In Australia’s wild northern waters there have been stories of illegal fishermen being taken by crocodiles.
But with mass fishing taking place in the Timor and Arafura seas other dangers lurk.
Like in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where an environmental catastrophe is taking place.
These beaches, on the east coast of Arnhem Land, should be amongst the most pristine in the country.
Up until the mid 1990s, that’s just what they were. Only Indigenous locals set foot on them to live and hunt.
Then, the nets started to arrive.
Baking underneath the harsh Territory sun, nets like these weigh hundreds of kilos.Â
And can take more than an hour to dig it out, using a 4WD’s winch.
“Ghost nets are horrible. I don’t think anyone that’s had to deal with them would say otherwise,” says Kristen Sierke, ghost net coordinator for the South East Arnhem area rangers.
“They are often buried … sometimes they can be full of squid jigs. Sometimes they can be starting to degrade so as you pull on them and they start snapping and breaking.”
A clean-up team made up of local Indigenous rangers and a group of volunteers from the conservation group Sea Shepherd has travelled to this remote stretch of coastline, just to the south of Blue Mud Bay, with the aim of extracting tonnes of marine debris.
Senior Numbulwar ranger Clive Nunggarrgalu watches on with satisfaction as the giant mass of nets finally comes free.
Some of these nets are known to him. But until now, he hasn’t had the tools or the available manpower to pull them from the sand.
At 47, he’s old enough to remember a time before his home became a global hotspot for marine debris.
The area has some of the highest tonnage of fishing waste per kilometre of coastline, anywhere in the world.
The first nets started showing up in Arnhem Land in the 1990s, as fishing in the seas to Australia’s north began reaching industrial levels.
“Back in the day it was really, really clean but the cyclones push the rubbish in, and it’s getting bad now,” Mr Nunggarrgalu says.
“All this area’s been piled up.”
Down the beach, three crew members work to free another net that has been inhabited by hundreds of hermit crabs.Â
They flee towards the water’s edge as the twine is cut.
“They don’t belong in here,” says ranger Sarah.
“They belong in the mangroves.”
Aboriginal people here source much of their diet from the bush and the ocean. More than 70 per cent of remote community residents in the NT report eating traditional foods at least once a week.
“The shop’s very expensive, you know? It’s three times what it is in town,” explains Joanne Pomery, another senior Indigenous ranger.Â
“The best thing is to stick on country food. There’s a lot of fish they get: Stingray, shark, turtles, dugong — that’s all our tucker we eat.”
But with the increase in ghost nets, rangers have grave fears about their favourite animals.
“We worry about that mob, [with] all them nets,” says Clive. “Once they’re stuck it’s hard for them to come out.”
Studies by the CSIRO have confirmed their fears.
A 2014 analysis of about 9,000 discarded nets that washed up on Australia’s northern coast estimates the ghost nets had killed between 4,866 and 14,600 sea turtles in the year, before they made land.
Many nets will drift for longer than a year.
“Once they’re at sea, they continue to float through the ocean, making a wall of death,” says Sea Shepherd’s lead on remote marine debris, Grahame Lloyd.
“Everything that’s caught in those nets dies.”
As well as the impact on animals, Mr Nunggarrgalu is worried about his kids playing on beaches strewn with fishing equipment.
Past clean-ups have found used syringes and bottles of urine nestled amongst the nets and fishing hooks.
“Our kids, they like to go out hunting with spears, [with] fishing line. They go running with no shoes on. They might get hurt in the feet or somewhere, no?”
Indonesia, Taiwan, Korea and Thailand
The Arafura and Timor seas to Australia’s north are some of the most heavily fished in the world.
Their relatively shallow waters are home to rich and highly sought-after populations of prawns, tropical snappers, sharks, squid, and tuna.
Ocean currents pull huge amounts of discarded fishing gear from these waters down into the Gulf, where they become trapped and eventually wash ashore.
By analysing net designs, researchers can trace them to their countries of origin.
Very few of the nets that wash up on NT beaches are from Australian fisheries — only about one in 10.
Most of the nets have drifted down from Indonesian waters.
“Indonesia is the second-biggest fishing nation on earth,” says Karen Edyvane, an Australian National University researcher who has been working on marine debris in the north for decades.
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The Indonesian fishing fleet is enormous, made up of everything from industrial trawlers to the more than two million small-scale, “artisanal” fishers who use traditional methods and non-motorised boats.
“The major consideration in the Gulf of Carpentaria is just the sheer number of Indonesian fishermen and illegal fishers in the Arafura Sea in particular.”
While the Indonesian fleet is the biggest legal operation in the area, it’s not the whole story.
