Go fishing for barramundi, hook a croc instead

Jul 11, 2016

If you can’t swim with the big fish, stay out of the water, says Anthony Huckstep, who braves crocs at Humpty Doo Barramundi.

Let’s face it, we live under a ridiculous regime of regulations. Don’t touch, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t swim and please don’t talk in the silent train carriage. Hell, when I was a rotund little Huck I didn’t need fluorescent tape around a hole to know I shouldn’t fall in and plug it. Now they’re even considering a requirement for dog owners to obtain a permit to walk their pooch in the park. “Excuse me ma’am. Do you have a license to drive this dachshund?”

Anyway, ‘don’t swim – crocodiles’ is one sign I appreciate. Only in Australia would crocodiles pose an issue in the workplace.

About halfway between Darwin and Kakadu I’m standing on the banks of one of the Humpty Doo Barramundi aquaculture ponds when co-owner Dan Richards exclaims – “we don’t mind them eating our fish, we just don’t want them to eat the staff”. He shows me a photo of a 2.7m crocodile they captured the day before. I nervously step back from the water’s edge. Turns out the crocs are here because the barramundi is that good.

An indigenous word meaning ‘large-scale river fish’, barramundi have a concave head, oblique mouth and an upper jaw reaching all the way behind the eyes. There’s nothing quite like them. Richards scoops about 30 babies out of the sheltered pools in a small net. They’re just 10cm long, but glistening chrome already. The fish are grown in murky saltwater, which keeps the sun off their backs.“Fish that sit in clear water in the sun will end up having black skin and flesh. They live in murky water naturally,” he says.

Humpty Doo is an extraordinary 70 hectare constructed wetland, so natural the place teems with wildlife. “Wallabies, wild pigs, buffalos, death adders, crocs and just about every bird in the Top End,” smiles Richards pointing to all the birds. Then suddenly ‘pop’ – a gas gun res to scare the birds off the baby fish. “It only sort of works,” he says, “They eat more fish than the bloody crocs!”

The farm brings in water from the Adelaide River during the dry season when the river is at its saltiest, and the wetland system allows them to re-use the water, which minimises the release back into the river. A header pond, 30 Olympic swimming pools in size, gravity-feeds the ponds. Wastage discharge is almost nil and the impact on the environment is, in fact, positive.

When they started there were no roads, no power and no fresh water. “We spent the first six years surviving,” says Richards. “In those days we’d swim across the water and stand in chest deep and catch the barra with a net, and decide ‘well that one’s big enough.’” They delivered plate-sized fish to the back door of restaurants in Darwin. “We kept getting these fish that would grow out of size. We moved them to another pond and thought we’d deal with them later.” At the end of the year they sent the fish to Sydney. “We made more money from that box than we had all year,” says Richards.

Turns out they were the first company to sell large (4-5kg) aquaculture barramundi in Australia. In two decades they’ve gone from 300kg a year to roughly 30 tonnes a week courtesy of some of the most innovative moves in aquaculture. In Tasmania, salmon grown in cages are fed pellets that sink. Humpty Doo instead use a floating pellet to visually monitor feeding habits to prevent waste and pollution. Co-owner Bob (Richards’ dad, pictured) had the idea to use the sound of barramundi feeding to regulate the amount of feed. “Barra only make one sound – ‘boof,’” explains Richards. Bob used voice recognition software to record the sound and the feeding machine listens for it, and stops feeding when it does. They also adapted American technology to ensure ethical practices. Fish are harvested straight out of 30°C water and a fish pump vacuums them through a tube before they land in a saltwater ice-slurry at -2°C.“You put barra in an ice slurry and they think, man its cold, I’m gonna have a sleep. It’s a very fast and gentle way to harvest.” In the packing room they are graded and then sorted by hand; every fish is inspected, hand-packed and is fully traceable.

They’re not only one of the most innovative and ethical producers in Australia, they produce a bloody good eating fish, too. Humpty Doo’s saltwater barramundi has a natural, earthy avour and firm texture – distinguishing it from the mushy, soft flesh of some in the market. So forget all the ‘don’ts’, and instead enjoy a world-class sustainable Barramundi from Humpty Doo.