The trigger for the development of the modern fishery was the arrival in the State of scuba diving gear. Len Staples claims to have initiated the first attempt to commercially exploit Tasmanian abalone. He was a pioneer scuba diver and had been appointed a correspondent to the Californian magazine Skin Diver. Staples was intrigued to read that the humble mutton fish seemed identical with the prized abalone of California. Staples linked up with an Austrian(?) ? Pott who was prepared to market the resource and approached J J Dwyer, the Minister for Fisheries, who gave him the use of the research vessel Liaweenee in February 1954. Staples put together a group of divers and first surveyed Recherche Bay. An experimental batch was air-freighted to Peck’s Paste in Sydney for canning. This trial excited the interest of Fish Canneries of Tasmania. However Dwyer could not get approval for an exclusive right to an area of the coastal sea they wanted. The Government declined to create a private abalone fishery and the venture folded.

Both the Fisheries Division of the Department of Agriculture and the CSIRO Fisheries Division officers at Battery Point bought Siebe-Gorman ‘Aqualungs’ scuba gear in 1953. Mike Hogdson and Mark Hindrum were trained and conducted a survey at the same time as Staples. They looked in shallow water in the southeast at Wedge Bay, Port Arthur, Fortescue Bay and Pirates Bay. They then went down the Channel and confirmed Staples’ findings that the Acteons held big quantities of abalone. Enthusiastic amateurs were also anxious to join in any such studies. A.M.(Mick) Olsen was the resident CSIRO fisheries officer in Hobart from 1946 to 1963. He was another pioneer in the use of underwater diving for fisheries research. From 1947 he used standard full dress diving gear to look at scallop beds in D'Entrecasteaux Channel until he got scuba gear in 1954. Olsen dived with Staples and in 1959 visited California and England and gathered information about abalone. In January 1960 a party of fifteen divers from the Underwater Research Group surveyed the waters off Partridge Island and provided the Dover Fisheries factory with about 200 kg of abalone that they processed for market testing.

However it was not until 1963 that the prospects for a fishery began to emerge. The Chinese community in Sydney had discovered local supplies of the delicacy and found an export market in Hong Kong. Reid Industries began canning abalone in 1962 from fish caught by weekend divers. In Melbourne David Gilbert had similar interests in the Asian Market. He had begun by airfreighting and then to exporting by sea. He was probably the first to send frozen abalone to Japan. Gilbert sent four divers led by Barry McDonnell to St. Helens in February, by October this group had grown to eight or more and Gilbert approached the Government for exclusive rights over much of the east coast. The Sydney group, now led by Australian Food Distributors Pty Ltd. sent the New South Wales fishing boat, Trade Winds skippered by Jack Lucas, down the coast and it soon appeared off our east coast. Three or four divers were soon catching enough abalone to attract the attention of Craig Mostyn Pty Ltd a major food company. It had a branch in Tasmania exporting fruit and local representative Keith Tierney encouraged the development of the Tasmanian abalone stocks as a source of large fish for drying.

In 1962 a minimum size of 5 inches across the shell was established and when the interstate divers arrived they were obliged to observe this limit. They also needed to hold commercial fishing licences and the vessel had to submit a monthly return of its catch. Such requirements were already more onerous than other States. Gilbert’s divers settled in Bicheno and air freighted the catch back to the Union Fine Food factory in Melbourne but also experimented with air drying. When Gilbert’s representative began buying Tasmanian recreational scuba divers were only too pleased to earn good money from the hobby.

During 1963 two Americans Dick Cullenwood, an ex-Navy pilot, and Carl Somer decided to relocate their dive shop called Aqua Scuba Services from Sydney to Hobart. They were very impressed with the abundance of both abalone and rock lobster and the ease of capture. So in addition to providing equipment and service to amateur divers they became commercial fishermen as well. Their impressive catches played a part in the Minister’s decision to ban commercial fishing for lobsters by divers.

In those days the diving gear was primitive. Some divers fished commercially by free diving with snorkels. Lance Barlow and J. W. (Curly) Robins fished around Nubeena as a pair. When one found a patch of abalone he would signal the other to join him, then after one knocked the shells from the rock the other followed and picked them up. Many used scuba and those with hookah gear often used spray painting compressors and even plastic garden hose. Most considered diving tables to be apple cases in the bottom of the runabout. Milfred Knight, who entered the fishery in 1974, extensively describes the fishing methods and the lives of the divers in his book Abalone Diving in Tasmanian Waters. The life of a commercial diver at an earlier stage was described by the Mercury in a story about the Bicheno divers Ian Holloway, Derek Catterall and Roger Lockart in October 1970. Lockhart was a former Mercury journalist.

At the beginning of the fishery the divers were a mixed group. Some were students whilst others had a range of jobs and dived at weekends and holidays. The leading Hobart Optometrist Richard Lane had recently finished his studies in Queensland and come to Hobart to work. With a background in swimming and sailing he enrolled in a scuba diving course run by Aqua Scuba. At the end of their course Cullenwood and Somer took the students on some dives at sea. Dick met Lance Barlow on this course and discovered that his new hobby could return an income through catching abalone. Lance provided some expertise and Dick’s father agreed to take them fishing from his thirty-two foot yacht. On Friday evening they would load their aqualungs and sail down the Bruny shore as far as One Tree Point, dive the next day and return to Hobart that afternoon. Occasionally they would go as far as Partridge Island and stay two nights. Abalone were plentiful — one day at Kelly’s Rocks the pair caught three large bags in fifteen minutes. These bags arrived in Hobart full of cocoa beans for Cadbury’s and were very big. Both of them were needed to swim them to the surface where with the help of Mr. Lane Snr. they lifted the bags into the yacht’s old clinker dinghy. Back home they would shuck the abalone in the Lane’s kitchen with Mrs Lane diligently searching through the viscera. Before long she had a matchbox full of small pearls. As soon as the shucking was done the catch was taken on the back seat of Mr Lane’s car to Dennis Porter in Patrick St.

Even being paid three-pence a pound by Dennis Porter meant Dick earned more from his hobby than from testing eyesight. He may have been the first Tasmanian to invest the proceeds from the catch. His choice was to buy shares each week from Dennis Porter’s payments. Before too long he could sell those shares and buy a house. Later the proceeds from the fishery bought property, farms, horse studs, vineyards and much more. In more recent years home builders and architects have also done well from the proceeds of abalone.

Quite quickly a large number of divers gave up their ‘day job’ for full time diving. In the flower power days of the late 1960s the long-haired, laid back ‘ab diver’ was a common, but not always universally popular figure in the fishing ports of eastern Tasmania. They lived an itinerant lifestyle in caravans and shacks around the coast chasing the weather and un-fished reefs. Long term investment was not a high priority for them. Some 8 tonnes of cleaned meat was landed in 1963 but the total catch for 1964 was over 50 tonnes (equivalent to 24 and 150 tonnes live weight).