Of Tragedy and Valor
Garry Hera-Singh

Garry Ian Hera-Singh was born 16 January 1956 at  Meningie, SA. Gary is a commercial fisherman of the lakes and Coorong like his Grandfather Lester Rumbelow. Garry is a proud 5th generation fisherman on his mother’s side. 

Garry first started fishing during the mid 1970’s working as a deckhand with his grandfathers. In 1984 he became a full-time fisherman when he invested into the industry. He continues the tradition of static net fishing but has deferred to a boat with an outboard.

There are very few 5th generation fishermen in Australia, fewer still who can claim they are fishing using the same methods for the same catch as their forefathers.  

"I still rely on some of my grandfather's knowledge of when and where to fish. Always watching the seasons, nature's signs and the weather for important clues where the fish might be tonight," says Garry. 

Garry is a recognised OceanWatch Master Fisherman. He harvests seafood respecting the aspects of responsible and sustainable fishing incorporated in the Master Fisherman Program including quality assurance, bycatch reduction devices and techniques, animal welfare and threatened species management.  His tireless commitment to the environmental protection of his beloved Coorong is as impressive as the delicious Yellow Eye Mullet he catches. 

Garry has served as the President of the Southern Fishermen’s Association (SFA). The SFA represents the interests of  commercial licence holders in the South Australian Lakes and Coorong Fishery. The fishery has existed for over a century and has developed  into a diverse multi-species, multi-method fishery that accesses native and  non-native fish stocks within Lakes Alexandrina and Albert, the Coorong and  adjacent ocean beaches.  

The Lakes and the Coorong fishery is a highly modified system following the  construction of the barrage network from 1935 to 1940, when 89% of the  estuary turned into a freshwater habitat. The impacts of this  construction includes reverse/summer flooding, riparian zone modification,  introduced species, massive water usage, flow modification and pollution. Yet  despite this 90% of the fishery’s value comes from 10% of the original  estuary. 

Lakes And Coorong Fishery Award Winners

SFA took out the National Environment Award sponsored by the Sydney fish Market, at the Gold Coast in October 2011. 

Local fishing industry group, the Southern Fishermens Association (SFA), took out the prestigious award at a glittering awards ceremony in Pt. Lincoln on Saturday night. Garry Hera-Singh president of SFA accepted the ‘Seafood for the Future – Environment Award’ sponsored by Sustainable Focus, from Brad Warren of Ocean watch. 

Judges were impressed with the association’s proactive approach during the recent “one in a hundred year drought”.  The fish down of Lake Albert where 16 local fishermen coordinated their efforts to remove over 100 tonnes of carp in three weeks was innovative and provided good information to the government and scientists about how to deal with the carp left stranded by the construction of the bund.

The association also wrote a Barrage Management document describing how to gain the maximum ecological benefit to the Coorong with the freshwater releases from the barrages. This has been supplied to SA Water, DENR, SARDI, Murray Basin Authority and the relevant Ministers.

https://www.coorongfishery.com/pages/initiatives-awards/awards/seafood-for-the-future---environment-award.php 

Rumbelows Hut

• SA life, Volume 2, Number 2

• February 2005, p. 74-75

The beauty of The Coorong is unique, as is the wildlife. Another unique feature is the families who seek a livelihood from its waters and cherish its fragile existence. One such family is the Rumbelows, a family who has fished one area or another of the south coast for generations. Lester Rumbelow, who called himself the last of the Rumbelow fishers, left his legacy in the form of Rumbelows Hut.

Lesters grandson Garry inherited the hut through his aunt on Lester's death in 1992. When you consider Gary's heritage of a Rumbelow on his mother's side and his paternal grandfather also a lifetime fisherman - there wasn't much chance of any other career. Garry has fished the lakes and Coorong for the past 22 years. During the fishing season (spring and summer), Garry's young family in Meningie will only see him for a few hours a day.

Lester spent all his time on The Coorong which inspired him to erect the hut in the 1930s - just four posts with some cladding on the walls, a corrugated roof and hessian rugs on a dirt floor. This 3.5 by 4 metre space, with a kerosene fridge, gas stove, table, chairs, bed and small rainwater tank as the only creature comforts, was Lester's home for his last 30 years. The hut was never meant to be anything but a shack. Lester had no requirements other than a break from the elements.

Lester Rumbelow had an innate knowledge of and respect for the waters and ecosystem that nurtured his catch. It was a harsh existence. It was an era when men were made of steel and boats were made of wood," says Lester's grandson Garry Hera-Singh. 

Lester's day began at 4 am, seven days a week during the season, when he would row up to eight miles a day to set and later retrieve his nets before the pelicans got to his catch of mulloway, bream and mullet. 

Not much has changed for Garry who continues the tradition of static net fishing but has deferred to a boat with an outboard "I still rely on some of my grandfather's knowledge of when and where to fish. Always watching the seasons, nature's signs and the weather for important clues where the fish might be tonight," he says.

Prior to his death, Lester shared with his grandson many words of wisdom and much knowledge of The Coorong, particularly prior to the introduction of the barrages "Many of the changes in Lester's view were for the worse. Reducing the estuary by roughly 90 per cent of its original size had a profound impact on the bird and fish populations of the region." 

Garry continues the family's respect for the environment. "The aquatic ecosystem is the engine room that drives the abundance of birds and fish every year. A healthy ecosystem delivers a healthy and sustainable fishery. Unfortunately the over extraction of water from the Murray Darling Basin catchment has meant that only about 27 per cent of the natural flows make it to the Lower Lakes and Murray Moth area. Most of the birds and fish relied on the annual fresh water pulses for reproduction and growth rates

"In 1998 the Lakes and Coorong fishery produced the first environmental management plan for a commercial fishery in the world The plan identified several areas the fishers needed to address. The first was an independent audit of the fishery by the Marine Stewardship Council certification process which is sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature. The second was the need for specific monitoring." 

Such monitoring included not only bird numbers but visitors, pellation, unusual events or sightings and the like.

Around six years ago Garry began to count the migratory birds on a daily basis - Cape Barren Geese flying overhead and the rare Eastern Curlew, Stints, Sanderlings and Sandpipers on The Coorong sandbars. That information has been collated and is now used to confirm trends in conjunction with the National Parks and the annual Australian Migratory Bird counts. "Unfortunately the quantitative data confirms what the fisherman already know - The Coorong is going down the gurgler at an alarming rate." 

As his grandfathers before him, Garry understands the intricate needs of The Coorong "What the waterway needs is another 1956 flood to bring life back to the levels of its former glory"

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 07/07/2008

Reporter: Mike Sexton INT

INT  At first light, while bracing a freezing southerly, Garry Hera-Singh is hauling in a catch of Coorong mullet. It's a craft he learnt from his father and grandfathers.

GHS  I don't know how old I was, it was before I could walk. I can just have very faint memories of being out in the wind and the cold and rain.

INT  The Hera-Singh's have fished the waters of this rugged, beautiful wilderness for so long, they are as much a part of it as the pelicans that follow their work.

For more than a century fishermen have worked the Lower lakes and Coorong, the fertile estuary where the River Murray flows into the sea. Over the generations there have been very few changes, although now the wooden row boats are tinnies and the cotton nets have been replaced with nylon.

GHS  Unlike in the old days where they used to just covered them up with hessian bags or a bit of seaweed we will just use ice and ice the fish down. So there's not a lot changed.

INT  In addition to the Coorong, Garry Hera-Singh fishes the turbulent Southern Ocean using a technique developed here called "swing netting." The net is taken out to sea using the natural rips around the Murray Mouth, and once set, is controlled from the beach.

GHS  Now I am trying to keep the tension on the rope to keep the net nice and straight in the water.

INT  In addition to the pounding surf, there is always the danger of meeting shark, but on a good day it yields 25 kilogram mulloway.

GHS  I am running about a ten inch net and that targets fish about that size (approximately one metre long).

INT A few kilometers inland, Henry Jones fishes the freshwater lakes.

HENRY JONES  I learnt an enormous amount from my grandfather and every school holiday I would be up there with him.

INT  He catches introduced species like redfin and carp as well as natives like golden perch.

HENRY JONES  The fish I catch for a living, they're going alright, they're going really well. We put lots of restrictions on ourselves, many years ago, to make sure the fishing is sustainable. For instance, golden perch, they spawn at about 23cm. Now 33cm is the minimum, so there is a big area there to spawn before we start catching them.

INT  Although those fishing the Coorong and Lower Lakes follow time honoured traditions, more than a decade ago Henry Jones believed they needed to formalise their environmental principles to maintain their livelihoods.

HENRY JONES  We called a meeting and we invited all the fishermen. And I was going to ask them to be greenies, and fishermen are fairly tough characters, and I was sort of worried about what was going to happen, but every one of them put their hand up and said this is the way we want to go.

INT  The families drew up a management plan based on their accumulated knowledge and by reducing the number of licenses, targeting certain species, and seasonally rotating their catches, convinced themselves - if no one else - they were sustainable.

GHS  The fishermen have known for decades they have a sustainable fishery but the people who live in the big cities have no idea unless it is written on a computer screen or in a book, we are not going to win the battle to convince these people.

INT  The fishing community eventually decided to go beyond self-regulation and apply for the highest environmental assessment, a Marine Stewardship Council Certification.

To do so, they opened themselves up to international independent scrutiny, and after almost 10 years of intense documentation they recently celebrated becoming the first community-based fishery in Australia and only the 27th in the world to be certified.

DUNCAN LEADBITTER  This is a very rigorous process. All aspects of the fishery in terms of its catches and environmental performance and management systems are put through a very detailed audit process and that's a very public and transparent process, and so the auditors are looking at everything.

INT  The certification is already paying dividends, with leading restaurants seeking out Coorong mullet and other species with the green tick. Any economic success is welcome in a community where the drought and over allocation of the River Murray has left the freshwater lakes in crisis.

ROGER STROTHER, MAYOR  The farming side of it, particularly the dairy and irrigation side here, they are really struggling, they are finding it really hard. Whereas the fishing industry side are still doing very well because they are managing their fishing industry so well.

INT  But despite the Southern Fishermens Association commitment to their workplace, the big picture is out of their hands. After years without river flows the Coorong is no longer an estuarine system where fresh and salt water mix.

HENRY JONES: Two thirds of the Coorong has died. It used to be the main area for flounder, mullet, black brim for breeding and all those non consumptive species, these little blokes who feed all the migratory birds and all the other birds, that used to be where they fished but now it's dead. Now it's the same salt consistency as the Dead Sea.

KEVIN RUDD, PRIME MINISTER: What has stunned me is the extent to which this shoreline has moved from there to there in the space of a year.

INT  When the Prime Minister visited the Lakes on the weekend he confirmed there is no short term fix, and that the only hope lies in long term restructuring.

KEVIN RUDD: It's the management of this entire system, this massive Murray Darling system, from Queensland where I come from, through NSW across Victoria and to here, and unless we manage this river system better in the long term, then what we do in terms of shorter term measures will not help.

HENRY JONES: I think irrigators maybe could learn quite a bit from us that and say that if you are not sustainable then everything is going to die. And I really think they could take a lesson out of our book.

INT  Tomorrow Garry Hera-Singh will again battle the elements to catch fish. His young son wants to learn the craft and he's determined to give him the opportunity.

GARRY HERA-SINGH: It's really simple. The environment is what produces the fish. If we look after the environment, the fish will do the rest for you.

Gary Hera-Singh - Oral History in the Coorong Fishery 

INTERVIEWEE: GARRY HERA-SINGH (GHS)

INTERVIEWER: HAMISH SEWELL (INT)

INT Okay, so would you like to introduce yourself?

GHS Yeah, my name is Gary Hera-Singh. I’m a commercial fisher in the Lower Lakes and Coorong Fishery. I have been for the last 28 years. I’m a third generation fisher on my father’s side and a fifth generation fisher on my mother’s side. 

GHS We’re currently situated about 400 metres from Lake Albert, nicely wedged between the Coorong and Lake Albert, having this yarn about the history of the Lower Lakes and Coorong.

GHS My mother was a Rumbelow and her father was Lester Rumbelow. 

The Rumbelows were originally whalers, in the Victor Harbor region. My grandfather Lester was sent by his father from Victor Harbor in 1930 up to the Lower Lakes to teach some fishermen how to sail around the lakes. While he was up here in the Lower Lakes region he struck up a friendship with a guy called Fred Pearson and in 1930 instead of going back to Victor Harbor he stayed in the In the Lower Lakes and Coorong area and fished from the 1930’s right through until 1992.  The year before he died.  

On my father’s side, Hera-Singh, he was a commercial fisher from about the mid-1920’s and he fished in the Lower Lakes and Coorong region until he died in 1986. 

INT So you had a close connection with your granddad and your father, who were both working as fishermen?

GHS Just about all the unprinted history of the Lower Lakes and Coorong that I ever got was from both those grandfathers. I used to talk endlessly about the fish and the years both of them fished in this region the. They fished the Lower Lakes and Coorong region for over fifty years and I guess the most interesting thing is that they both told me that every year was different. Not one year is the same and I can verify that because in the last 28 years I can actually say the same thing, that every year is different, there’s not one year the same. 

Trying to capture some of the history of the region and particularly the fishery, there’s two parts to this; there’s the actual Lakes and Coorong Fishery, the commercial side of it, and then there’s the other part of it, which is the Hera-Singh history of the region. 

While I'm comfortable speaking about both of them, I don’t think we’re going to get the time to really talk about both of them in any great detail. 

The documented history of the Lakes and Coorong Fishery goes back as early as 1854, that’s the first evidence of this fishery. It all started from the paddle steamer days when crews were basically marooned because there was no flows in the rivers. They were unable to get from Milang or Goolwa back up to New South Wales and Victoria and Queensland.

Those stranded crews found the fish were so prolific in the region, at the time, that they could actually catch fish to sell, to replace their wages working on the paddle steamer. 

When the flows returned and the river started to run again a lot of the crew actually stayed and continued to fish. 

Particularly in the Milang and the Goolwa sites, there’s a massive history as far as commercial fishing is concerned on the western side of the Lower Lakes and Coorong fishery. 

It’s a bit different in the Meningie area, where I live. It was first surveyed in 1846 but we really can't find many records about commercial fishing on this side of the Lower Lakes and Coorong area until about 1900. 

It became a very important part of the industry, the primary industry area around Meningie became commercial fishing, and particularly in the South Lagoon. The only route through to Melbourne and the lower south east from Adelaide went through Meningie and the Coorong.  If you left as a traveller and you were heading to Melbourne, if you didn’t go by train, you got a stage coach to Milang, you caught the paddle steamer was from Milang across to Narrung and then from Narrung to Meningie and then you caught a stage coach from there down through the south east to Mount Gambier and down on towards to Melbourne. And that was the Royal Mail route of those days. 

People that used to fish in the south lagoon of the Coorong and supplied cafes and hotels and inns and wherever the Cobb and Co’s Inn was or the stop was. For those travellers. they could always buy fresh fish meals from the river every day, 

Although there wasn’t a lot of documentation about commercial fishing in this region before the Second World War, we’ve managed to collect quite a bit of stuff after the Second World War. 

You could buy a licence for ten shillings which later went to a pound. You could fish anywhere at any time up until the mid 1970’s. After that the fisheries became zoned, You had to be registered as a commercial fisher you had to fill out what they would call ‘Catch and Effort’ data, that goes monthly to the government. So that all really started to change back in the ‘60’s, ‘70’s. 

To where we are today, where it’s a continual stream of paperwork, to keep up with legislative requirements as a commercial fisher in this region. 

When the Barrages were built it took five years, from ’35 to 1940 the first big change to the ecology and the ecosystem once flows were completely controlled.

The size of the fishery was the whole lake pre-barrages, which was about 500 square kilometres. But when they built the barrages there was less than 100 kilometres left. 100 square kilometres of estuarine area. And really there’s only about ten or eleven percent of the riverine estuary area left. 

INT Why is that?

GHS The barrages actually separated the salt water from the fresh. In those days the laws of the country were governed by how many cattle you owned, how many sheep you owned, the size of the wall clip. The focus on the country’s wealth was completely different to what it is now. The focus has changed to providing fresh water for increasing agricultural development and also a reservoir for the surrounding areas for fresh water all year. 

This really crucified bird and fish populations in the area because it’s not what they were used to. They were used to, you know, one in five, or one in seven, or one in eight in year type floods but they weren’t used to the area being flooded out and the lakes in particular every year, all year round. 

You can look at the catch data from that period to see a gradual and slow decline in the fish numbers. That is also corresponded with bird numbers. Whether it’s waterfowl or whether it’s waders and the other smaller fish-eating birds, they’ve all been in decline. 

There’s a really good graph that shows that commercial fish catches of Mulloway, pre-barrages, which were all around the five, six hundred tonne a year. The very year that the barrages were built, it goes back under a hundred tonne. And there’s only been twice since 1940 where the fishery has actually caught more than a hundred tonne of Mulloway per year. 

INT So the Coorong is still the remnant estuarine area?

GHS Yeah, from basically Goolwa to Pelican Point, which is the area that encompasses the five barrage structures. Because of declining river flows, over-allocation of extraction of water out of the Murray-Darling Basin, all those small to moderate flow events are now captured in the name of progress for irrigation and industrial development. And cities like Adelaide and all the river towns. 

Those animals that have evolved over tens of thousands of years, that relied on fresh water flows for recruitment and growth rates, now don’t get a drink that often and so in years of no flow, there’s no recruitment and there’s no growth rate. It’s a very complex and intricate food web.

The fishing industry started the Southern Fisherman’s Association, which is the group that represents the commercial Lakes and Coorong fishers. This was first formulated in late 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, by commercial fishers that were concerned about various aspects in the Lower Lakes and Coorong and it was interesting reading some of the minutes of those meetings. The degradation of habitat has been right up there as one of the top items, while the government and the public and recreational fishers had this perception that you know, those bloody bad commercial fishers taking all the fish. 

What’s actually come to light is really, the degradation of habitat is the big-ticket item. It’s about a 70 percent decline in most of our fish populations. 

INT That’s a very complex thing isn’t it? The depletion of habitat and there’s many things connected with that?

GHS Various communities here in Australia spend absolute squillions of dollars on aquaculture when you’ve got a perfect, natural aquaculture system here. You give that natural system what it wants, which is basically a drink of water in the spring and summer of every year, then the birds and the fish do the rest for nothing. They have a very high pertundancy, they have a very high reproductive rate and so they can regenerate and recoup in large numbers very quickly, you know, within a couple of years numbers will be really good again. 

But because the flows don’t come every year or every other year, and as, in this case, we’ve just experienced, you know, a decade of virtually no flows, of minimal flow, so those fish haven’t been able to recruit, or the birds haven’t been able to grow and reproduce in the last ten years. Particularly those estuarine dependent species, everything’s down and very low numbers. 

Different for the species that are marine dominant, in other words, they live in the ocean, they grow and reproduce in the ocean and don’t rely on the Coorong. If the Coorong were to disappear tomorrow then those species will still continue. But the estuarine dependent species, fish species, the Black Bream and the Green Back Flounder, the Congolli. They’re in very, very low numbers. They're all doomed.

Having said that though, with the high flows that we’ve had this year, there’s a good chance that they’ll turn around very, very quickly. And I guess that’s been the beauty of this fishery. We’ve got three different habitats here, we’ve got the fresh water, the estuarine and the marine habitat. And so at least in one of those different systems there’s one fish or one species that’s firing you know, whether it’s the Goolwa pipi or the Goolwa cockle or if that’s not going so well then it might be the Coorong Mullet, or if that’s not going then it might be the yellow belly or the Golden Perch in The Lakes. And we have quite a large section of fishery here that catch European carp and Bony Bream for the rock lobster markets. They harvest somewhere around 700 to 900 tonne of bait fish a year.

So, there’s an opportunity in the fishery for fishers to move around and try and fish the peaks of those species that’s in abundance. And not flog to death fish that are in very low numbers like the Black Bream or the Green Back Flounder that you know, are obviously stressed from drought and low-flow periods. 

INT So you talked about your granddads being fishermen here from a long time ago. Were they founders of the Southern Fisherman’s Association?

GHS They were members, I wouldn't say they were founders. Lester was in the original group of fishers that was in the group that actually met in the Corio Hotel at Goolwa in September in 1939. They talked about how they should protect the interests of the fishers and do what they could to -- particularly in view of the imminent completion of the Goolwa Barrage, and structures right across the lake system and what that meant for the fishery and no one at the time really realised just how much an impact that that structure would have on the commercial fishery. It just changed virtually overnight. 

INT And you’ve got minutes from those meetings?

GHS Yes.

INT It must be interesting looking at the legacy of political meetings like that when in some ways that debate has continued?

GHS Well it is interesting because 60 plus years down the track a lot of the issues are still the same. The degradation of habitat is right up there. Government regulations and bureaucrats, which we are continually dealing with, um.. where --- there was a great opportunity for a commercial fishers in the bygone days, there was a lifestyle fishers, that might have only fished for, you know, three or four weeks, got some money together and then either didn’t fish for a while or went off and did something else, or … their licence only cost them, you know, ten shillings so it was not a great impost, uh.. and so they fished when they --- wanted to, when they chose to. 

Now, because I pay over 10,000 dollars a year for a licence, for the privilege to fish you have to run your fishing business as a business. I know I want to fish tomorrow. I've still got to go out and fish because it costs me over 200 dollars a week before I put one litre of fuel in the tank, before I put any food on the table for my family, so it’s much more intense these days. 

INT There’s a lot more pressure on you?

GHS A lot more pressure absolutely.

INT What did your grandfathers pass on to you in terms of fishing? Is there anything that you’d care to share?

GHS A lot of the discussions I had were either late at night over a cup of tea or coffee were about the old days, and about the fish habits. When you break the species down and you talk about the time of year that they arrive and when they should and - the absolute classic is - the old fisher used to say, ‘Well when the dandelions come out the Black Bream start to move.’ And, ‘When the dandelions start to dry off and die that’s when the Mulloway turn up.’ 

When you start looking at the reasons for these fish turning up it is to do with their hormone development, their photogenic periods, as you get closer to the summertime equinox, which happens in generally, September 23rd, 24th, where the days get longer than the nights so therefore, there’s dramatic increase in water temperature.

There’s more sunlight naturally, and the fish normally eat up over the winter months, building up their reproductive organs, their gonads, and so it’s interesting when you say, ‘well okay, that’s about the time that the dandelions come out,’ and so you can correlate. ‘Well okay I know - what I know biologically about fish and what these old guys who didn’t know anything about the biology, what they knew, the other signs were - the dandelions, the time of the year when the water warms up.’ 

Salinities is another big important thing, particularly with the recruitment of Black Bream. They used to taste the water. Now I just either read the real time data off of the water monitors or stick a salinity monitor in the water and say, ‘okay, that’s 20,000 EC or that’s 120,000 EC,’ and you know there’s no fish in that sort of water but it’s just interesting how these guys got by without any technological advantage and yet they were very good fishers and caught a lot of fish. 

INT And they’d tell you that they tasted that?

GHS Yeah. I use a salinity monitor now to tell me what the salinity levels are, they used to just taste the water. But about the mesh sizes, about where you set nets, about how you set nets and watch for weather, always look at the clouds.

I look at the BOM site and I look at the weather that’s been forecast for the next two, three, four days, full week, but I also look at the clouds, look at the mares’ tails and say, ‘well this time of the year, you’ve got strong south-westerlies, that means big seas, that means strong current in the Coorong, that means don’t set in any narrow areas, try and pick a sheltered spot if you have to fish,’ all these sorts of things. So you just put it all together so what you’re trying to do is minimise damage, loss of gear and try to keep your catch rates up. 

So, it’s interesting just, reflecting on those discussions I had with the older guys, about how they fished and where they fished and what they did. And the species, the time of the year.

It was interesting, both of them inferred to me that the more you reckon you know about fishing, really the less you do know.

INT That’s a bit like life, really.

GHS Of course, most of those guys were, you know, they operated sailing boats, they rowed everywhere, and particularly during the war and sometime after the Second World War there were petrol rations. Everybody rowed, you know, and they kept the petrol for their vehicles. It was nothing for them to row, you know, eight or ten miles in a day, out to the nets and back again. And then if they got a favourable wind they would sail to either Milang or Goolwa to get rid of their fish.

As a kid I was told in those days that’s when boats were made of wood and men were made of steel. They were a really tough breed of guys. Really tough.

INT Did you go out with them on the boats?

GHS My earliest recollections as a child was that it was windy and it was cold and I probably would have been four or five years old at that time. But as I got older and got interested, you know, I was a mad fisher as a kid. I used to work for one of my grandfathers. He had a fish processing business here in Meningie and of course in those days before decimal currency it was like, you know, work all weekend, Saturday and Sunday for a couple of shillings and then as I got a bit older it went to five shillings. When decimal currency came I got a pay rise that went to a dollar, and two bucks and five dollars. I had a very strong interest from a very, very early age. 

INT So where did you grow up?

GHS In Meningie, I’ve been here all my life. I’m 54 and apart from five or six years travelling around the world, I’ve been here all my life. 

INT How deep is the Coorong?

GHS The deepest part of the Coorong is around the Murray mouth estuary area where the flows come out of the barrages and washes out to sea. There’s also some fairly deep water, well used to be, around the salt creek region in the South Lagoon, about fifteen to twenty foot of water in that region there. That’s only a small section. 

INT So it’s generally quite shallow?

GHS Yes. Most of it’s under six, seven feet. 

INT And these lakes just here? To the west of us?

GHS Lake Albert in its deepest parts is around two metres, two and a half metres. Lake Alexandrina is a little bit different. The deepest water is up near the mouth of the river, near Wellington, there’s about 60, 70 foot of water up there but most of the lake is around six feet to about ten feet. And then you got a couple of deeper sections down the Goolwa Channel there, they’re around 20 feet. 

INT So how does the play between the fresh water, the estuarine and the marine water sort of play itself out in terms of the fish species? 

GHS Pre-barrages the flows came down the river which is, you know, the northern extremity of Lake Alexandrina, before it opens up and empties into Lake Alexandrina, 95 percent of the time that was fresh. The water emptied out into the lakes and then you had the Murray Mouth and the Goolwa region and depending on the time of the year, whether you had strong winds and king tides and lots of rain, the seawater on the tides, twice a day, would ingress into the lakes and might get to as far as Point Sturt. 

Which is about half way up the lakes. And then the tide would change and the fresh water would push that seawater back out again and, depending on the flows coming down the river, whether they were big flows or just small flows. And my grandfathers used to say that if you wanted to catch a Mulloway you always fished west and sou’ west of Narrung and if you wanted to catch a cod you always fished north, north-east of Narrung. 

So in that one lake it’s quite possible you could catch Murray Cod in the northern extremities and you could catch Mulloway in the southern extremities. Basically that’s what happened. 

Post-barrages, completely different. They turned that 500 square kilometres into a fresh water habitat, became, basically, a freshwater impoundment and when the lakes got too high, and that was the only reason, then they decided to release water into the Coorong. And there was no methodology in how they released it. If it was windy and it was rough, or if there were big seas then they released the water out of Tauwitchere and if they wanted to get rid of the water in a hurry then they used the Goolwa structure. And so that water got released very quickly, virtually no benefits to the Coorong at all and then was discharged to sea. 

The operations have changed a lot. And particularly when the flows came naturally and then dispersed into the sea, they were very gentle, I mean the gradient here’s roughly an inch a mile, so there’s not much fall, and that’s basically the fall of the River Murray. So flows always came fairly gentle, they peaked and then receded fairly gently. 

Now where the flows come and sure enough, the lakes gently rise, but when it’s discharged it’s discharged with a head difference, you know, anything up to two or three feet between the lakes and the Coorong. 

INT So it rushes through?

GHS It really pours through. You can turn a marine ecosystem in the Coorong into a freshwater ecosystem in about two and a half hours. 

INT And you’re lobbying against that?

GHS We have been, for a long time. The Industry wrote a barrage operating strategy purely for the ecological benefits of the Coorong. I think the bureaucrats and the government are attempting to try and adopt within reason, some of those recommendations that we’ve made. 

But it’s a slow process, I mean it took more than 20 years for any acknowledgement that  you got to be much more ecologically sensitive when releasing water out of the barrage structure. 

Who knows with this Murray-Darling Basin water management plan whether we’ll actually get any more water or even less water, I mean, who knows? But the system down here, for millennia has relied on fresh water flows and all the animals, it doesn’t matter whether it’s birds, it doesn’t matter whether it’s fish, invertebrates, aquatic plants, fauna, terrestrial fauna, it has all evolved and relied on fresh water flows.

INT And is at the mercy of everything that happens up-river?

GHS Absolutely. We are extremely dependent on those people giving us some water. I guess it’s contentious about how much water we do get and how much water the system really needs to function properly.

We do have to get a lot smarter about how we deliver that water  and particularly to the ecosystems to get net optimal ecological benefits out of those water releases. 

Probably the biggest, single issue post-barrages time, is the explosion of the the European carp. It’s had a absolute monumental impact on the commercial fishery.

I was involved in some survey work back in the ‘90’s of fish numbers in Lake Alexandrina and 90 percent, numerically, 90 percent of the catch was European carp.

I mean there’s been a lot of blame from recreationals, various community groups, political scapegoats on the commercial fishery for declining fish numbers, but really degradation of habitat and introduced species is about 95 percent of the problem.  Commercial and recreational fishing is about five percent of the problem.

The government continues to manage the human component, which is the five percent, which is the commercial and recreationals but because degradation of habitat and introduced species are 95 percent of the problem it’s too hard, too expensive to do anything. Because it’s underwater, out of sight, it’s out of mind so people in the cities don’t get to see it. 

INT And when you said that your grandfathers were very conscious of the degradation of habitat what sort of things were they talking about?

GHS Mostly declining river flows, particularly with the Coorong. The Coorong is so dependent on river flows for its fluctuating salinities and around the estuary and the north lagoon.

The older fishermen, and not only my grandfathers, but all the old fishermen realise that the south lagoon, which used to get water out of the southeast, which is a salt creek, was not only dependant on River Murray flows, but it was also dependant on water coming out of the south-east of South Australia

What happened was historically, the south-east, all its’ ground water, its’ natural flow, used to run towards the Coorong, in a north-westerly direction. Even though the gradient to the coast was very steep there was a lot of what they call interdunal corridors and so um.. the water found --- particularly the surface water uh.. found it much easier to run uh.. parallel to the coast towards the Coorong. And so there was ground water inputs, there was surface water periodically coming in to the Coorong, as well as uh.. flows down the River Murray, so the whole Coorong used to get this, you know, fluctuating salinity levels, which the birds and fish used to absolutely love because your most productive --- ecologically, your most productive systems are your estuarine systems. Not marine, not fresh water, but estuarine systems. That’s where all the productivity is. 

And so, there were lots of fish, lots of birds, and what’s happened is that as the southeast of South Australia got developed for farming, uh.. a lot of that country was underwater. They actually learnt that the gradient to the sea was much steeper and they could get the water off of their hinterland much quicker, and so they developed this drainage network in the southeast to bisect all these natural flowing watercourses that came to the Coorong and delivered the water to the sea. And so they got the water off their properties much quicker and then they opened up all this farming land. And as I said, historically, the wealth of the county, in those days, was valued by the sheep, the wool clip, the amount of cattle, the amount of grain you could grow.

But what actually happened, over time, and this --- it didn’t happen over night, it happened over, you know, four or five decades. And so, the salinities in the south lagoon started increasing slowly and then it got to a point where fish numbers started to disappear. Well, when the fish started to disappear, the birds started to disappear. And then by --- and really things started to turn seriously bad when the mouth closed in 1981. And then the fishermen said, ‘Things are serious here, we’re going to lose the Coorong if we don’t start addressing the degradation of habitat issues.’ And that’s been a constant battle ever since. 

And what’s happened now, is that the south lagoon has become so hyper saline, five to seven times saltier than seawater, there are --- there’s no life. The only thing that’s left in that south lagoon now is brine shrimp. And that’s basically the last step before ecological collapse. You know, all the insect larvae, all the aquatic weeds, all the small fish that had high tolerances to salt, um.. the soft-mouthed Hardyhead, they’re all gone. And the last rung on the ladder, ecologically is the brine shrimp, and so all the birds are gone and that’s had a major impact particularly on vulnerable birds, like the Fairy Tern, that used to have large nesting areas in the south lagoon of the Coorong. 

They’ve now had to set up their nesting sites near the Murray Mouth for food. And unfortunately with the storm surges, and over a three feet of water or a metre of water comes in on storm surge, those eggs get washed off the sandbars and we’ve gone from a critically low 500 pairs of Fairy Terns down to less than a hundred pairs this year. Yeah --- I think they’re on the verge of extinction. We’re about to lose another bird species in the Coorong. 

And so um.. and I don’t see the salinities in the South Lagoon turning around in a hurry, particularly with uh.. the strategies that have been in place for the last 25, 30 years. And --- that’s really sad because as a child, myself, and even my father, we spent all our fishing lives in the South Lagoon of the Coorong. The South Lagoon was so productive, there were … This fishery was taking 20 to 30 tonnes of Greenback Flounder a month out of the South Lagoon. 

I haven’t done any commercial fishing in the South Lagoon for 20 years. So, it’s just been --- you know, it’s been a massive loss, not only to commercial fishing but to tourism, to recreational fishing and to the ecology and the environment. It’s just been just like huge cancerous growth of hyper salinity in the Coorong. It’s just increasing. 

INT So do you want to just tell us what your position is in terms of fishing advocacy, sort of lobbying, do you want to tell us kind of where you sort of stand with those things?

GHS I’m president of the Southern Fishermen Association which is the group that represents the commercial fishers of Lower Lakes and Coorong  and so, um.. all the fishermen, even the new entrants that come into the fishery, all understand that if you don’t have a healthy environment you don’t have a healthy sustainable, economically, financial, commercial fishery. It’s pretty simple. 

And so, even the new entrants realise that the Coorong is not what it once was. And I doubt we will ever return it to its former glory. About thirty years ago the government come in with a big stick and whacked the commercial fishermen around the head and said, ‘Fish populations are declining for whatever reasons,’ whether it’s over-fishing, whether it’s degradation of habitat or any other reason. ‘We need to reduce the numbers of fishers, we need to reduce the effort, the amount of gear, we’re going to put in some seasonal closures blah, blah, blah.’

And the fishermen were really angry at that time because it wasn’t their fault. After a bit of deep and meaningful discussion about what we could do, we started this process of lobbying government agencies about how we had to start turning things around for the Lower Lakes and Coorong  region. The Department of Environment, Department of Water, Ministers, any politician that would listen. And so that’s been a really long, ongoing process over the last 25 years. 

And I can honestly say it’s only probably been in the last four or five years, since we’ve had this really severe drought, all time low lake levels of a metre below sea level. This area ‘s never, ever seen it this low before. Acid sulphate soil issues. Massive degradation of habitat issues. You know, declining bird populations, um.. a lot of --- closing down of a lot of local industries, like the dairy farming and --- a lot of people have left the district. The school lost 100 kids, you know, over the last five years. That really --- that people started to realise that if you haven’t got a healthy ecosystem and a healthy environment around you --- people are now just beginning to realise that that’s what underpins mankind. 

You know, if you don’t have healthy ecosystems with lots of biodiversity then in the end, um.. we can all move to the cities, but in the end you need water and you need food. It comes from regional areas, so… So it’s been a big realisation in that sense but it’s been a lot of work and --- like my position and the rest in --- of the fishermen in this fishery, all the efforts are honorary, I mean no-one gets paid for the work they do so, you know, you’ve got your job to do, you’ve got your family to look after, your business to run and when you get some spare time you do some lobbying or write letters or whatever. 

It’s been a tough battle in that sense, particularly for the commercial fishers, you know, in 2010, 20111.

INT Is there any threat to you licences round here?

GHS Who knows what the politicians are thinking. I mean uh.. I look at all the commercial fisheries that have closed and particularly the inland water fisheries in New South Wales, Victoria and now, South Australia, they've been all political decisions. Not based on sustainability, I mean, it’s been the perception out there that we got to get rid of the commercials because, you know, they’re depleting the fish stocks, when degradation of habitat, to me, I --- I almost think it’s some sort of uh.. what’s the word I’m thinking of? Um.. uh…

INT Sweetener for our conscience?

GHS Yeah, it’s a feel-good exercise. If --- you know, everyone’s got this perception and we get it jammed down our throats on the --- in the media, whether it’s print, radio or TV, over-fishing, you know, over-fishing, over-fishing, over-fishing. Well that’s --- you know, people, if they want to believe it then they do and they accept it. 

A lot of the over-fishing that’s happened around the world ‘s all in the northern hemisphere, it’s all been done mostly under corporatised type fisheries. You look at these small, community-based fisheries like this one here and like those that existed in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, where there’s a long history, I can’t think of any fisher that just goes out and rapes --- and pillages and catches fish for today. Because their feeling, just like my grandfather’s was that if you know you’ve got a healthy ecosystem, you know you’ve got fish out there, you know you’ve got money in the bank. You know you’ve got a future, you know your kids have got a future.

And so to protect that, you know, we’ve had to work fairly hard in the last 25 years. So, and the last thing that we want is --- to corporatise these small community based fisheries. They’re the ones that are sustainable, they’re the canary in the mines. If you haven’t got a healthy commercial fishery in an area then you’re ecosystem ‘s in real strife. And the only way you’re ever going to know that is to have the commercial fisheries, because of, you know, their daily catch and net returns and the monitoring and the…

INT You were talking about that before we put the tape on. Do you want to talk about that with the --- up the Murray --- with the commercial fishers, with the licences?

GHS Oh well the Riverland Fishery here in South Australia um.. --- the South Australia government had an election in 2002, it was a hung parliament. And for either one of the parties to --- have a majority uh.. they needed the support of an independent, and he had a wish list and on that wish list was to close the --- Riverland Fishery in South Australia. Which, to me, was --- I’ve looked at a lot of different commercial fisheries around the world and if you ever wanted to base a truly sustainable commercial fishery, they --- the Riverland Fishery in South Australia were the most sustainable. 

Every commercial fisher had a reach. There were 30 . They only fished that reach, and if they felt that reach was a bit stressed or numbers were low in that area, then they went off and they did something else for a while. You know, drove a truck or went and pruned a few grapevines or sheered sheep, worked in the building industry, laid a few bricks. They were their own conservationists of their own patch, they looked after it. What was really sad is that fishery was closed down purely for political reasons. 

What’s happened since is that under the Fisheries Act the government has an obligation to monitor fish stocks, particularly those that are now harvested by the recreationals on the river, the Golden Perch and the Cod stocks. 

I know in the first three years that the government spent $5.2M  on doing sampling programs to monitor those fish stocks, which wouldn't have been anywhere near as good as what the data that the commercials were supplying on a daily basis. I haven’t been able to find out since just how much money they really have spent on monitoring those fish stocks. 

What the community doesn’t understand is that $5.2M could be better off spent hospitals, police, other community services. The other interesting thing is that because the fish that they were harvesting were high-valued species, Cod and Callop, most of those fish were sent interstate so that they were actually bringing money into the State. 

Unfortunately, unlike this fishery, the locals up there didn’t see the commercial fishers, because they weren’t getting any product from them there was no community support. The community basically said, ‘Well… didn’t know they were there, not gonna miss ‘em if they’re gone.’ 

Where, one of the things we’ve been very conscious of in this fishery is that we always make sure, and you can go to anywhere in Meningie here, the butcher shop, the two delicatessens, supermarkets, fish and chip shops, you can get out local product here, as fish and chips. And so the community is very much aware of the fishing industry here, it’s our second biggest industry in the Meningie area, and so that if we ever got the chop, the community would really feel it. 

INT And you have a lot of support in the community.  At the moment we’ve got good water flows coming through into the system, are you noticing a big increase in the freshwater fish into the system?

GHS When you have high flows most of the native fish actually move upstream, to spawn. And then they spawn and then the small hatchlings, the larvae, and as they get a bit older, a little bit bigger, they get into their first year, they actually go with the flow, ‘cause they’re not strong to , unlike the bigger fish, to actually swim upstream. So, they repopulate the river system.

So what we find is that native fish all swim upstream, and they spawn and then the larvaes then wash down, through the river system into the lakes and then re-generates. Most of those native fish, we don’t catch in the first three or four years, until they get to legal minimum size, 33 cm, and so there is a lag, it takes about three to four years before we really start to see an increase in fish populations. However, we do see the juveniles, you know, the numbers of ‘em startin’ to pop up.

INT So what are you seeing now in terms of freshwater, native fish?

GHS We’re seeing a lot of small fish, a lot of native Bream, introduced species, Redfin, and European carp, unfortunately. There’s another species that also has a huge impact on our native fish larvae and that’s why people call them a Mosquitofish or Gambusia. They were introduced into Australia back in the 1920’s to eat the mosquito larvae, because most of the people were Europeans at the time and hadn’t been brought up being bitten alive by mosquitos. They wanted to make an impact on the mosquito numbers. So what they did was they brought these fish in from South America. 

What they found was that the Mosquitofish actually found the native fish larvae a much easier to consume than the mosquito larvae, so they went round knocking off all the Callop and Cod fingerlings before they got too big.

INT Do you notice much of an interplay between the Callop, the Catfish, the Murray Cod?

GHS Well those native fish, they’re extremely perceptive. I mean they understand that if the salinity starts to slightly increase then they’ll move back upstream to the fresher water. But where these fish have been marooned and landlocked is that in the past there’s been big flows so the fish have gone with the flow. The flows have stopped so they shut all the barrages overnight. So downstream there’s all these animals trying to get back upstream. And up until the last four or five years there’s been no fish ways, there’s been no way for those animals to get back upstream.

We lobbied very hard for more than 20 years to get fish ways put in every structure. We have two in at Tauwitchere Barrage and one in the Goolwa Barrage at the moment. And so hopefully, after this flow period, and when things start to wind back, and they start to close things down, then a lot of animals, particularly those freshwater dominant animals that have been trapped downstream, can actually get back up. 

So that’s important. It’s about giving everything a little bit of an edge or a bit of an opportunity.  The natural system is one of the most productive aquaculture systems and it doesn’t cost the community anything. The fish ‘ll do it, the rest for you for nothing, if you give them that opportunity. And that’s what it’s all about. 

INT Hmm. So, a big part of your community engagement strategy is really to let people know that you’re involved. You’re involved in the support of the habitat, you want people here to kind of understand what it is that you are doing.

GHS Yeah, well, and part of that process was --- we looked at a green tick for the fishery. We looked at some sort of eco-labelling for the fishery about 15 years ago and we looked at all the different types of --- certification systems possible for a commercial fishery, and there was one in Europe that was a real standout and that was called the MSC, the Marines Stewardship Council Certification. Um.. and it’s a very rigorous process but it’s all about acknowledging a sustainable fishery and a well-managed fishery. 

And the fishers here have always, even --- in my grandfather’s day, all those guys recognised and even the guys now recognise that what we do is sustainable. We know that the fishery is --- reasonably well managed, but we needed some way of documenting that. But we need to get some sort of benefit from it. And so um.. this fishery was the first to put out an environmental management plan for a commercial fishery in the world. Uh.. we completed that in 1998. And then the conservation groups got interested in what we we're doing and World Wide Fund for Nature, which has a sustainable fishery section in it, were interested in what we were doing and they co-sponsored us in to getting a certification process. 

It took us ten years, we had no money, we had limited scientific data, which was what the assessment process was based on, and so it took us a while to get our cards in place. It probably cost, all up, about a quarter of a million dollars, which this fishery didn’t have. Um.. In 2008, we finally got the certification. After ten years. It’s basically a green tick to verify that this fishery is well managed and it’s sustainable. 

There were 30 conditions put on the fishery, over a five-year period, we were audited annually, by independent assessors and auditors. Its another way of telling the rest of the world  it’s not over-fished and rundown.

INT Tell me about the ways in which you share a lot of practices with your grandparents’ way of fishing.

GHS Well as far as the methodology is concerned about the way we fish, they’re still the same. There’s no power hauling, there’s no mechanical aids in the fishery. Where my grandfathers used a rowboat or a sailing boat to get to the nets, we use an outboard motor. They’re small, they’re still small tinnies, they’re low-tech. Where one time they would have been wood, now they’re aluminum. So that hasn’t changed.

My nets are still set exactly the same way my grandfathers set them 80 years ago. If he was alive today he could jump in the boat and go out and run those nets exactly the same as he would have ran 80 years ago. 

We have been recognised as low-tech, high physical input fishery which is a natural cap on effort. Humans are not machines, you can’t turn ‘em on at six o’clock in the morning and turn ‘em off at ten o’clock at night. That is really has been a really strong point in the fishery. The rotational harvest in the fishery has also been another very strong point. Moving between the freshwater component, the estuary component and the marine component and having that ability to move around within the fishery has also been a very strong point. 

There’s a classic case in the last five years where Black Bream and Greenback Flounder have been under --- they’re estuarine dependant, there’s been no estuary. These fish haven’t recruited for at least five years, if not longer, and so they’ve been in very low numbers. So the fishermen, instead of trying to sit there and catch the last Bream or the last Flounder, they’ve actually been able to go off an fish either for pipis on the beach, or fish for Mullet or Mulloway in the Coorong, or fish in the lake for Rock Lobster bait; the Carp and the Bony Bream. 

And that’s really important. To have that access to all those areas and those species. 

INT And you’re pulling the fish out by hand, on the nets?

GHS Yes, all by hand. Have a look at these, they’re cut to smithereens. (Laughs).

INT And that must put a bit of a limit on what you can catch? If you’re pulling them out by hand I mean.

GHS Oh, it’s a great cap on effort. If you look at industrial type fisheries around the world, Alaskan Pollock is just unbelievable. A million metric tonnes. In one haul they pull out our whole fishery. 32 fishers and 36 licenses in the fishery.  In one haul they catch our annual Coorong Mullet catch. We catch around 200, 220 tonnes of mullet a year. They catch up to 300 tonne in one shot. 

That’s just unbelievable. 

This fishery could not withstand those technological changes. You don’t find many fishers that have fish finders and echo sounders, and those sorts of things. But because the water is shallow, most of the fish disperse before the transducer goes over them. Those guys that have got sounders in their boat mostly use it for depth and finding the drop-offs and those sorts of things to identify the endobenthic region. There’s not a lot of room for technological gain in this fishery. 

The fishermen voted in 1986, ‘We do not want mechanical harvesting in this fishery.’

INT Why’s that?

GHS Because the fishermen are very conscious about if you want a long-term, sustainable fishery, then cap the effort, and that’s one way of doing it. 

I mean, the government says, you know, ‘We’ll reduce the number of nets in the fishery,’ but a fisherman can use nets very efficiently, very effectively, so really, while it looks good on paper, the reality is it doesn’t work.

The fishermen know that if they put a cap or want to reduce the effort, but then don’t allow mechanical harvesting, don’t allow power hauling, don’t allow machines to come in and start harvesting the fish otherwise you’re going to be in serious trouble down the track. 

INT And lose a lot of jobs too.

GHS And a lot of utilities that support the fishing industry. I’ve got a folder up there with hundreds and hundreds of thank you letters in it from Girl Guides, Church groups, community groups that get fish donations. In our fishery we have CFC volunteers, we got ambulance drivers, we’ve got Sea Rescue, the SES, so if the fishing industry closed, then those people would move on.

I coach the under eleven footy team during the winter months, well, the footy team’s gonna to be without a coach. So --- it’s not just fishing. You underpin all these other activities in the community. Particularly these regional areas, you know? It’s not a big population. There’s a lot of people multi-task, they do a lot of things, you know, like --- they work at a football club, they might work at a tennis club in the summertime and they might be an ambulance driver, so there’s a lot of --- there’ll be a lot of holes to fill if --- the fishing industry closed in --- this region.

I coach the under eleven footy team during the winter months. Well the footy team’s gonna to be without a coach. You underpin all these other activities in the community. Particularly these regional areas. It’s not a big population. There’s a lot of people multi-task, they do a lot of things, they work at a football club, they might work at a tennis club in the summertime and they might be an ambulance driver, so there’ll be a lot of holes to fill if the fishing industry closed in this region.

I’ve already said to my wife, you know, ‘Start lookin’ at real estate --- interstate.’ And it won't be Queensland that’s for sure but look at Western Australia or Northern Territory, I said, ‘we’ll be leaving the area, there’s nothing here for us.’ 

INT So, come back to your grandfathers again, was your grandparents --- I mean, you’re talking about your grandfathers, were your grandmothers involved in fishing in any way?

GHS My grandfather on my father’s side had a fish processing business and they used to sell fish from the back door of their home.. She, apart from raising seven kids, that was her job.

INT Filleting the fish?

GHS Not often because he had a lot of kids and grandchildren that helped out. In the latter years she did spend a bit of time in there but most of the time she was too busy cooking, washing cleaning, selling fish at the back door and answering the phone, taking calls.  

My other grandfather, he was on his own for the last 32 years of his life.  His house got burnt down at Narrung and he decided not to rebuild and he lived in his fishing shack out at Pelican Point for 30 years. He lived an extremely simple life and didn’t want for much and didn’t care for much. He basically fished until he died, really.

INT And did you used to go out and see him?

GHS I was fishing from the same area for the last 18 years so I saw him nearly every night. We used to sit around the Tilley light and talk about the old times about, how the fishing was and the catches and the seasons and how things change. Funny things and sad things.

My grandfather on my father’s side, one of his brothers was a Prisoner of War in Changi and after the war, when he came back and he was so skinny and frail that he couldn't fish on his own. His older brother came back and gave him a hand until he built up enough strength, but he drowned in the Coorong while they were out fishing.  Terribly tragic, and of course in those days there were very few people around. 

Anyway, after they raised the alarm they tried to find him and they couldn't. They trawled for him using grapple hooks for about two days and they finally pulled him up. But we have crabs in the Coorong, and his body was badly eaten by crabs, when they found him both the brothers were pretty shocked, because they’re the ones that found him. 

So that was very tough and tragic but they did also enjoy their times, because fishing was more of a way of life and not run truly as a business like it is today. If you didn’t fish today, we’ll go fishing tomorrow. If there was a party on, or --- they used to often ride their horses and jigs and the old T-Model Buck Fords and those sort of things, um.. fifty miles to a party or a dance or you know, just to socialise and have a good time. Just completely different times to what it is now. 

In those days they had the very limited access to refrigeration and ice, particularly after the Second World War. The quality of fish is always an issue and particularly in hot weather. 

INT And getting the fish sent off to the markets quickly. 

GHS Yes.

INT So how would they manage that?

GHS Oh, there was a lot of smoking done in those early days. A lot of fish were smoked. A lot of fish were salted. Uh.. if you were close enough and it was cool enough, uh.. then you got your fish onto a transport or onto the rail or whatever to send to markets, but ice was sent from Adelaide down to here and --- in bags with sawdust jammed around it to try and insulate it. So you might start off with a 40 pound block and by the time it got here it might be ten or 15 pound. 

So um... yeah, it was always an issue. And that’s probably the biggest change that I’ve seen in this fishery, just in my lifetime, has to be the quality of fish. How it’s improved.

INT In terms of selling it?

GHS Yes, yeah.

INT And being able to hold it?

GHS Well we have a much better understanding now, like --- once the fish dies you don’t get that gut out, you’ve got four hours basically, to get that fish, temperature start to drop on it. And that’s the other thing, in the Lakes and Coorong  area, because most of our fishery is in large expanses of very shallow water, the water heats up very quickly in summertime. And particularly after hot spells, we can have 28, 30 degrees Celsius water, and so you’ve got to get that water --- those fish into iced water as quickly as possible from when they’re caught. 

Uh.. so, in the old days it was looking like coming in for a real hot spell there wasn’t much fishing done. You know, they’d just lay under a Coolabah tree or a Eucalypt and just ride it out until the weather cooled down because they knew they couldn't look after the fish.

INT Did the fish disappear when it got really hot like that?

GHS They don’t disappear. They’re not as active, they don’t move around as much, but I mean, you can still catch fish even when they’re lying dormant because you can get a net around them, they get inside and splash the oars and make a bit of noise and the fish just move away and then move into the net. So um.. there’s ways and means of catching fish that way. 

INT And you talked about using the same nets, fundamentally, I mean obviously, they’re made of different things, you’d be using plastic nets, whereas they’d be using hemp or …

GHS Yeah, hemp or cotton.

INT Hemp or cotton nets. How do you set a net?

GHS Same way my grandfather set ‘em. Top line in the boat and bottom line over the side, you just - you fix one end by - either by an anchor, or those days, they used to use a lot of what we call kellick sticks, um.. and kellick anchors. Now we just throw over a grapple. 

INT It holds on to the bottom?

GHS Yep it hangs on to the bottom. Um.. a lead rope attached to a buoy and then just feed the net out. And then just pick it up by hand exactly the same way you fed it out. 

INT And how big is the net?

GHS All our nets are 50 metres long and --- up to 25 measures deep. Which is about two metres. Yeah, six foot six, something like that. 

INT And are you repairing those nets?

GHS Depending on the type of net, depending on the ply rating, if it’s a heavy ply net and it gets torn or - holes get punched in it, yeah we do repair those. Um, but the lighter ply nets, if they’re flounder nets or bream nets, and they get torn, particularly with the high Australian dollar at the moment, it’s actually much easier to strip that net and re-sling a new bundle. 

INT And are there many snags in where you’re fishing?

GHS Lots of reefs, yeah. Lots of rocky outcrops and depending on the time of the year, sometimes the fish are on the sandy regions, sometimes they’re - they hang over the rock and when the fish are moving, particularly in the spring or the autumn, then you can find the fish anywhere. On muddy bottoms, sandy or rock, you know, they’re all over the place, depending on what the currents are like and the tides and the moon phase, there’s a whole range of you know, different influences on fish movement and habits. 

INT And is there a range that you have a licence for or are you allowed to pretty much go out of the mouth and within this system as well?

GHS Our fishery incorporates the two lakes, Lake Albert and Lake Alexandrina, the Coorong, from Goolwa to Salt Creek, which is about 130 kilometres, and the ocean from Goolwa Beach Road out to three nautical miles down to Kingston, which is about um.. that’d be close to 200 kilometres, 180 kilometres, I suppose. 

INT Along the coast?

GHS Along the coast, yeah. Some of the roughest water in the state. Heavy surf zone, there’s nothing between our shoreline on the ocean beach and the Antarctic, so, you get some big swells, a lot of heavy surf. But we do have uh.. a pipi fishery, or a cockle fishery in that region and uh.. and there is another method we use to catch Mulloway called swinging, where you actually use the undertow and the rips on the surf to actually draw the net out, through the surf, and one end of the net’s tied to a vehicle and then once it gets out, depending on the ocean currents, time of the year, whether it actually moves parallel with the shore or just goes out and washes in. 

And we did a methodology search on fishing methods around the world and it’s unique, they don’t do this anywhere else. So, that --- something was evolved originally from the Murray Mouth, where the fishers used to put the net inside in the Murray Mouth and with the outgoing flow, let the net wash out the mouth and sweep out to sea and pick up Mulloway that way. Well in 1974 uh.. no ’72 sorry, the fishers were --- commercial fishers were banned from doing that and so then someone said. ‘Well maybe we can use this type of swinging down along the beach.’ And they successfully got it out in a rip and we’ve been --- the industry’s been doing that ever since. 

INT So are you taking the boats out of the mouth and fishing along there?

GHS No. No. No. No. We have vehicles on the beach, um.. and there’s a rope attached to one end of the net, uh.. we put a wetsuit on, drag the net to the start of the rip, the net gets taken out to sea. And then, as I said, depending on the currents and time of the year, whether that actually goes along the beach, and we just follow the --- net along with the ute. Um.. with the rope attached to that net, and quite often you see the fish hit and quite often you get nothing. 

It’s only 50 metres of net but, I’ve caught up to 990 kilos of Mulloway in one 50 metre net. So, you know, at times when the fish are thick you can catch a lot of fish. 

INT So are you using much the same size nets that you would inside the system here?

GHS No, they’re a much bigger net. We --- uh.. the swing net is basically eight inches to twelve inches, in diameter, in mesh size. Um.. which is very similar to what the Mulloway fishery inside the Coorong and the Lakes used to use prior to barrages, they used to use a lot of that big mesh net. 

And that’s interesting in itself, where the year the barrages were completed that the big Mulloway came into the Coorong looking for a way to get upstream, past the barrages and they came in en masse that year. And then the very next year, and ever since then, they’ve never come back into the Coorong in those numbers ever again. They couldn't get back into the Lakes. 

INT And is there other areas in the Lakes system and the Coorong where you are assigned --- that’s your area or…? How do you guys work out where exactly you fish?

GHS You’re not allowed to set nets within 200 metres of somebody else. And I like to be a lot further than that, if you can. Um.. setting nets close to somebody else, all you do is reduce your catch and their catch so… I mean, it’s not very productive. And generally, uh.. particularly the older fishermen, they always like to uh.. like to have a bit of space around them and like to fish their own areas. And quite often if somebody’s in one area then they’ll, you know, go past them and fish somewhere else. 

But there are, I wouldn't call them hotspots, but there are areas where fish, if they’re in the region, they will hang over that reef or they will be in that gutter, or they’ll be in that hole or they’ll be on that sandbar. And so, if that area is already occupied then you just find similar habitat somewhere else. 

INT And tell me about your granddad who was at Pelican Point.

GHS Lester Rumbelow was a very simple man. Uh.. a man of high integrity and uh.. very strong principles. Um.. a very good fisherman. Understood fishing and the elements, the weather, the seasons, river flows, the importance of those river flows. Had a very intricate knowledge, which he accumulated over 60 years of commercial fishing in the Lower Lakes and Coorong  region, a very intricate knowledge of the fine detail and what makes a good fisherman. 

And it was interesting, there was, particularly in his latter years, when he got a bit older and a bit frailer, he still often caught as many fish out of a handful of nets as a lot of the younger fishermen who were using lots of net. He was --- because he understood and --- the system very well and understood fish patterns he had a --- beautiful saying, ‘One net set in the right spot is as good as ten in the wrong.’ And that was so, so apt, because he proved that time and time again. 

INT How long did he live for?

GHS 79, yeah. 

INT Was he the one who died in ’93?

GHS Yes. Alot of those guys and those older fishermen you know, if they saw a boat within half a mile they wouldn't go anywhere near it. You know, they’d say, ‘Well okay, you’re up there, I’ll leave that to you, I’ll go this way.’ 

But as I said, in those days, you know, there wasn’t a lot of expense in fishing and --- uh.. most of the guys that fish now, most of their fishing expenses, just to run their business are in excess of you know, 100, 120,000 dollars a year, depending how big you are and how many employees you’ve got and all the rest of it. But, as I said, you’ve got to make money, you’ve got to --- and your costs, everything you touch, say fuel doesn’t --- ice, refrigeration, electricity. It’s the same with every business. You can’t --- it’s not a lifestyle anymore. You have to make money. And you’re forced in to that position. And the government wants their pound of flesh as well, so… So, you’ve got to keep them happy. So um.. it’s just a different mindset, you know?

INT And there must be quite a fine line between the restrictions that are placed on you and which you’ve placed on yourselves and the money that you need to bring in, just to basically stay afloat?

GHS Yeah, and --- I guess that’s the ongoing battle, uh.. In 1970  there was 104 commercial fishers in this fishery and when limited --- what they call limited entry, um.., when they said, ‘Okay, we’re not issuing any more licences in this fishery,’ um.. there were 48 licences in 1983, when the Scheme of Management came in for Lakes and Coorong Fishery it went down to 32 licence holders, with 36 licences. 

INT So are they basically just dropping off as people pass away?

GHS Oh well, we had an amalgamation scheme, where you could buy another licence and add it onto yours. There was a bit of a rationalisation, I lost two workers that came without a licence, because I couldn't have anymore than two --- workers on the one licence. And the nets were rationalised, the endorsements and gear was all rationalised and we all came to an agreed position with the Department of Fisheries at the time. 

And so, that brought the number down. The really --- I guess the critical point now is --- that if the numbers of the fishers start to get any lower than what they are now --- we have this huge management bill that we’ve got to pay to the government every year. Last year it cost us 428,000 dollars to manage this fishery. So as the numbers of fishers keep decreasing then the licence fee, per year, per individual keeps increasing. So there’s got to be a bit of a balance there. 

INT Why is there a 420,000 dollar management fee? Is that for the licences? To pay for the licences?

GHS It’s to pay for them --- in South Australia we have what we call cost recovery and the --- purported management costs for the commercial fishery, for the Lakes and Coorong  Fishery in South Australia, which include things like SARDI, which is the South Australian Research Institute --- Development Institute, which does all our stock assessments and monitoring of fish stocks and analysis of data and all that sort of stuff. Uh.. compliance, we pay for our own compliance in the fishery, auditing, licensing, any legal aspects, legislation, there’s a whole ream of things that we pay for… 

INT Yep. Now I understand. 

GHS All that sort of stuff. So, our real concern is that if --- and --- the management bill keeps increasing exponentially, every year, and if you’ve got less and less fishers contributing to that --- pool of money, then it gets to a point where you know…

INT It falls on one or two people’s shoulders. 

GHS Less and less fishers, paying a bigger bill, which means they got to put more pressure on the fish stocks, to pay for those bills. So there’s a fine line there about how you manage that. 

INT And meanwhile, at the same time, it’s really in your interest that --- the broader public kind of recognise the inter-relationship here between the fishermen, the biodiversity, the habitat, the community, the well being of the community. So it’s --- there’s also kind of a PR element too there isn’t there?

GHS Which is something we’ve worked on um.. pretty hard in the last ten or fifteen years. Is that, there’s been a lot of people unaware of just --- what contributions the fishing industry make to, as you said, the social well being of the community. Whether it be volunteers for ambulance or CFS, or whether it be donations of ice, fish, products, to various community groups, school groups, hospital, aged care facilities, those sorts of things. 

INT But there’s also too, things that you can't put a price on and that’s things like the handing down of knowledge.

GHS I don’t know how you put a price on that. Um.. however, there are --- it’s pretty clear and I’ve seen this happen in this fishery, over time, where there are less and less generational fishers and more and more entrepreneurial business type people --- are coming in to the fishery. And so, um.. which is unfortunate but that’s just --- this beast that’s been created over the last ten or fifteen years where the government wants it’s pound of flesh so you know, you’ve got to, as I said, make money to pay for this extraordinarily expensive management bill. 

INT So you’re almost kind of corralled into that more corporate, entrepreneurial go-getter sort of thing where…

GHS You have to and --- I’m in the midst of a debate at the moment, with the government, about --- I’ll give you an example, uh.. the last government survey in South Australia said that the recreational sector catch 60 percent of the total Mulloway catch in South Australia. So that leaves 40 percent for the commercial, and yet, the commercials are paying 100 percent of the stock assessment on that species. And stock assessments are not cheap they’re 80,000 plus to produce, so the commercial fishery’s are paying for that stock assessment, for the government, um.. and the community.  Stuff like that that people don’t realise just what contribution we are making. Not only from a social side of thing but also from an economic and I guess, public good component that’s not considered at all in the equation. 

INT It’s interesting, to draw parallels, though, to the whole --- I guess the preservation of the fish within the Murray-Darling Basin system because you could argue that the survival of the fish, in some ways, is a litmus test of, basically, the health of the entire habitat, you know, within that greater Murray-Darling Basin system, and I think, sort of, what you’re talking about, in terms of the survival of the --- more community spirited fishermen, is, in some ways, very connected with the greater health of a much larger system here. 

GHS Well, you just spoke about a litmus test. The litmus test to native fish stocks in the Murray-Darling Basin was if that ecosystem could support a commercial fishery healthily, sustainably, then that was the litmus test. The government got rid of that litmus test and so you have a purported recreational sector that is sustainable, except those people, that are recreational fishers, have another job. So their --- effort is subsidised by their day time job. So they can go out and we --- and this is always a fear of mine, it happened to the Rass Fishery in Florida, where they banned commercial fishing and within ten years they wiped out the Rass fishery, the recreationals. 

It’s because they are subsidised by another job that they can put effort into catching the last fish. And my concern is, here, and particularly in the Riverland fisheries, of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, where they do these ad hoc sampling regimes, saying, ‘Oh, the fish stocks are healthy,’ or, in New South Wales case, what they do, is they pour a million cod fingerlings into the river, you know, the top end of the predator, who gives a rats arse about the --- trophic impacts on those other smaller bodied fish, because the cod eats all them, but the recreationals are happy. It’s a political decision. Who --- no one cares about the genetics of --- selected breeding and that impact that that has on cod stocks. Over the longer term. And I’m talking sort of, 50 to 100 years, not just five or ten or fifteen years, and so my concern is here, in this fishery, and particularly where we’ve got low bream and low flounder stocks, is the recreational --- that first thousand recreationals come in, they still catch an odd bream, and when they can't catch any more, and eventually they get the last bream. But it’s the commercials fault. Because they’re the people that’s got the nets, and they’re the people that’s caught all the fish. 

The commercials have got this economic indicator that says, ‘If you can’t make enough money out of that stock then you have to move onto another species.’ Which is what I’ve talked about before, it’s important having rotational harvests in this fishery, because that point of economic sustainability is --- way and above the point where these fish are so depleted ecologically.

So there’s a buffer there between the commercials and the bream and flounder stocks. There’s no buffer there with the recreational sector because their effort is subsidised by their daytime jobs. It’s a real concern and no one really wants to look at it. And it’s politics that drives it. You know, just --- makes me bloody livid when I hear these --- you know, fanatical, rabid, bloody recreational fishers, and --- let’s be real here, three quarters of the population are not recreational fishers. There’s three quarters of the population that rely on commercials, like myself, to put fish in the markets for those people to eat. 

INT And it’s interesting, I mean, it suddenly sort of highlights this rift between the recreational fishers and the commercial fishers.

GHS No the rift is between the recreationals, commercials. Commercials couldn't care less about recreationals. We just move on to another area, go and fish somewhere else. They’re always complaining about us. We don’t…

INT So the rift is between? Sorry?

GHS Between --- the rift is not both ways, I mean, I see a recreational fisherman, my dad’s a recreational fisher. He loves recreational fishing, you know? Good luck to ‘em, that’s what they want to do. 

INT So the issue here is --- that the --- accountability?

GHS It’s this perception out there that’s fed politically that commercials are the root of all evil and it’s the reason why fish stocks are deplete. When, you know, I look at the last 60 to 80 years of this fishery, it’s degradation of habitat, introduced species, which has accounted to… Degradation of habitat is 69 percent of the problem. Introduced species is 29 percent of the problem. The other 5 percent of declining fish stocks in this fishery, is commercial and recreational effort. And that’s where the focus is, that’s where all the management changes are, because the other two issues are far too difficult, far too expensive and politically, not palatable. 

INT But the commercial fishers also, are much more accountable in terms of having a public profile and in terms of the --- amount of fish stock that is there being seen to be kind of managing that sustainably, whereas the recreational fishers can kind of fly-by-night. They can come and they can grab what they want and they can bugger off somewhere else.

GHS Exactly, and --- 90 percent of the commercial --- uh.. the recreational fishers, um.. only catch ten percent of the recreational catch. It’s the ten percent of the recreational fishers that catch 90 percent of the catch, and that’s out of their mouths, not mine. That’s what they’ve told me. 

And so 90 percent of the recreationals, so nine on ten that you talk to say, ‘Well I only catch enough for a feed.’ You know, and --- that’s fine. But it’s the other ten percent. That go out…

INT That go for it.

GHS Yeah. They go out three, or four, or five. I've got --- there’s recreational fishers here that fish every day. So, you know, they’re…

INT What are they using? Set lines? Hand lines?

GHS Um.. well, some are hookers, like rod and line, but some are also, they’ve got what are called a --- in South Australia here, recreationals can still have a mullet net.

INT Like a drum net?

GHS A mullet net, like an actual mesh net, a gill net. 75 metres long, a metre drop. They’ve got to be within 50 metres of attendance. 

INT The nets can be 75 metres long?

GHS There’s actually more recreational nets registered in this fishery than there are commercial nets. And our commercial nets are 50 metres long, the recreational nets are 75 metres long. 

INT Okay. So, we’ve got two granddads here and the --- old timer here that I’m looking at a photo of  Hera-Singh the --- what’s that Inda?

GHS Inda. 

INT Inda, do you want to tell me a little bit about him?

GHS Well, it would be unfair to call him a hedonist, but he loved a good time and liked to be sociable and his doors were always welcome and open to anyone that came in. Always had a feed of fish for anyone. He was a very well known fisherman throughout the Coorong and loved his horse racing and provincial horse racing. He had seven children and a couple of his boys worked with him for many years fishing. My dad worked for him from the time he was 14 ‘til the time he was 20. And they rode up and down the Coorong and clocked up many, many hundreds of miles fishing and chasing the famous Coorong Mullet. 

INT And he was from Indian extraction wasn’t he?

GHS Yeah Inda’s father, Hera, was actually a deserter from the Indian army and, of course, in the late 1800’s they shot deserters on sight. When he got out to Australia he actually disappeared to inland Australia and acted as an Afghan cameleer. And then after about ten years, when he thought the dust had settled, he moved down to the Lower Lakes around 1900. 

He met an English girl and married her and they had 12 children of which one of those was my grandfather, who was Inda. 

Two of Inda’s brothers were also fishermen in the Coorong for many years. Bishan Hera-Singh was a Prisoner of War in Changi and he was a fisher in the Coorong and fished right up until the 1970s. His brother Stan was helping Bishan as he was very weak after being in the camp and unfortunately he drowned in 1946.

I’m the last of the Hera-Singh’s fishing in the Coorong at the moment. 

INT  And Hera-Singh, I wonder if the location of the Coorong wasn’t a factor in him coming here, because he jumped ship from the Indian army, it must have been quite a marginal place in terms of you know…

GHS Well in those days it was a very isolated area. It was all new country being opened up to support stock, so I don’t think he would have attracted too much attention down here. 

INT Whereabouts in India was he from?

GHS The Punjab region. 

INT Where’s that? That’s kind of inland isn’t it?

GHS Up near Kashmir, up near the Khyber Pass

INT So, you couldn't say he was a fisherman in India then?

GHS Oh absolutely no. His family, from what we can gather, were farmers in that region. 

INT So that’s quite a rich story in itself, isn’t it?

GHS Yeah, there’s a few gaping holes. I mean we really haven’t made a concerted effort to find out, because both my grandfather and my great-grandfather were happy to let sleeping dogs lie. We’ve sort of respected their wishes a bit, but we know that being a sergeant in the Indian army with arranged marriages in those days, he must have left either a wife or family. We don’t really know much about that side of his family. 

INT So what are your earliest memories of Hera Singh?

GHS My great-grandfather died in 1942, so that was way before I was born. My  grandfather Inda, I just remember fishnets and the fish. That’s my earliest recollection, I’ve got no idea how old I was. Even before I can remember going to school I can just remember smelling fish, seeing fish, and seeing my grandfather. 

I don’t know what they were doing or what I was doing, but that’s my earliest recollection. And the smell of fish. 

INT And it’s a strong smell. 

GHS Fresh fish is not strong, it has it’s own unique characteristics. It's interesting because when you look at fish in a fish market and you look at fishmongers, one of the signs of quality fish is not only the looks but the smell. The smell’s sweet and it’s got this lovely aroma about it. You know it’s fresh. 

INT The mulloways is a seawater fish is it?

GHS Marine dominant. 

INT A marine dominant fish. 

GHS Yes. 

INT It likes the estuarine water?

GHS Yes, for many reasons. The small mulloway use the estuarine area as a bit of a refuge, as a nursery area, but also the estuarine area also provides an abundance of food. The  lower salinities get rid of the external and internal parasites that the mulloway pick up out at sea. And it doesn’t take them very long to be in fresh water, about two to three weeks, and they can rid themselves of all their parasites. And then, on top of that, plenty of food, and that sets them up for their gestation period and for having --- or for their recruitment period after Christmas, when they --- spawn.

INT And so Inda Hera Singh was in a shack at South Lake?

GHS South Lagoon. Actually my dad and I have got it now. It was a fishing outpost, 21 miles south of Meningie. In those days they spent all their time rowing and sailing and Inda camped a lot out, when he was fishing. The shacks in the South Lagoon and so we’ve kept that there as a bit of a family memento. 

Lester had a shack at Pelican Point, which is in the northern extremity of the North Lagoon, and he lived there for 30 years. 

INT So Lester’s the other one?

GHS Yes.

INT So Lester, the family name is Lester…

GHS Rumbelow.

INT Rumbelow. 

GHS Lester Rumbelow and they're very well known, famous in Victor Harbor in South Australia. They originally were whalers, back in the 1850’s, 1860’s. 

INT And we’ve got this photo here of Lester at his place at Pelican Point. 

GHS Yes. 

INT And it’s quite an iconic picture, really, because we’ve got the pelicans in mid-flight behind him, the pelicans and the Terns there, it’s a real sort of iconic photo isn’t it?

GHS It’s what the Coroong's all about. It’s not only about fish but it’s also about the bird populations and, I guess, that’s why --- one of the reasons why it was listed as a wetland of international importance. I mean there are iconic bird species, like the Pelican. People often wondered how these magnificent large birds could actually fly, but then I had the same question about jumbo jets, I mean, how do you get three hundred tonne off the tarmac?

INT And we’ve got the name Malen Rumbelow.

GHS Malen David Rumbelow was Lester’s father, and he drowned in 1932 at Waitpinga Beach, which is between Cape Jervis and Victor Harbor, in a boating accident. He was also a commercial fisher. 

INT Malen Rumbelow, that’s an interesting name, it’s not an Anglo-Saxon name. 

GHS That’s more than I could tell you, yeah.

INT Any particular memories in terms of your granddads and your father in terms of what old time knowledge and stories that you want to share with us?

GHS I think, probably, and I haven’t realised this until probably the last ten or fifteen years, now that both of them have gone, is that all those conversations that we had and all the discussions that we had about the birds, and the fish, and the seasons and things to look for, like the flowers and the --- eucalypts and the tannins in the water and barrage outflows and the destruction of the barrages, all the things that we talked about - it was all about making me a better fisherman. 

These guys either learnt this information the hard way and it was just their experience being long-term fishers in the region, and that they just wanted to circumvent that for me, and say, ‘well this is what you need to look for. You need to look for the weather, you need to look at the clouds, you need to look at the time of the year. You have to understand that these fish spawn this time of year. You got to know where they go and how quickly they move and how far they’ll move with the --- a rise of water.’ 

All the different things. And, when I look back on it now it was all about making me a better fisherman.

INT I wonder where they got their knowledge from, if they were some of the first fishermen round here?

GHS Like most of those guys they did it the hard way. Mind you in those days, a lot of the indigenous community used to work with and for fishers, so some of that knowledge, particularly about the flowers and particularly about the plants and when they flower and --- a lot of that would have been, I’m sure, local indigenous knowledge. For example the dandelion, when that comes out, the bream turn up, those sorts of things. 

INT And, as you were saying to me before, the Ngarrindjeri, there was a substantial population around here?

GHS It just amazes me how productive this area was, and how productive it must have been, because it supported the largest indigenous population, permanent population, all year round, in the whole of Australia. This area was more productive, all year round, than the Kimberleys or Kakadu (where there were plenty of water, where there was plenty of fish, plenty of animal life.)

The population here was between three and five thousand Aborigines, and they were permanent residents. I just find that utterly amazing. Particularly when you look at how the place is so degraded and how much land we’ve cleared areas. I’s not even ten percent of what it was. 

INT And when you’re out on your boat on The Lakes or on the Coorong do you often reflect on the time that you had with your granddads or your father?

GHS I do. They definitely saw the best of this fishery, as far as catches were concerned. I’ve often thought maybe I was born 50 years too late. It would have been great to be fishing with these guys 50 years ago where there was less politicisation of fisheries management, where there was less political intervention, where it was more about making money, having families, living a comfortable life and being fairly carefree and having other interests outside of fisheries. 

Anyone that’s fishing these days, it is 100 percent of their time. 

INT And it also strikes me too, looking at these photos, that both your grandfathers were very much at one with the environment round here, in terms of growing older and fishing being a part of their way of life. 

GHS Not only were my grandfathers but a lot of those older fishermen, they had a very clear understanding that if your ecosystem was healthy then you had good fish stocks and if you had good fish stocks, then you had money in the pocket, you had money in the bank. And so it was in everyone’s best interests, though they felt a lot of it was out of their control, and I feel that now, as well, because the only way that the Lakes and the Coorong get their water is from Queensland, New South Wales or Victoria and if --- with the levels of, particularly of development, in those states, and particularly on the Darling, um.. and the extractions and over-allocations of water is that --- this area here is really at the whim of those states. 

My grandfathers had a good understanding of the bigger picture and not just about the Lower Lakes and Coorong. They understood that water came from interstate, they understood that, you know, that while it might have been a week or two weeks later, that they’d heard that there were floods or --- big rains in the north, they knew there were because all the ducks and the birds that nest in the north had left the Coorong. And the birds didn’t have any telephones or computers or anyone to text them to say, ‘Oh, we’ve had big rains up here.’ The birds would spend three or four days gathering in large mobs and then the fishermen would say, ‘There’s rain coming. There’s water coming.’ And then, within a week, all the birds are gone. 

And then they’d go up north, into the wetlands and those vast expanses of water we got there now and there’d be millions of ducks up there nesting now. And so uh.. the fishermen sort of knew that there had been big rains interstate and they’d say, ‘Well okay, in three months time or four months time when the water gets here, we’re gonna have flows.’ So there was --- they had very subtle signs of --- when water was coming. Not always, but particularly big events.

INT There are quite a lot of boats here in these pictures. What sort of boats, primarily were these guys using?

GHS Most of their fishing vessels were all flat-bottomed dories. Wooden flat-bottomed dories. Fourteen, fifteen, up to sixteen foot long, or row boats, but they’d use those boats to run their nets in. And then they would often sail out to their nets and they might sail to a point halfway between two lines of nets and then they’d row to one line, run that line of nets and then row to the next line, and run that line of nets and then come back to the sailing boat, hook up and then sail back to port.

 They had plenty of time. They had all day so they were in no great rush. They did their job. 

The fishing season, in particular, was over - more over the warmer months, the spring and the summer months, um.. that’s when the mulloway turned up and that’s when there was a lot of extra activity in the fishery. And the winter months were more about uh.. fishing for mullet and callop in The Lakes. And there wasn’t --- the hardy, the tough fishermen were the ones that --- fished all year round and so you might have, fifty or sixty fishermen in the summertime but you might only have ten or fifteen in the winter. 

See, in those days, there was no waterproof clothing, there was no waders or you know, it was --- after the Second World War, thermals was a modern revelation. Most of these guys were you know, just wore bare feet and an apron at most. Um.. so they were tough as hell. I mean, I’ve been out there in waders and waterproof jackets and thermal underwear and still been shivering pretty hard. To think these blokes used to run nets you know, with bugger-all clothes on, I mean, they were just --- they were tough. As I said before, back in the days when boats were made of wood and men were made of steel. 

INT And, even though it’s quite shallow, I mean, it’s still pretty dangerous out there if you’ve got a strong wind and a strong current when you’re out.

GHS Particularly in Lake Alexandrina where you’ve got a shallow basin but you’ve got 23 miles as it’s widest point. So you get these short, choppy waves, um.. not big rollers like you get in the ocean, where you get troughs, but these - no sooner you get over one wave and bang, you’ve got another one. 

Unfortunately, there’s been a few lives lost in the fishery. There hasn’t been a commercial fisherman lost since 1966, which has been a bit of a blessing, but there’s unfortunately been a few recreational people that have lost their lives since then, but our boats are much safer now.

My grandfather always used to say that the best person to take in a boat is a non-swimmer, because they’ll bail the hardest. 

INT And what were the boats made of?

GHS Wood plank. So in the summertime with the hot weather the planks used to shrink and open up and let more water in, so they’d cork ‘em and tar ‘em and do all sorts of things to try and stop the water from leaking in. In the winter time, it was cold and wet and the planks, you know, expanded and tightened up and didn’t leak so much.

INT And did they make the boats?

GHS They all made their own boats, yeah.

INT Where did they get the wood from?

GHS Um.. they used to use the knees or the elbow joints --- they used to go round, walking around the scrub for ages lookin’ for the right angle um.. for a boat, you know, tree trunk or a bough of a tree or whatever. And they’d spend half a day to --- just looking, in one area and they might get one or two and then they’d go along the next day to another patch of scrub and find another one or two until they had six or eight knee bones. And that’s what they used to fix the walls to the bottom of the boat with. And uh.. so it was quite a work of art, making boats. 

INT And they plank it longways instead of sideways?

GHS Yes, all longways, yeah. Yeah. Yep.

INT And were any of those boats around when you were a kid?

GHS They were but they disappeared very quickly once we got into bondwood and then aluminium and fibreglass. You will very rarely see a flat-bottomed dory now. Very rarely. 

INT And is that a flat-bottomed dory which is in the museum?

GHS Yes.

INT They’re quite a shapely looking boat. 

GHS Oh yeah.

INT Did they have a keel on them?

GHS No. Flat bottom. They did have a keel running down the centre that was generally only probably three inches wide and maybe an inch, inch and a quarter deep. That was so as  you rowed it, it didn’t row all over the place, it actually rowed in a straight line. 

INT You would get some huge storms around here, coming into winter, wouldn't you?

GHS Part of the secret of survival is to watch the weather. Everyday I look at the BOM site. That’s the modern day fisher, you just look at the weather and say, ‘Well okay, it’s going to be sou’ west or sou’ east or strong northerlies,’ so you sort of know what to expect. Where the wind’s comin’ from, what direction, what speed.

But in those days, they just sort of looked at the sky and said, ‘Oh yeah, those clouds, yep, time of the year, sea breeze is this afternoon, it’s gonna blow that way, the water’s gonna run this way.  I’ll go here to try and intercept the fish that’s going from A to B.’ 

So, sometimes they succeeded and sometimes they didn’t. But it didn’t matter, what they missed out today, they pick tomorrow. 

INT Did you ever feel like it was a pretty tough thing to have to do as a kid? When you were out there on the boats helping or involved in the fishing stuff? 

GHS Never at any stage. I never felt disappointed or depressed, even if we caught no fish, it was still a great experience. Because there just seemed to be so much of everything. There seemed to be so many fish, there seemed to be so many birds.

My first experience with migratory waders, a small bird that’s four inches high that flies ten to fifteen thousand kilometres twice a year. They never experience a winter. It spends its summer here, spends its summer in the northern hemisphere, then it comes back to spend summer here. 

And it wasn’t until it was pointed out to me that my grandfather used to say, ‘Well they are a much more interesting bird than what the pelican is, or the shag is, or the tern is, because they get up into these air streams and slipstreams and fly overnight from one hemisphere to the next.’ 

And to me, that showed just how dynamic and just how important this region was, not just to the fish, but to a whole range of different animals.

INT So if you’ve got a whole range of different birds and animals and fish and everything’s kind of interconnected whereas, one of those things goes out of the picture - the whole chain starts to break down. 

GHS You’ve hit the nail on the head. Is those ecological links, they hold everything together. You break one, the chain falls apart. 

INT So, can you give me an example?

GHS I can talk about the South Lagoon and the food chain. The South Lagoon’s become so hyper-saline there’s no invertebrates, there’s no aquatic weeds and so then there’s no small fish and there’s no bigger fish eatin’ those smaller fish. There’s no birds, because there’s no fish and so what I harvest are the bigger fish, so there’s no commercial fishing in that region and now, because the system’s almost ecologically collapsed, there’s no birds. If you fall overboard in the South Lagoon you can’t sink. The water is so hyper-saline. It's like the Dead Sea. You can lay on your back and drink a beer or eat a sandwich and you won't sink. However, apart from the brine shrimp, there's no life there. 

INT So is that eerie? Is that an eerie thought?

GHS It’s hugely disappointing to see how much that South Lagoon was producing 30 years ago, how productive that system was, and to see it now. It just breaks my heart. 

And both my grandfathers would be turning in their graves. They’d say, ‘How can you let a system deteriorate to this level?’ 

But because it’s not in a metropolitan area and because it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. 

INT Do you feel angry about that?

GHS I'm past the anger stage now. I just want to get even. (Laughs). 

The fishing industry identified 20 years ago that we had to start lobbying and putting the message out there. Particularly with this really severe drought over the last four or five years in this Lower Lakes and Coorong area is that there’s a lot more of an awareness out there. Particularly on the eastern seaboard, where 80 percent of Australia’s population live,  I spoke to some people in Darwin here not long ago and they’re saying, ‘Gary, I want the Coorong to be healthy. We don’t come down here much but I live 3000 miles away and I want to know that someone’s lookin’ after it for the next generation.’

INT So it’s in the collective imagination now?

GHS It's an amenity that’s available to everybody. It’s not just this generation, but the next generation. I want your kids, my kids, somebody else’s grandchildren to be able to come down here and experience this system how we saw it. 

INT What about the vegetation during your father’s time? Do you think it was different along the lake foreshore and along the Coorong?

GHS There was a lot more scrub around in those days. It was very difficult particularly travelling inland from the Coorong because it was very dense scrub. 

And so after the war there was this massive land clearing operation and we’re down to about 8 percent of our natural native vegetation, so --- there’s only small pockets of it left. 

The greatest realisation is that the terrestrial impacts over time have just had this profound impact on the Lower Lakes and Coorong. Clearing all this vegetation and things like ground water run off. It’s just been extraordinary --- for the Coorong. 

INT There is this huge complex system of vegetation and run off and land clearance and then you’ve got the waterways and then within the waterways, then you’ve got the fish, underneath the surface.

GHS Out of sight out of mind.

INT Out of sight out of mind. 

GHS There is such a small number of people that really understand what’s going on in the water. It's difficult to get that message out there, and particularly to the decision makers. 

We’ve got a classic case here where the State Government has decided not to pump the South Lagoon. We had thought that the only way that we could reduce the salt loads out of the South Lagoon was to actually pump that water directly to the sea. It's expensive, about 30 to 40 million dollars, but we thought it was probably the only way left to try and rejuvenate the South Lagoon, particularly as we knew several months in advance that these high flows were coming. Now we have the high flows but we still have this very hyper-saline water in the South Lagoon.

INT Why is that? Is that because you’re not getting that run off coming from the southeast? 

GHS That’s one of the reasons. We’re not getting that the volume of water out of the south east but it’s also when the flows came, the Coorong was already filled up by seawater and so what happened was when they opened the barrage to let the seawater out, the water couldn't run southwards, down the corridor of the Coorong, it actually ran straight back out to sea. There was some water that came up into the Coorong but not a lot.

And so, one of the problems with water management on the whole Murray-Darling Basin is that because the flows are so regulated and so controlled the water arrives here much later now. And so, often, the Coorong fills up with seawater first. 

INT Have you noticed any difference in the types of fish they were caught as to what you’re catching now?

GHS I can say that the species that they caught are pretty much the same as what we catch now. Bream. Flounder. Coorong Mullet. The Australian Salmon. 

The only thing that’s changed, really, is the Redfin and European Carp. 

INT And the odd Murray cod and …

GHS Yep. Well there used to be quite a large cod fishery here pre-1960. Around the ’56 flood, there were a lot of cod taken out of the Lower Lakes. 50, 60, 80 pound stuff. 

INT And how often would you come across a cod these days?

GHS The fishermen here don’t use that mesh size and our nets are very selective. In my 28 years here I’ve seen two cod probably, as a by-catch. I know of guys that used to do cod fishing and they might not catch anything for a week or two weeks and all of a sudden they might get six or eight fish one morning. 

It is economically unviable to target cod now. Because we are limited in the amount of gear that you can use and because they’ve got a minimum and maximum size range on the fish. Its very difficult to select for a smaller a range of fish, particularly when you know there’s a lot of older or bigger fish in the fishery. So, the guys just don’t worry about it. 

INT Your grandparents had shacks on the edge of the lagoons, or Pelican Point? What were they like?

GHS Very small, very simple. The one at Pelican Point’s (Lesters) is a one-room shack with a stove, kerosene fridge and a bed. Just somewhere to get out of the elements and take refuge from the wind and the rain and cold weather in winter. 

The other shack in the South Lagoon, which my other grandfather (Inda) used to use was originally a one-room shack but over the years they added on to it, putting a bedroom onto it and a front room. Because there’s been so little commercial fishing in that region for the last 20 odd years it doesn’t get used much these days. 

INT You’re not going to go there to fish?

GHS It’s five to seven times saltier than seawater, so the only reason you’d go up there is to rest, read a book and just watch the world go by for a while. 

INT Are you hoping that more people will take up fishing around here?

GHS My wish list is that the Murray-Darling Basin water plan actually provides an environmental allocation of water for Lower Lakes and Coorong. And then we get into the battle of how best we’re going to use that water, how we release it, how we try and get some optimal benefits. If that all happens, then I think that --- and this fishery’s always been noted as a boom bust fishery, even in my grandfather's day, you know, it was up here one minute, down here the next. 

I think if you could level it out a little bit and if you were going to be guaranteed flows and water specifically for environmental reasons, to keep the system ticking along, then I think you would see a rekindling of interest of people trying to re-enter the commercial fishery. 

But at the moment, you’d be a pretty game man to want to invest in an industry that, you know, has a huge cloud hanging over it. Which is a terrible shame. 

INT Thank you very much. That’s been fantastic. 

GHS Good. 

INT Yeah, I’ve really enjoyed it.

END OF TRANSCRIPT.