Academic literature on the topic 'Fishing South Australia'

Hunter-gatherer or forager societies, as the names imply, have been defined first and foremost by their mode of subsistence: ‘hunting of wild animals, gathering of wild plants, and fishing, with no domestication of plants, and no domesticated animals except the dog’ (Lee and Daly, 1999: 3). Another recent survey develops this defining characteristic in the following terms: ‘the absence of direct human control over the reproduction of exploited species, and little or no control over other aspects of population ecology such as the behaviour and distribution of food resources. In essence, hunter-gatherers exercise no deliberate alteration of the gene pool of exploited resources’ (Panter-Brick et al., 2001b: 2, their italics). In addition to this primary characteristic of ‘not being farmers’, there are or have been two other very common features amongst recent and contemporary forager societies, as Lee and DeVore (1968b: 11) commented in their opening essay to the seminal Man the Hunter volume: ‘(1) they live in small groups, and (2) they move around a lot’. At the end of the Pleistocene, forager societies peopled most regions of the world, at most latitudes. By the middle of the second millennium ad, foragers still occupied a third of the globe including all of Australia and most of North America, and large tracts of South America, Africa, North, and North-East Asia. Yet in recent centuries foragers have ‘retreated precipitously in the face of the steamroller ofmodernity’ (Lee and Daly, 1999: 1), occupying only those areas where farmers simply cannot go, or where farming is so marginal as to be uneconomic (Fig. 2.1). Many societies frequently cited in archaeological textbooks as examples of forager societies today, like the !Kung-San of the Kalahari, in fact also practise cultivation or herding on a small scale, and others depend heavily on trade with neighbouring farmers for staple foods. It is extremely difficult to translate foragers’ behaviour as recorded today or in the recent past into theories of general applicability to the world’s prehistoric foraging population prior to farming. The task is all the more complicated by the remoteness of the everyday lives of foragers (present and past) from western Europeans, a remoteness that has given rise to two enduring currents in European philosophical thinking about such societies: that they are alien savages on the one hand, or innocents close to the state of nature on the other (Barnard, 1999).

<em>Abstract.</em>—The New Zealand eel fishery comprises two species, the shortfin eel <em>Anguilla australis </em>and the New Zealand longfin eel <em>A. dieffenbachii</em>. A third species, the speckled longfin eel <em>A. reinhardtii</em>, is present in small numbers in some areas. Major fisheries in New Zealand are managed under the Quota Management System. Individual transferable quotas are set as a proportion of an annual total allowable commercial catch. The Quota Management System was introduced into the South Island eel fishery on 1 October 2000 and the North Island fishery on 1 October 2004. Freshwater eels have particular significance for customary Maori. Management policies allow for customary take and the granting of commercial access rights on introduction into the Quota Management System. Eel catches have remained relatively constant since the early 1970s. The average annual catch from 1989–1990 to 2001–2002 (fishing year) was 1,313 mt. Catch per unit effort remained constant from 1983 to 1989 and reduced from 1990 to 1999. Statistically significant declines in catch per unit effort for New Zealand longfin eel were found in some areas over the latter period. For management, an annual stock-assessment process provides an update on stock status.