I n the warm, shallow waters that lap Australia's Top End it's called a “rodeo” manoeuvre; where someone leaps overboard from a boat that's been following a turtle to grab and hold the marine creature. There is a real knack to catching a turtle this way, according to Kakadu ranger, Dwayne Wauchope.
“you have to get that technique right — where your hands go out automatically and grab him behind the head and tilt him up,” Wauchope says. “You have to make sure your hands are not close to any rocks or coral and you don't grab him by the shell, because you can cut your hands.”
A ranger at Northern Territory's Kakadu National Park for more than 20 years, Wauchope says members of his family from the Cobourg Peninsula, 350 kilometres north-east of Darwin, have been catching and harpooning turtles for generations.
“Your parents teach you from an early age,” he says. “Now we have boats and all that other hightech stuff, I don't allow harpooning. If you're not a really good harpoon person, you can hit the turtle in the lung or elsewhere and if you don't want the turtle and you let him go, he is likely to die.”
There's increasing suggestion across northern Australia among Indigenous coastal communities that turtle and dugong populations are declining. At Elcho Island, traditional Yolngu owners have asked hunters to limit their take.
“We still eat turtle and dugong because it is better than food from the store,” says David Ganambarr, a traditional owner of the Wessel Islands, which stretch north from Elcho into the Arafura Sea.
