty simple really,’ he says. When he gets a spare bag of scallops he takes the roe and the sperm from the male and female scallops and mixes them together in a big plastic bladder with sea water. ‘I’ll then drop back down to the bottom of the scallop bed and burst the plastic bladder and fertilise the area.’

  Because of his fertilisation and the sustainable practice of not over-picking ar
eas, he thinks there would be close to half a million scallops on the seabed around Kangaroo Island at the moment and he can now take 14 tonnes of scallops each year without affecting the equilibrium below.

  The queen scallop is what Paul is after. It has a purple inner shell and a rich, sweet taste as opposed to the male scallop which is creamier, though there is no way to tell until you open it up. ‘It’s worth three times more than other scallops in Australia,’ he says of the delicacy.

  ‘My scallops do well because they’re exposed to the tides and the nutrient flow,’ he says of their position in the channel where the scallops are still somewhat protected from the elements, though they get the flow-through of water from different currents and locations to enrich them and give them flavour.

  Paul drops in and out of the water all morning, bringing up scallops and urchins and telling me of the blue swimmer crabs and fish keeping him company below. As he surfaces with another bag, we open a few queen scallops on the boat and slurp them down raw, straight off the shell. One interesting point he makes about the changeability of the weather here is how the land impacts on his playground.

  ‘Generally, if there’s a famine on land, then there’s a famine in the ocean,’ he says, referring to the current drought. Running opposite to this, he says that while the storms in 2016 were ferocious and wiped out the electricity grid on the mainland (and made South Australia a momentary laughing stock), the wild weather led to a ‘bumper season’ for Paul because of all the nutrients and turbulence in the ocean, helping the shellfish grow and spawn, and his scallops were abundant.

  After another circuit of his scallop beds, Paul surfaces after about an hour with enough scallops and urchins for the day. He’ll take what we don’t eat over to his neighbour as a gift.

  Later, we return to his place near American River to open scallops and urchins on the beach. This is a normal evening to him, though the pleasure of eating fresh seafood on the sand and throwing the shells in the water for the crabs to finish is something rare, even in a place so surrounded by the ocean like Australia.

  Despite Paul’s ingenuity and resilience and the beauty of his office, there are strains that weigh on him here, with the isolation that comes from island living. Even though he’s only in his early forties and just a few years older than me, he seems as if he’s from another era. He has a heroic, tragic quality to him – a sense of duty to the ocean and his scallops and a work ethic to keep pushing the limits that seems to belong in my grand-father’s time when six-day weeks and 12-hour days were the minimum expectations of what it meant to ‘work’. Despite the feeling that he is exactly where he should be, it still seems like a struggle of opposing ideals. We walk along the sand in the pink dusk with a bottle of wine from the Bay of Shoals and a bag of scallops and urchins, and he says that the biggest issue for him isn’t the ocean or the money, it’s knowing that his children and his wife have a life without him back on the mainland that he has to accept.

  ‘It’s getting harder and harder,’ he acknowledges of missing his kids growing up, and he’s not sure what the future will bring. I can’t see Paul sitting in an office with bare feet and a smoke in his mouth anytime soon.

  Another concern Paul reflects on during the long hours under water is the mortality of the modern diver. There aren’t many professions that are still so exposed and independent as Paul’s is. Of the 20 scallop divers in South Australia’s history, two have been killed by great white sharks he tells me sombrely. The most gruesome of these was Paul Buckland in Smoky Bay in 2003, who, despite wearing a shark shield similar to the one Paul has now, had his leg and part of his torso taken off by a 6 metre female great white while out scallop diving. He died on his boat out at sea in the arms of his deckhand.

  One of the most obvious risks in Paul’s line of work isn’t the danger of a shark attack (though it’s certainly there); it’s the bends, or decompression sickness, that can lead to a lack of blood to the brain and permanent damage. Because Paul can sometimes spend up to 12 hours in a day foraging along the rolling ocean floor for his scallops, he develops an excess of nitrogen gases and bubbles inside his body. These are normally eliminated by gradual ascending, which allows the gases to slowly dissipate, though after such a long time under water he has been caught out twice by not ‘decompressing’ for long enough. He tells me that it feels like an extreme sort of bruising spreading across your limbs and under your skin. ‘It’s excruciating,’ he says. He was airlifted to Royal Adelaide Hospital both times and the second time, when he was greeted at the decompression chamber with ‘you again’ from the attendants, he was in such a daze from the pain the attendant in the chamber with him had to barricade herself in the corner ‘with a wall of pillows’, because he was flailing around so much with the agony of the bubbles of nitrogen in his system until it was safe to give him medication to knock him out.

