Bartolomeo Puglisi

Bartolomeo (Bob) Puglisi has been in the fishing industry 63 years. He started working as a crew member on a fish trawler at 12 years old in 1954, but even then had been fishing for years. He worked with his brothers in Ulladulla on the New South Wales coast, where many Puglisi families lived. The heads of these families were nearly all fishermen who had been brought out from Lipari, an island off Sicily, by Bob's father Joe Puglisi.

In late 1967 Bob attempted to sail his small fishing vessel, the Angelina Star, from Ballina near the Queensland border to Port Lincoln in South Australia but was foiled by horrific weather and tried again. He was 25 years old and had been prawning for many years. He heard that in Port Lincoln fishermen wanted to fish for prawns, but had little knowledge of what to do. Beginning early in 1968, Bob brought in his first catch off Cowell. The rest is history, the history of the prawn fishing industry in South Australia. Still today Bob owns and operates two 22-metre prawn freezer vessels.