Some fish have an ugly elitism about them.
Nothing to do with the fish, of course, but all about our interactions with them. A marlin is a Republican fish, hunted by weekending bank presidents between mainland America and the islands America deems contemptible or ideologically unsound. You can land a fish from Cuba in Florida, but not a human being. Bluefin tuna stand in for marlin off Australian shores – if you don’t have 300 horses and a Landcruiser, they’re really not for you. Trout, among the most benign of Australia’s invasive species, carry with them a whiff of tweed and pipesmoke. To pursue them with any real intent is to pretend to be English, tiger snakes be damned.
Then there are fish that exude egalitarian welcome. Chief among these, to my mind, is the flathead, but that’s another story. Instead, consider for a moment another Everyfish – the Australian salmon: bountiful, sleek and available to young and old, frequently at the end of any old bus ride.
First a bit of housekeeping, as they say at the community hall.
Australian salmon are not the diseased monsters cutting manic laps in cages off Bruny Island. Those are Atlantic salmon, which in their natural state (nobody can remember it) are a superior-tasting fish. Australian salmon were first named (I use “first” advisedly: plenty of First Nations hunters would have had names and intricate stories for these fish) by the French baron Georges Cuvier in 1829. Cuvier named a lot of fish – he was also, ominously, the first palaeontologist to prove the idea of extinction.
Australian salmon are Arripids – a family known globally as Kawahi. Here, they form two sub-species, the eastern and the western (Arripis trutta and truttaceus), though the two overlap considerably in southern Australia. Their nearest marine cousin is the tommy ruff, a redoubtable little scrapper found under piers and beloved of stout-glugging South Australian pensioners, who fish for them using “gents”.
Gents are maggots, everybody.
Easterns and westerns are pretty much impossible to tell apart visually, but the easterns are generally smaller. They have a couple of extra gill rakers: unless you’re the kind of person who has no problem rummaging around bloody fingered inside an eviscerated fish, you’d probably never know it. But those rakers play a role that’s analogous to what baleen does for a whale: they help the juvenile fish sieve krill from the seawater. Intriguingly, that krill diet is gradually being replaced by small fish in response to changes in the temperature of the East Australian Current.
The westerns, on the other hand, feed on pilchards and sprats. They’re dispersed eastward from southern WA as eggs and juveniles on the Leeuwin Current, ending up as far east as Lakes Entrance. Then they migrate all the way back across the Bight as adults during the winter. By the time they get to Albany, some of them will be almost a metre long, and fat as mud.
The Australian salmon’s range extends all the way around southern Australia from Kalbarri in the west to K’gari in the east. They form huge shoals in the sandy shallows, sometimes seen from above as a dark mass with a clean line cut through it where a shark noses in, picking off stragglers. In less toothy moments, to be underwater and surrounded by hundreds of racing, circling salmon is a hypnotically beautiful experience.
The main predators of all Australian salmon are seals, dolphins, sharks and middle-aged male humans in BCF hoodies – their abundance and powerful fight make them a favourite recreational species. The commercial fishery for salmon uses purse seine nets and spotter planes and mostly sells to the pet food industry. The Good Fish website and the Australian Marine Conservation Society both rate salmon as a sustainable seafood choice, but Swainston and Hutchins, the indispensable fishing guide, gives both species a grudging two stars for edibility. Every other fish in the sea seems to disagree, which is why they’re excellent bait. Among favourite salmon memories – I have dozens – I once tried threading a bunch of them on coat hanger wire and suspending them in the chimney above a fire in the hope of smoking them. It didn’t help. Best bet is to treat the big fillets as a nondescript sauce vehicle: chop ‘em up and bury them in a curry.
Which might sound dismissive. The truth is that these fish are held in great affection. If you ask a child to draw a fish, the thing they will invariably draw looks like a salmon, because salmon are the archetype of a fish: torpedo shaped, silver, finny – possessed of a pleasing lateral line and that dramatic forked tail. The small hands select only two colours: a blue-grey for the scaly body and a bright yellow for the dab on the pectoral fin and on that eye, the one that eyeballs the viewer with a panicky stare. Why am I in your picture?
This story features in Roaring Journals, Edition Two:order your copy here.