“Over 95 per cent of the foreign fishing nets that wash ashore come from just four countries: Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and Korea,” says Ms Edyvane.
Vessels fishing in other countries’ waters are supposed to register with local authorities and report their catch.
But the large volume of Taiwanese, Korean and Thai nets does not match up with the minuscule reported catch by those nations, suggesting significant rates of illegal and unreported foreign fishing.
“What we’re seeing is countries fishing in Indonesian waters that are not reporting their catch to Indonesian authorities,” Ms Edyvane says.
Illegal fishing can be difficult to detect and combat.Â
Some vessels will drop off catch at dodgy ports or pass their catch on to other vessels in a practice known as transhipping, allowing illegally harvested fish to be ‘laundered’ with legitimate ones.
In one case last year, a Chinese-owned, Russian-flagged vessel, the FV Run Zheng 03, was apprehended by Indonesian authorities after it was reported fishing in the Arafura Sea, in both Indonesian and Australian waters.
The vessel had turned off its automatic tracking system after leaving port in China.Â
The ship had reportedly pulled in hundreds of tonnes of illegal catch, while members of the vessel’s Indonesian crew later spoke out about their mistreatment on board, including being forced to eat rotten chicken and drink water dripping from air-conditioners.
Australia has also recently seen an uptick in Indonesian fishing vessels venturing into the Australian economic zone.
In a 2017 study, Ms Edyvane analysed just over 2,000 nets that had washed up on NT shores and found a majority had “neatly cut ends”, suggesting they had been deliberately discarded.
This could be due to relatively cheap nets getting snagged and crews deciding it is not worth the time or effort to retrieve them, or illegal fishing crews trying to hide their tracks.
Along with the nets come huge volumes of plastic bottles, shoes, and other household waste, often bearing Indonesian barcodes.
But Mr Lloyd says these too, likely trace back to illegal fishing vessels, which sometimes stay at sea for years.
“With a lot of the other items we’re seeing like lighters, thongs, water bottles — a lot of that is also potentially coming off the fishing vessels, because we believe they’re dumping a lot of the items they’re using at sea to keep more room, to stay at sea longer.”
Funding concernsÂ
Last year, the government announced it would spend $1.4 million working with Indonesia and PNG on “regional solutions” to ghost nets.
It’s a contribution Ms Edyvane says is woefully inadequate. She’d like to see Australian fisheries staff stationed permanently in Indonesia, sharing Australian expertise in managing fish stocks and cracking down on illegal trawling.
“This can’t be done by Zoom meetings, an annual workshop, or a shared fisheries patrol,” she says.
Back home, the main fund to deal with ghost nets is the Morrison-era Ghost Net Initiative, a $15 million fund that has been running for four years but is about to expire.
The program paid ranger groups to carry out the expensive and time-consuming work of ghost net removal.
Now, the rangers face an uncertain future. Many have hired individuals with a focus on ghost nets, those positions are now at risk.
“If the federal government doesn’t renew the funding for the ghost net program, it’ll be the end for a lot of the resources and the tools for the rangers — they’ll no longer be able to fund themselves to come out and conduct these clean-ups,” says Mr Lloyd.
Mr Nunggarrgalu says he and the other rangers “don’t worry about money much”.
Either way, he’ll keep doing what he can to get nets off the beach.
But he also worries about the potential withdrawal of government support.
“If you get this message, government people, we need to protect our country and keep our country really strong,” he says.
“We want to get support from you guys and keep the ranger groups working.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Albanese government confirmed it had found “additional funding” to prop up the Ghost Net Initiative until December this year, when it is now “due to expire”.
But longer-term funding was still being “considered”, the spokesperson said.
After seven days of cleaning just over 20 kilometres of coastline, the team of rangers and volunteers has managed to remove 10.1 tonnes of marine debris.
The bags are loaded onto a truck and have to be driven back a few at a time down the rough road back to Numbulwar.
The rangers know the impending wet season will wash more nets onto the beaches they’ve just been cleaning.
Ranger Joanne Pomery says that only makes it “more important to keep coming back”.
“It won’t stop, it’ll keep coming,” she tells 7.30.
In the meantime, there are small victories.
Rangers have observed the return of turtles for nesting season on beaches that have been cleaned, which they were previously avoiding.
Mr Nunggarrgalu says for now, he can breathe a little easier while his kids are playing in the sand.
“They can play and enjoy their life on the beach here,” he says.
“It’s really good for me when I see the beach nice and clean, it makes me proud.”
Credits
Reporter: James Elton
Photography and videography: James Elton
Graphics: Bill McGuire
Digital production: Jenny Ky, Myles Wearring
Editor: Paul Johnson
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