Mallacoota’s abalone divers rake in the cash with licenses bought for as little as two dollars

YOU wouldn’t guess they were millionaires if you met them in the street. Meet the men making a killing on the ocean floor.

IT’S THE muscly sea snail that retails for $100 a kilo and is considered a delicacy in Chinese cuisine.

Abalone is a lucrative Australian export, thanks to the efforts of a few hundred divers who brave the perils of sharks, poachers and decompression sickness to retrieve the ocean’s most prized bounty.

A typical daily haul of 300kg is worth more than $8000 on the wholesale market, making it a profitable and highly regulated industry.

Equally as rare as the molluscs themselves are the licences that allow divers to do their work. Once costing as little as $2, they’re now worth up to $6 million each and are mostly passed down within families.

For Mallacoota’s Paul Menke, diving is in his blood. Dad Gerry Menke was one of the industry’s pioneers, back in the days when harvesting abalone was just a way for a band of road-tripping adventurers to fill their bellies.

In the 1960s, the freewheeling Dutch immigrant and his spearfishing mates set off from Sydney in a beat-up old Landrover, stopping to pitch their tents at Narooma, Mystery Bay and Green Cape before settling at Mallacoota, a seaside town in East Gippsland, Victoria.

“They’d spear fish and they’d get abalone and they’d do what they can to just get some food, have a beer, get some petrol,” said Mr Menke.

Abalone retails for $100 a kilo.

Paul Menke with a 1.7kg abalone.

What began as a lifestyle choice morphed into a money spinner when the divers tapped into the growing market for abalone in Asia, where stocks had been depleted by overfishing.

“The market started to increase, so all the original divers got together and started an abalone cooperative in Mallacoota,” he said.

“They all thought, ‘We might as well do it all together, establish our market and start exporting.’ Then it just kept increasing and increasing.”

Gerry Menke continued diving for over three decades, until a bout of “the bends”— the decompression sickness that can afflict divers — put him out of action, prompting him and his wife Mary Menke to start a side business selling abalone pearls.

The couple was tragically killed in 2014, when they were among 37 Australians on board Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down over Ukraine.

Gerry and Mary Menke with their daughter Anna Cowen.

Naturally, Mr Menke said, a love of diving had been instilled from a young age in his household.

“I remember when I was about eight or nine years old, Dad used to put us in the pool and he’d chuck empty abalone shells in the water and let us go and collect it,” he said.

“He did that with all of us kids. You’re born and bred into it.”

After getting a scuba diving licence in his teens, Mr Menke trained as a commercial diver in Tasmania before heading to Wollongong to complete an honours degree in environmental science.

“Dad sent every single one of us to university as well, to make sure we were educated — he didn’t want us to just be divers,” Mr Menke said.

Paul Menke with his wife Elizabeth and their daughter.

Along with his siblings Brett, Anna and Sara, Mr Menke inherited the family licence, with the two brothers doing the diving.

It means that, unlike contract divers who get paid by the hour, they reap a comfortable financial reward from the work.

“We’re fortunate enough that we have a licence so we get quite a good income,” he said. “If you were just a contracted diver, you’d still make an average wage, but it’s a lifestyle choice — you might only dive 45 to 60 days a year.”

Maintaining the family legacy has taken on a deeper significance since MH17 was shot down, with all fours siblings now living in Mallacoota.

At family gatherings, the siblings grill abalone on the barbecue and light candles to honour their parents.

Just like with a rib eye, Mr Menke said, the trick was in the cooking technique.

“If you cook a steak too long on the barbecue, it’s gonna be tough,” he said. “It’s the same with abalone; you’ve got to give it the respect.”

Mallacoota and the Menke family will feature on ABC’s Back Roads, which airs at 8pm on Monday, December 12.

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