Dam good eating

For 30 years, Cambinata Yabbies in the WA Wheatbelt has been supplying freshwater crustaceans for fine dining here and overseas.

Story Aleisha Orr  Photo Ben Davidson

When people think about eating yabbies, crawbobs or craydabs, they often think back to childhood. Of casting nets, muddy buckets full of snapping claws, the change in colour as they cooked, shelling them as soon as they were cool enough to pick up and eating them maybe with a squeeze of lemon juice or vinegar. Now the humble Australian yabby is also being enjoyed overseas and in trendy dining establishments, with a good portion coming from a property just outside the small WA town of Kukerin.

Derek Nenke, who caught the small freshwater crayfish with his siblings on his family’s sheep and wheat farm as a child, now supplies yabbies that are served in the platinum service on the Indian Pacific train. He and his mother Mary Nenke run Cambinata Yabbies, the only commercial yabby producer in the west.

Mary and her husband Michael began the business in 1991 in an effort to help pay for their growing brood’s education costs. “Everyone thought we were crazy,” says Derek, who was a teenager at the time.

Although 4 generations of the family had farmed sheep on the property, it was de-stocked in the mid-1990s and yabbies now generate half of the farm’s income, alongside crop production.