Jarramba: the Kimberley's giant prawn

24 November 2026

Part 14 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn

In Derby, in the west Kimberley, the giant freshwater prawn is called jarramba.[1] In 2019, a Derby Aboriginal corporation, Emama Nguda, completed a three-year pilot that made it, in the words of the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation, “the first group in the country to successfully breed the northern Australian species”.[2]

That is harder than it sounds. It is the problem Shao-Wen Ling solved in Penang in 1961 for the prawn farmed in Asia (Part 1): the larvae need brackish water, and a hatchery has to carry them through every stage until they turn into young prawns. Doing it once is an achievement. Doing it reliably, batch after batch, is the hard part of farming this species anywhere.

The Kimberley’s work began in a training hatchery. From 2018, the Cooperative Research Centre for Developing Northern Australia funded a project on cherabin, the prawn’s name elsewhere in the north, as a basis for Indigenous business. North Regional TAFE’s Broome Aquaculture Centre ran the hatchery and the training. The project began with the Ribinyung Dawang Aboriginal Corporation at Mud Springs, near Kununurra, and from November 2018 it trained students from Emama Nguda.[3]

The CRCNA’s evaluation, published in September 2026, records what the project built: a refined way of rearing the larvae, hatchery guidance, a business model and accredited training. Its largest hatchery batch was about 1,500 young prawns. The evaluation is candid about what was still hard, as it has been everywhere: making every batch succeed, and keeping young prawns alive through changes in temperature. Commercial viability, it says, was still to be shown.[4]

The Kimberley kept going. The Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation provided almost $2 million and land, the former Kimberley Turf Farm, for a commercial farm with a hatchery, grow-out ponds and processing, and Emama Nguda began talking to distributors, wholesalers and high-end restaurants.[2][5] Chefs had noticed the prawn too: in 2017, the Orana Foundation, founded by the chef Jock Zonfrillo, named cherabin among its first areas of investigation, and in 2018 it was researching cherabin farming in the Kimberley with an Indigenous-owned partner.[6] In 2026, Emama Nguda was recruiting a hatchery manager to lead its jarramba operation.[7]

In the meantime, on the other side of the continent, on Cape York, the Hope Vale Foundation was about to start a venture of its own.

Sources

1. ORIC (December 2019), Aquacultural pioneers. Jarramba, Derby’s name for the prawn. oric.gov.au
2. Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation (18 October 2019), Aboriginal cherabin breeding project set for Australian first. The three-year pilot; “the first group in the country to successfully breed the northern Australian species”; almost $2 million and land for a commercial farm. ilsc.gov.au
3. CRCNA, Cherabin aquaculture production as an enabler for Indigenous business development (AT.2.1718098), final project report (January 2023). crcna.com.au
4. CRCNA, impact evaluation of the cherabin project (21 September 2026). Outputs; largest batch about 1,500 post-larvae; consistency and temperature risks; commercial viability not yet demonstrated. crcna.com.au
5. ORIC (December 2019), Aquacultural pioneers. Distributors, wholesalers and high-end restaurants. oric.gov.au
6. The Orana Foundation; Modern Restaurant Management (2018). Cherabin among the foundation’s first areas of investigation; Kimberley farming research with an Indigenous-owned partner. theoranafoundation.org
7. EthicalJobs (2026), Aquaculture Operations and Hatchery Manager, Emama Nguda Aboriginal Corporation, Derby. ethicaljobs.com.au

Part 14 of 18 · A history of the giant freshwater prawn · Previous: Part 13, The prawn on the other side of the line · Next: Part 15, Twenty prawns to two hundred thousand · SHRMP.bio’s strategy behind it: shrmp.bio/strategy.html