There’s a particular kind of irony in watching a government reverse course so completely that it goes from prosecuting someone to cutting them a check. That’s exactly what’s happening in New South Wales right now, and the reason is swarming across the ocean floor.
Young people from the Walbunja indigenous community were facing jail time for practicing something their ancestors had done for thousands of years: diving for abalone and lobster. John Carriage found himself in court defending his cultural heritage—for the fourth time. But just as another round of prosecutions seemed inevitable, New South Wales made a choice that flipped the entire dynamic. The state dropped the charges, not out of sudden enlightenment alone, but because it desperately needs what these traditional fishermen can do.
The problem is a sea urchin plague. Decades of overharvesting predatory fish and warming ocean temperatures created the perfect storm for long-spined sea urchins—an endemic species whose populations exploded without natural checks. Now they’re devouring everything: seagrass, kelp forests, vegetation that keeps entire reef ecosystems alive. The NSW seabed is being turned into what scientists call urchin barrens, and nobody knows how to fix it at scale. Except, as it turns out, lunch might be the answer.
Enter John Carriage, his brother Denzel, and a whole generation getting trained to establish the first Aboriginal-led sea urchin fishing industry in New South Wales. With an AUD$1.48 million government grant administered through the Joonga Land and Water Aboriginal Corporation, they’re learning to dive with supplied oxygen, pilot boats, and harvest thousands of urchins annually for Australasian seafood markets. Every urchin pulled from the water means kelp and seaweed get a chance to regrow. Marine biologist Cayne Layton explained it plainly: this kind of harvesting has demonstrable, positive impacts on marine vegetation richness.
What makes this story genuinely compelling isn’t just that a government reversed a harmful policy. It’s that indigenous people, who’ve been pushed to the margins of every other fishery in Australia, now have the opportunity to lead an entire industry from the center. The elders see it as something deeper too—a necessary step toward healing the land, even when that land sits underwater. John Carriage summed it up better than any policy document could:“Every time we’re taking a sea urchin out, we’re allowing the weed to regrow. We should be able to have more fish, more lobster, more abalone, and better quality sea urchins.”
That’s not just ecosystem management. That’s reconnection.
About the Author
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.
