Joe Rotondella Projects

Projects

Atlantic Limited
With my fishing fleet continuing to grow and my business ventures expanding, I decided to consolidate part of my fishing operations with my property and share investments. I decided to enter the public arena by floating a public company, which were very popular during the 80s. In June 1987, with a float of $5 million, Atlantic Limited was listed as a Public Company on the Australian Stock Exchange.

Atlantic Pearls
Later, Atlantic Pearls bought a pearl farm in Broome at Doubtful Bay with a 15,000 wild shell quota harvested from the seabed, from Darrella Holdings. I wanted to increase our quota by way of hatchery technology and we became the first hatchery to be given an extra quota of 50,000 shell. So I made the decision to build the hatchery at Portsmith.

Pearling in Asia
From Broome, we went to Indonesia and took our hatchery knowledge where we were again successful but I didn’t like the lay of the land and I felt very uneasy with the whole government system and the culture. There was racial unrest among the Indians and the Chinese so we departed from Indonesia to go to Malaysia on the island of Langkawi, which was the province of the ruling President of Malaysia, President Mahathir. I felt comfortable with the Malaysians and we were well received but we struck a hurdle there and decided to move on to Burma

Port Coogee
In the early 1990’s I had commenced negotiations and discussions in developing the land on Cockburn Road that I had purchased in 1983. I’d had a unique vision for the development of the land into “Port Catherine”, a marina with canals.

Myanmar (Burma)
We had been employing people from Yangon to do the mundane work on the pearl farm. I recognized that we had 2 villages close by who were subsisting on their fishing culture with no future advancement in what was becoming the “new” Myanmar foreseeable in their lives or for the following generations. I could see that there was no hope for these people to prosper in the “new” climate of change and I realized that by employing the villagers to do the mundane cleaning work on the shells and fostering further training for them in the industry, it would give them a future.

I arranged to build a school on each island for their children so that they would have an education, although it would be a minimal one, by breaking the cycle that had kept them trapped on the islands for generations, due to their lack of finances and education. In these countries and there are a lot more like them in the world, you can make a few dollars go a long way.