October 4, 2017 by Anna Clark, The Conversation
Australia has had tens of thousands of years of fisheries
exploitation. That history reveals a staggering natural bounty, which has been
alarmingly fragile without proper management. The current debate over the
federal government's new draft marine park plans is the latest chapter of this
story.
Early accounts described what we can only read today as some
sort of fishing Eden. The sea floor off the west coast of Tasmania was carpeted
red with crayfish. Extraordinary schools of Australian salmon swelled the
beaches of southern Australia—from Albany right around to Port Macquarie.
Mountains of mullet migrated annually up the east coast of the continent.
Colonial writers described huge hauls of fish, caught using
nets they had brought over on the First Fleet. One catch in 1788 was so large,
wrote David Collins, the colony's newly minted Judge-Advocate, that it actually
broke the net. Collins speculated that if the haul had been landed, the entire
catch could "have served the settlement [of over 1000] for a day".
Like colonial fishers on the coast, inland explorers such as
John Oxley were struck by the paradox of Australia's natural world. The land
seemed barren and unsuited for pastoralism, he observed in 1817, yet the water
teemed with life. In less than an hour, one of his party "caught 18 large
fish, one of which was a curiosity from its immense size and the beauty of its
colours," wrote Oxley. "It weighed entire 70 pounds [31kg]."
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