  I drive to American River to see the new Kangaroo Island Connect ferry. The state government recently did not renew the exclusive Sealink lease on the ferry terminal at Cape Jervis, opening the door for competitors to step in – something that is welcomed by everyone I speak to on the island, considering the monopoly Sealink has had on the journey to Kangaroo Island since it began in 1989. The fare is around $300 for a single return ticket with a car for the 45-minute trip and it is something many locals are keen to talk about – that while the high prices have kept the riffraff out, as some people call the backpackers and younger tourists, this exclusion also makes business extremely hard for people like Paul and other small operators.

  Alongside the new ferry, Paul and I wander into an old shed where a group of retirees is building a replica of the Independence from 1803 – the sealing vessel built on American River which was the first boat constructed in South Australia.

  The next morning, Paul is off on the water early as he works to fill an order for 50 dozen scallops by the end of the week. I drive inland, across the sea of greenery in the middle of the island to the farming settlement of Parndana. Once I’m up on the plateau, the grass trees and big gums make way for the red mud and clear paddocks of thousands of acres of farmland. While back in 1836 George Sutherland proclaimed how suitable this land would be for farming, it wasn’t for another 112 years that it was properly cleared. The Soldier Settlement Scheme was established on Kangaroo Island after the Second World War for men with a minimum of six months’ war service. One hundred and seventy- four ex-servicemen and their families were given perpetual leases on farmland in the centre of Kangaroo Island (along with a £30 000 debt to the government) to start a new life after the war had finished. Enormous machines were brought over on ships in the early days to clear the land, while up to 40 families at a time lived in makeshift camps.

  The town is dusty and hot and the small grid of streets contains names like Pioneer Street, Prospect Place and Settlers Lane. There is one pub, a museum run by volunteers, and a ‘mixed’ business on the main street where you can get a roast chicken, buy a phone and get stamps for your letters all at the same time.

  In a curious twist of fate, I discover that one of the first farmers in Parndana was Phillip Weatherall, a distant relative of mine. He was born in Sydney and served in the Australian Imperial Forces in the Middle East and Asia for six years during the Second World War, until he contracted malaria in Bougainville as peace was declared. He met his wife in Adelaide while en route to Java during the war and after being discharged he took a plot of land just outside Parndana in 1947, just before the soldier settlers arrived. Phillip built a small hut in the bush by himself, using a crosscut saw to mill the timber for their home and they used the water from Deep Creek to keep the horses, and those of the occasional visitor, such as the solitary postman who would ride through with the mail, in check.

  Phillip’s daughter Meaghan married another Parndana local, who she met at the school here, Bernie May, and they’ve lived in the little town of 149 people (according to the last census) ever since.

  We sit at their dining tab
le with cups of tea and look over our shared branches of the family tree. Meaghan and Bernie inherited Phillip’s 1400 acre (570 hectare) plot, and their children still farm in the region. Their three children all returned to Parndana in their thirties, showing the pull of family and the ‘home’ that they’ve made in the town. It’s not dissimilar to the pull of the island, and the ocean, which drew Paul to the coast back here. Bernie says that they’re the lucky ones though: ‘Many of the soldiers had no idea how to run a farm, what to plant or what to do. The scheme was poorly managed and we were lucky. Many of the settlers ended up leaving.’

  Meaghan and Bernie give me directions to go and explore the original site of Phillip’s farm as I drive towards the south-west corner of the island.

  For my last night on Kangaroo Island, I stay in the Cape Du Couedic Lighthouse in the Flinders Chase National Park. The National Park is now full of kangaroos, goannas, platypus, fur seals, possums and koalas (which were introduced and are now in plague proportions), though it was once the stomping ground for herds of marsupials and megafauna which date back between 110 000 and 45 000 years ago. Among the fossils found in Flinders Chase are those of the Diprotodon optatum, the largest marsupial ever discovered – it looked like a bear crossed with a rhino and was 3 metres long and 2 metres high; the mega roo (Sthenurus) which weighed 240 kilos and was 3 metres long and the Thylacoleo carnifex which was a 1.5 metre meat eater resembling a gigantic Tasmanian devil.

  Things are quieter now and this isolated headland looks out towards Antarctica with little else to disturb the wind and the tides. After the day-tripping crowds leave, I am the only person left for kilometres in any direction. The light begins to pulse from the lighthouse, automatic now, though I can’t help but think of the isolation the lighthouse keepers would have felt here in the early 20th century after the Cape Du Couedic station was built in 1907. The discipline required to live here would have been immense. The two lighthouse keepers at Cape Du Couedic had to work seven days a week and the mechanical clock for the light had to be wound up every two hours, without fail. In the early days, they would only get fresh supplies every three months.