Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.The West Australian government doesn’t know how many people have been killed by crocodiles in its warm, northern waters. Kasim Djalilan, a sea-gnarled fisherman from Indonesia’s West Timor province, could tell them of at least four since 2020. He saw one himself only last year.
This masthead meets Laudi’s colleagues at their Rote Island village of Papela for a grim re-enactment. Kasim plays the part of Laudi, lying flat on his back atop a moored trepang boat. The dead man’s cousin assumes the role of “alligator”.Laudi is sleeping, his head only slightly poking over the water, and the crocodile is gliding steadily and unseen until in range it launches its upper body from the water, latching onto Laudi’s skull and flipping him into the foaming water.
While the true number of successful trepang runs to the Australian mainland is unknowable, anecdotal evidence suggests it is staggering. “There is just an abundance of trepang there and no one is collecting it,” says Dahlan Karabi, a Papela fisherman and multi-time former people smuggler. “Everybody started putting bigger engines into their boats to get them out there faster”.
When the weather clears, he will need to pay off his new vessel with more trips to Australia, he says. He does not rule out taking paying passengers. Dahlan sticks to traditional fishing these days, meaning he uses a sailboat without an engine. The old-school method is the only legal way to move inside what is called the “Memorandum of Understanding Box”, a patch of Australian waters near the maritime boundary that recognises Indonesians’ generations-old fishing claims.But without engines, the cross-border fishermen are at the mercy of the winds, leading to hundreds of deaths on MOU Box reefs this century alone, he says.
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Source: 7NewsSydney - 🏆 16. / 63 Read more »