Caught

You might, as you peruse the new arrivals at your library or bookshop, walk past The Catch, thinking it is a coffee table book for anglers - and that would be a mistake.

Anna Clark is a historian who grew up in a family of fisher-folk and is a passionate and accomplished fisher in her own right.  Invited by the National Library of Australia to produce a history of fishing in Australia, she went as far back in time as she could, showing the depth and richness of the fishing cultures of the First Peoples, and then worked forward through first encounters between them and the outside world to the current state of play in both the commercial and recreational fishing worlds.  She shows how the stories we need to hear were preserved and carried forward in time, and tells us why it is important for us to preserve our own stories for the benefit of those who follow after us.

I called the author a historian, and she is, but The Catch is not a dry work of facts and figures, though it is full of important information - it is a collection of stories woven into the greater story of the lives of those who live in this country, and those who came before.  Read it in conjunction with Dark Emu, by Dr Bruce Pascoe, and you will gain a much more comprehensive picture of what resources were available to the First Peoples, and how well and carefully they were used and managed. 

Even if fishing isn't your bag, the first few chapters are important to every Australian, as they set out in detail the amazing skills and technology the locals were using when the First Fleet arrived.  Nets woven by local people were described by the newcomers as being "better than the finest European lace" and, some years later, one of the inland explorers encountered a net fully 90 metres in length.

Those new arrivals noted the fleets of bark canoes - all occupied by women, often with a baby or small child, and with a fire on a small clay hearth, ready for the immediate cooking of the catch - that were all around Port Jackson and Botany Bay.  They were seen to travel across the open water between North Head and South Head, and the observers were amazed at the quality of fishing lines and hooks being used, and at the quantity of fish being caught.

And therein lies the other important aspect of the stories in this book; the enourmous abundance of fish and shellfish that were present when the new settlers arrived - and the rapidity with which commercial operations were able to wipe out much of that abundance. For those among us who complain about the regulation of fishing today, the stories show us how all the controls imposed on modern fisher folk derive from a time, not so long ago, when the fisheries around our major cities had been almost completely wiped out by unfettered, unthinking exploitation.

Dr Clark has woven together the stories of past and present to show us what was, and what could be again, if only we can learn how to manage ourselves and our interactions with the environment we are so fortunate to live within.  Marcus Garvey said that "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots"