The only fish – by Ben Walter
ISLAND | issue 169
The first fish I catch as a child is a flathead. I’m leaning over the side of the boat with my red toy fishing rod, mind drifting wherever a tiny mind does, when I notice a fish at the end of the white string line. Confused, I turn to my dad. ‘Is that … the bait?’ I ask, before seeing that it is a real, actual flathead, and I have somehow caught it.
Nearly forty years later my dad is at the tiller once again. We’re fishing with my own kids. It’s one of their first trips in the boat; we putter out into the bay, stop in the channel, and I tell them this story.
Suddenly I frown, thinking about the details.
Something here doesn’t add up.
Flathead are bottom feeders, scrounging around in the sand. But the hook on my flimsy rod barely scratched the surface of the water. And my family loved to make things special, like when I got a metal detector for my birthday and they buried a pile of coins near the steps leading down to the beach.
I turn to my dad, feeling like I’ve only just realised that Santa Claus couldn’t have squeezed down all those chimneys.
‘Did you put that fish on the hook?’ I ask him. ‘You must have done.’
He looks away, pausing for a moment.
‘Do you really want to know?’ he asks me.
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Still, the first fish I caught would have been a flathead. Nearly everyone goes after flathead – if you’re a Tasmanian throwing out a line, there’s a 68 percent chance that’s the fish you’re going to be reeling in.[i]
When I first read that statistic, I shrugged. It fit with my experience. But when I started to consider it as a pure number, divorced from angling habits, it seemed staggering. The estimated annual catches of different species put it into shocking perspective. Leatherjacket: 6,059. Silver trevally: 8,277. Flathead: 730,699.[ii]
Most fishers take certain other species when they happen to hook them, but the chances are that a flathead will be nibbling at the bait; a flathead, finally, taking a proper bite; a flathead hooked and heaving at the line, a flathead dragged up and landed on the boat, measured with a ruler and stilled with a thong, a flathead stabbed in a triangular marking on its olive green head just above its brain, its own map of Tasmania. A flathead thrown in the bucket of sea water and cleaned later in the morning, the scales rasped off with the edge of a knife and the white fillets gathered in a bag, the leftover fish carcasses tossed to seagulls. Perhaps all done with a nifty trick to bone them that I never remember how to do.
Platycephalus bassensis, the southern sand flathead, is the fish in question. If you’re lucky, you might get a tiger (or in our family, ‘king’) flathead, a larger species, and there are apparently bluespotted flatheads off the north coast of the state. But sand flatheads are the dominant catch. I read about the huge dusky flatheads along the east coast of mainland Australia. To me, the trophy photos look like they’ve been fiddled with in Photoshop, because the sand flatheads I’m used to are much smaller – a decent size is 35–40 cm, but it’s rare to catch them that big. Until recently, the legal size for keeping was 32 cm – the good fish were often just over that. You tend to catch a lot of smaller ones, releasing them carefully over the side, away from the longing eyes of cormorants and gulls.
Why are they so popular? Well, there are a lot of them. Flathead crowd in the big, sheltered bays on the coastlines where much of the state’s fishing takes place. Plus, they’re easy to catch. You only need to drop a line on a sandy bottom and wait for them to pounce. There’s no need to muck about with floats, or specially sized hooks, or fancy baits, or specific depths. There’s no need for trolling, driving the boat slowly with a lure trailing behind, and you’re not dependent on a school coming through. You don’t need a still night and the right equipment – light, spear, battery – that you do for going after flounder. You don’t need a big, expensive boat to head off the coastline, like you would chasing tuna. You don’t need a gillnet, which regulations increasingly restrict for recreational fishers – there are plans to phase them out completely by 2030. Flathead are easy to fillet and superb eating. You might catch other fish on a line, like cod or wrasse, which tend to linger over rockier, weedy bottoms. But nobody much likes cod or wrasse – the latter are more likely to end up as bait in a craypot. There’s school whiting, which are bony, small and a bit of a pain. There are gurnard, which are apparently good eating, but few people bother keeping them because of their poisonous spines; we’d just cut the line and watch them swim off. You can get shark in deeper water, but you’ll probably have to throw them back: many of the commonly fished bays are Shark Refuge Areas, and it’s illegal to keep them.
There are people who go after bream, or trevally, or cocky salmon, and others who revel in species like kingfish and snapper arriving with warmer water from the north as the climate changes. Still, most people are going after flathead. They’ve always been the perfect mix of easy to catch, plentiful, and delicious.
But they’re starting to disappear.
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For the first time, a report from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) has classified sand flathead as depleted.[iii] ‘Depleted’ means that ‘urgent actions are required to avoid a fishery collapse and to begin the process to recover the fishery to a sustainable level.’[iv]
It’s not the only fish to get this rating. There’s the bastard trumpeter, which my dad netted regularly as a young bloke, but never sees these days – more about them later. There’s the southern garfish, which we used to watch zipping happily about the surface when floundering. There’s the striped trumpeter, and Commonwealth-managed species like the blue warehou. But it’s the sand flathead that’s most relevant to Tasmanian fishers, and the figures are worrying. Flathead are subject to a phenomenon called growth overfishing, ‘where most fish are removed soon after reaching legal size.’[v] Indeed, around 80 percent of flathead over this length die every year, the vast majority of them because of fishing.[vi] There’s likely more pressure in the south-east of Tasmania, where nearly half the catch is taken, but the data appears concerning everywhere.
All this means the spawning potential of the species is declining; there are fewer years for larger female fish to lay eggs because they’ve nearly all been caught before they’ve had a chance to get around to it. What’s more, it’s believed that flathead are now actually evolving to be smaller. Slower growing fish will mature and begin spawning as relative tiddlers, having more chances to breed before being caught, while the naturally larger fish are taken before they have a chance to spread their genes.
Who’s to blame for the hammering of flathead stocks? One article in the Mercury quotes Mark Duncan, a fishing charter operator: ‘If there is a decline, and I am not saying there is, it is the three big commercial operators where any reduction focus should be.’ But only 2 percent of the sand flathead catch are taken by such operators – the remaining 184 tonnes are caught by recreational fishers.[vii] We can’t just blame huge trawlers; without a change in the way we approach flathead, recreational fishing in Tasmania will change enormously. It would be like eucalypts dying off across Australia – a fundamental change in how we experience a landscape filled with human activity.
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My uncle was an independent professional fisherman at a time when this was decreasingly common in Tasmania. Still, he’d throw certain species he netted back into the ocean.
‘Twenty cents,’ he once said about a wrasse, ‘isn’t worth a life.’ I remember on one occasion, when I was maybe eight or nine, listening to him take on the fish’s perspective. ‘Poor little fish,’ he said. ‘Swimming along, and then suddenly…’ I remember having a jolt of concern for that fish, becoming terribly upset; perhaps my first moment of empathy for another creature. A fish who was just enjoying being a fish, easing through the water and nibbling about, wrenched up to a boat with a savage hook in the corner of its mouth then bashed to death on the gunwales.
Poor little fish.
I wonder, now, if that moment helped push me to vegetarianism in my teens, causing endless trouble for my dad, who would cook two separate meals for the family. When we went out in the boat in summer, he and my sister would line fish for flathead, while I’d sit happily at the front of the boat, reading a book or just enjoying being on the water.
I drifted away from vegetarianism in my twenties, before returning to a weirdly complex form of it, informed more by factory farm practices and climate change than empathy, with a set of inconsistent rules that would be boring to spell out. But still, I continue to eat fish; which is strange, given the impact of that story so many years ago. I feel a conflict here that’s deeply personal. Perhaps many pescatarians out there have a clear set of values, but for me … I remember standing in the waters of South Cape Rivulet just before it met the ocean and feeling the water surging in all directions, the flow from the river meeting the waves and the tide, and all of it struggling against the other. The competing ethical demands feel a lot like that. I like the idea of being responsible for my food in a sustainable way, which might at times involve eating meat; at the same time, I hate unnecessary killing. I feel a certain resignation to the way life works, of wild creatures eating other wild creatures (I can only catch flathead because the fish is so keen to leap on its own meal), while feeling deeply disturbed by it. I could choose to avoid fish, but it’s less clear that replacing it with other foods would always be more sustainable at an ecological level – even if the fish might prefer it that way.
Granted, a lot of these feelings are complicated by my upbringing, where fishing was normal. We didn’t grow up hunting, so duck shooting feels a long way from anything I might want to do, but as kids, we had a shack on the coast at Dodges Ferry, back when this wasn’t unusual for middle-class Tasmanian families, before the real estate booms. We’d stay there for six or seven weeks every summer through the school holidays, taking the dog and the cat and everything else besides.
Even today, my own family piles into the car every January to spend a week or two with my dad near the beach. We stack everything we might need in the back, around the seats, in the footwells, filling every space to the brim, just like we did when we were kids. If it was an option, we’d probably gaffer tape bags of clothes all over the chassis and still not have enough room (I really need to buy one of those pricey roof pods so we can fill that up with junk too). Before leaving, I push down on everything in the rear of the wagon until there’s just enough daylight to see through the rear windscreen, in the bizarre event I might want to change lanes.
Going back to Dodges has its own, particular familiarity – we’re happy to chat, watch cricket, go to one of the beaches on the good days (where I get annoyed at the sand, then help the kids get used to the waves). We wait for a still morning to get the kids out in the boat. They love it out there, taking turns to steer, holding on tight as the wind tries to steal their sunhats, and dropping a line in the bay to catch a flathead. It’s just about the only time I go fishing these days, though the rest of the year, I have vague intentions to grab a rod and head down to the water where I live now. With young kids, it’s hard to find the time – but also, that clash of values is echoing in my mind, giving just enough resistance to stop me from going out and doing it more often.
Maybe I’m still thinking of the poor little fish my uncle conjured, swimming along, looking for a feed.
How do we respond to the challenges of overfishing a popular species? Usually, government regulation hasn’t gone far enough. The bastard trumpeter, another depleted species, serves as an example of a very different clash of values. IMAS notes that:
the current minimum size limit of 38 cm TL is still well below the size at maturity of >45 cm FL … While there have been discussions about an increase of the minimum size limit to enable stock recovery, this management intervention was opposed during the 2015 review of the management plan because it would effectively close the current commercial and recreational fisheries for the species.[viii]
That’s to say, it remains legal to catch trumpeter, a depleted species, well before they have a chance to lay eggs, because otherwise it would close off the fishery – a fishery that is in deep trouble because we’ve been catching too many trumpeter. It hardly seems an ‘urgent action’ to avoid a ‘fishery collapse’ – more likely, it makes you want to throw an oyster shell at a window. The conflict between management of a species, from both an ecological and fisheries perspective, and the maintenance of existing ‘rights’ to fish that species should be nonsensical, given the ultimate repercussions, but it remains very real. It reminds me of George Monbiot’s discussion of marine reserves in his book Feral. Monbiot identifies the huge gap between aspirations to protect marine areas and actual practice; the challenges of a situation where ‘[f]ishermen [sic] tend to resist marine reserves before they are created, then to support them once they have been established, as their catches rise, often far beyond expectations.’[ix] But this initial resistance is difficult to overcome. It’s a political problem. He notes the problem of short-termism and its
triumph over not only wider social and environmental interests, but also over the medium- and long-term interest of the people who block this reform … the proposal to stop crab and lobster fishing in just 1,100 hectares around Skomer Island, off the coast of Pembrokeshire in Wales, was voted down by the fishermen [sic] on the committee which considered it, despite the evidence of greatly improved catches around similar reserves. The prospect of lower returns for the first one or two years of existence appears to have outweighed the promise of higher returns for ever after.
In Tasmania, there has been a striking and surprising set of announcements to rescue the flathead fishery; perhaps the magnitude of the issue has been a wake-up call. In the first instance, an educational program, ‘Flathead for the Future’, highlighted the problem and suggested other species that fishers could target. But in April 2023, Jo Palmer, the Minister for Primary Industries and Water, introduced immediate, temporary restrictions on flathead fishing. The size limit was increased to 35 cm, and bag limits reduced to 10. A consultation process was launched, including a discussion paper proposing more lasting changes. The 35 cm minimum size would be entrenched, and a maximum size limit would be introduced to protect larger, breeding fish: 38 cm in the south, and 40 cm elsewhere, making for a particularly narrow slot in which flathead could legally be caught. Additionally, the bag limit would drop to two in the south, and five elsewhere.
The process of consultation may weaken these proposals, but even as an ambit claim, it’s a lot more extensive than I’d been expecting. Certainly, more drastic steps would involve seasonal or area closures, or even closing the fishery completely. On that final option, we can hear an echo of the trumpeter when IMAS notes, ‘[w]hile we recognise that this would be the most effective way to rebuild the fishery … [w]e also recognise the impact this would have on Tasmania’s most important recreational fishery. As such, other management options that could deliver a significant catch reduction are preferred at this time.’[x]
Nonetheless, the regulations, if they go through, would serve as an effective closure for most people. Who wants to muck around trying to catch a flathead in that narrow 3 cm window? Some will ignore all this, of course, but the consultation paper anticipates that: it’s much more difficult to determine whether a fish is the correct size from just the fillets, so it’s likely to become illegal to clean flathead at sea – fishers will have to bring whole fish back to shore, facing possible inspection from authorities.
I worry that the blowback will be incredible, ultimately weakening these regulations – the political weight of the issue is significant in a context where nearly a quarter of the human population fishes over the course of a given year.[xi] That’s a lot of fishers, with a huge diversity of values and opinions. But protesting against something like this gives me the same sort of confusion as Monbiot when he considers marine reserves. Certainly, humans are geared towards instant gratification – from an evolutionary perspective, food right now is more important than food that might possibly be there in a couple of years’ time. The COVID crisis proved that many of us were pleased to draw out our superannuation rather than save it for retirement. But still, something in me wants to scream: isn’t it just mindbogglingly obvious? Isn’t it better for everyone, including fishers, to have a thriving flathead population – even if you’ve never felt a single iota of empathy for a fish?
Many of the usual arguments against restrictions don’t apply. For the most part, people aren’t making their living from flathead – it’s almost entirely a recreational fishery. I’m sure that for some people, wild-caught fish makes a contribution to their diet, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the majority would spend more money outfitting and running a boat than they’d make back in fish – less than 5 percent of the flathead catch comes from shore-based angling.[xii] We can get stuck here, insisting on our right to keep on doing what we always have – a set of practices that in large part aren’t unreasonable, and in one sense are very human. Conflicts between ecological issues and a culture’s recreational pursuits can be just as difficult as those where sacred jobs are at stake. But what if that practice is eating itself, as much as the flathead? ‘Always bet on self-interest,’ Paul Keating is famously reputed to have said, ‘at least you know that it’s trying.’ But is it really? Perhaps in the short term. The decline of flathead feels like an obvious parable for climate change and broader environmental collapse, but given it’s such a narrow issue, where the stakes are so clear – if we catch too many fish we will run out of fish and then there will be no fish – it feels like a peculiar form of insanity for us to ignore it.
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Could I go without fishing? Absolutely. Should I go without fishing? It’s all very well to talk about taking responsibility for our food, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that things are being done sustainably. Foraging has become fashionable in a small way, and while there are few issues with scavenging as many weedy dandelions or blackberries as you can find, it’s more complicated when it comes to the depletion of native species. Sometimes it might be more ecologically sound to eat a tasteless supermarket carrot than a wild murnong.
I’d love to see a popular movement from fishers embracing these changes; advocating, even, for the closure of the flathead fishery, for however long it might serve to rebuild the species. It wouldn’t have to be a cliched ‘lock it up’ policy so often attributed to environmental movements, just a recognition of the bleeding obvious; indeed, there’s no reason for this to be a predominantly environmental issue at all. While we wouldn’t want a situation where it was only legitimate to conserve species that serve obvious benefit to humans, the protection of flathead could, at least, make for a broad consensus from multiple perspectives and viewpoints with its own kind of strength, even if that might be challenging in a Tasmanian environment where polarisation is a route to power. Perhaps holding out the possibility is enough to open up a wider conversation about what we really value, and whether we would like it to last.
A few days after realising that my first flathead catch was a little illegitimate, I’m splashing about in the shallows with the kids when my eye is caught by a tiny creature, olive green and just a few centimetres long. I call the kids over.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘It’s a baby flathead!’
A tiny replica of its adult cousins, lying in the sand, swimming on a little when we get too close. It looks just like that happy fish I imagined so many years ago, and it’s such a pleasure to watch that I don’t want to think about its chances, the perils of its life to come. Will it be eaten by a seagull, or a larger fish? Will it grow up and be hooked undersized in the bay, thrown back to live a little longer? If female, will it have a chance to breed in multiple seasons, growing to a ripe old age? Will the new regulations give it a chance to have a go? Or will it end up on our plates in a few short years, caught before having the chance to live a decent life and swell the population, its memory of our wondering faces long gone? ▼
As we were going to print in November 2023, the Tasmanian Government announced a new set of regulations for sand flathead fishing (subject to review in two years' time). The 35 cm minimum size was retained, and a maximum limit of 40 cm was established for everywhere except the Bass Strait islands. The bag limit was dropped to two in the most impacted areas of the south-east, five in the east, and ten elsewhere. Commercial fishing was banned completely. The proposed rule requiring fishers to land flathead before filleting was withdrawn.
[i] Lyle, JM et al. (2019) 2017-18 Survey of Recreational Fishing in Tasmania Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania p 88
[ii] Lyle, JM et al. (2019) 2017-18 Survey of Recreational Fishing in Tasmania Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania p 88
[iii] Fraser K et al. (2022) Tasmanian Scalefish Fishery Assessment 2020-21 Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, p 101
[iv] Sand Flathead in Tasmania: What’s happening with the Fishery? (2023) Wild Fisheries Management Branch, Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, p 3
[v] Sand Flathead in Tasmania: What’s happening with the Fishery? (2023) Wild Fisheries Management Branch, Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, p 3
[vi] Sand Flathead in Tasmania: What’s happening with the Fishery? (2023) Wild Fisheries Management Branch, Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, p 3
[vii] Fraser K et al. p 102
[viii] Ibid p 38. ‘TL’ refers to total length, while ‘FL’, fork length, represents the distance from the snout to the fork of the tail – so the disparity between sexual maturity and legal size is even greater than the above figures suggest.
[ix] Monbiot, George (2013) Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life, Penguin, p 250
[x] Sand Flathead in Tasmania
[xi] Lyle, JM et al. p 120. Figures based on Tasmanian population over five years of age.
[xii] Lyle, JM et al, p 33
Image: Adam Sherez - Unsplash
This essay appeared in Island 169 in 2023. Buy your print copy.