auditorium. French navigator Louis de Freycinet recorded
“un chant particulier des femmes qui vont à la pêche”, a peculiar
song the women sing when they fish, which was low, sonorous
and in minor keys.
There was also the ceremony of malgun. In this practice,
a length of spider web would be tied around the first two joints
of an infant girl’s left little finger, where it would stay until the
finger mortified and fell away. The blackened flesh would then
be taken out to sea and dropped to the fish as an offering.
For these women, fishing was an act of mutual sacrifice. There
was no claim of ownership here, rather a bond to the ocean
that was reverential.
We can also forget that Sydney Harbour was mapped by
maritime men, whose eyes strained seaward more than to
the land. They called landmarks after their own appetites:
Cockle Bay, Oyster Bay, Chowder Bay – the latter named for
the briny stews that whalers would cook on its shores. Food
historian Jacqui Newling notes that Botany Bay was originally
named Stingray Harbour by Captain Cook, who happily
feasted on skate from its waters.
For them, fishing was often a necessity, but it was also a
pleasure. In the shadows of momentous occasions like Governor
Philip scouting Port Jackson as the potential settlement for the
new colony, were men like Jacob Nagle, one of his oarsman, who
casually dropped a line while he waited and was rewarded with
a large black bream. The First Fleet sailed
with 8,000 fish-hooks and 576 lines
that were to be used by women and men
alike. Elizabeth Macquarie famously
out-fished both her husband and
son at Watson’s Bay in 1821. And
fish was a staple of the early colonial
diet, eaten in soups and pies, curried,
crumbed, and served au gratin.
As the European nets brought in larger hauls and harbour
stocks diminished, though, fishing became much more about
preventing spoilage. Fishers needed to both transport their
supply and keep it cold in the process. “The history of fishing
is partly a history of refrigeration,” Clark says. Until the 1920s,
when engines on boats became the norm, there was no power
for a refrigeration system, which meant most boats threw out
more fish than they kept. For anyone who didn’t live directly
by the sea, chances are the only fish they’d eat in their life would
be cured or smoked. Or potentially spoiled, given that it was
often sold by hawkers going door-to-door without any ice.
Even for those who did have access to fresh fish, their
culinary blinkers often meant they overlooked the most
delicious morsels of the ocean. One advertisement from
the 1920s recommended squid, roasted octopus, crabs and
even lobster as bait for snapper. In the early 1940s there were
complaints that Albany’s harbour in Western Australia was
“nearly choked” with bluefin tuna. ”They were considered
a pest by local fishers,” says Clark, “because they chomped
through the fishing nets.”
“So what changed?“ I ask. ”Italians,” she says. ”And all the
other migrants – more than a million – who came to Australiain the decades following World War II.” Italian immigrants
taught Anglo-Saxons about the pleasures of charred octopus,
just like Japanese migrants popularised raw tuna in America
in the ’80s. Many post-war migrants came to Australia from
small fishing communities in Sicily or Calabria, and in their
efforts to keep these fishing traditions alive they initiated
a revolution in Australian cuisine – a whole host of neglected
species, ones we now cherish, went from bait to plate.
Some immigrants also fished to supplement the food
they were served in migrant workcamps;
Clark’s book abounds with sepia-coloured
images of dark-haired women in three-
quarter-length skirts holding a line on
the banks of the Murray, or bare-footed
Italian men cleaning nets on the piers of
Woolloomooloo. “It’s not that different
today,” she says. “Look at the people fishing
now.” I glance up to see a line of Vietnamese men traipsing down
from the rocks carrying buckets and rods. “You still see the old
Greek men tenderising octopus on the boat ramp at Botany Bay.”N
ight has started to blot the air and the water at
Little Bay is inky. I’ve been tossing the line over my
shoulder for almost an hour now, listening to the
whoosh as it reels out to sea, feeling the tickle of salt
water at my ankles. Without the complications of a catch the
experience has been deeply relaxing. A bit amphibious. It’s
a moment where you stand on the border of the non-human
world and feel your own smallness.
For Clark, it’s a way of connecting with Australia’s past.
“It was only in the twentieth century that women really started
to be mocked for fishing, and unfortunately fishing culture is still
like that today,” she says. “It’s considered a man’s sport, a way
of getting away from the wife and kids. But I love to imagine
those Eora women out there in their nowies, balancing their
babies and children in the canoe, catching tonight’s dinner.”
For me, it’s Joseph Banks’s vision from windows of The
Endeavour that remains: Sydney Harbour lit up with bobbing,
flickering lights and the sounds of the women singing their
odes to the ocean. ●One advertisement from
the 1920s recommended
squid, crabs and lobster
as bait for snapper.ILLUSTRATION DANIELLE LEEDIE GRAY/ILLUSTRATION ROOM.76 GOURMET TRAVELLER