"Dig your toes in, feel the cockles, and keep moving."
Bobby Hoult walks barefoot backwards through waist-deep water, dragging his homemade rake and net, gathering a bag of cockles from the ocean floor at Shark Bay on the Western Australian coast.
Located 800 kilometres north of Perth, Shark Bay is a pristine and unique environment, where red dirt from the inland desert connects to turquoise coastal waters.
For Bobby Hoult, the ocean has been his home and workplace for all of his life. Now in his 60s, Bobby runs a commercial cockle harvesting operation.
The Malgana man uses his toes to feel the seabed for cockles, finding the best place to drag his rake and bag.
Once raked into bags, the cockles are carefully graded and sorted by hand, labelled as Shark Bay clams, ready for shipping to restaurants across the country.
It's a laborious manual process for Bobby and his crew, but he chooses to use a hand-operated raking system to ensure a 'light touch' on the ocean floor.
"I like Shark Bay, and I don't like anybody disturbing it and stirring it up anymore than need be," he says.
"I've spent half my life trying to stop people from doing that, so there's no reason why I should do it.
"And it keeps you fit, no reason to go to the gym in the evening."
How does he feel about people eating his catch?
"It's good for the plate," he jokes.
"And [people] should be enjoying them, knowing that we're not doing something that's impeding upon nature; meaning it's all sustainable."
An unusual abundance
When Bobby began raking for cockles in 2012, he took a leap of faith.
A marine heatwave had just hit the Western Australian coast wiping out species such as abalone and scallops, turning attention to what was seafood still present, and cockles came to the fore.
Bobby knew from his childhood and days net fishing that there were cockles in the area, but he didn't know how many.
He worked with fellow fisher John Craike and the WA Department of Fisheries, and together established a WA cockle industry.
Today they're still permitted to harvest wild cockles, and while they could operate in much of the state, Bobby chooses to work the same patch of ground in Shark Bay, due to the continued supply of the Venus clams.
"I had no idea what to expect and I'm gratefully surprised that there's an abundance of them here," he said.
"Shark Bay is different ecologically all around, so if there was going to be something different with cockles, it would happen in Shark Bay."
Bobby describes himself as having Aboriginal and European heritage, and while he has learnt his own lessons about developing a commercial cockle industry, he was also told about what species were good eating by his elders.
Malgana people are known as saltwater people, having gained sustenance from the ocean for tens of thousands of years.
"[Cockles] would have been a major part of their diet because from what I can gather, most of our people lived along the coastline and obviously that's where most of the food was available," Bobby says.
"Everywhere they camped would have been alongside the beach or on the beach, so first thing you do is walk out and grab a feed of cockles."
A life spent on the water
This will be his eleventh year of fishing for molluscs, but for Bobby it continues a life lived on the water in the Shark Bay region.
Along with two decades spent crabbing, Bobby worked with his family net fishing and shearing sheep and goats on an island, which the Hoult family operated as a pastoral station.
"We always shore [sheep] during the summer months because we trapped most of [the sheep] and mustered the rest of them. It was always blowing southerlies. It wasn't the perfect fishing time of the year," he said.
"So, we'd knock off for a month or two and go and do the island."
The Hoults ran about 3,000 sheep on Faure Island, with sheep and wool transported to and from the mainland by barge.
The island is now owned by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
Tune in to ABC Landline on Sunday from 12:30pm AEST to watch this story.
