The road ends at Bremer Bay, 800km southeast of the West Australian capital of Perth. The brilliant white sand beaches are lapped by the Great Southern Ocean. Next stop south is Antarctica. It seems an odd spot to find an aquaculture business producing seafood aimed at the Hong Kong market.
'Conditions are ideal for an abalone farm,' said Jim Morrison,
a marine biologist and consultant to Western Australian Abalone.
He stands beside one of 22 nursery tanks in which millions of shellfish are spawned. Each tank holds 50,000 tiny green-lipped abalone. The 1.2 million shellfish, about twice the size of a match head, will take four years to grow to maturity. They will then be about twice as big as a mobile phone.
They will also be valuable. Gourmets eagerly pay premium prices for the delicacy. At the Spring Moon restaurant at the Peninsula hotel, a 30 gram piece of Japanese abalone costs HK$1,800. A serving of South African abalone costs up to HK$8,800. Across the harbour at the Mandarin Oriental's Man Wah restaurant, South Australian abalone is HK$498 per slice.
Abalone has been a valued delicacy on Chinese menus for centuries. But it wasn't until the late 1960s that divers in Australia and New Zealand woke up to the fact that their rocky foreshores were studded with millions of shellfish whose value was not much less than that of gold.
A rush started. By 1971, hunters were plucking so many shellfish from Western Australian waters that the state government limited the number of professional divers to 26 and placed strict limits on amateurs. Poachers and rogue divers swiftly began to plunder the waters of both countries. As they stripped coasts bare of the succulent mollusc, prices soared.