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Aesop's Fables - Tales with Morals . Mother Goose . Mother Goose in Prose
OUR PRIMITIVE METHODS OF FISH CAPTURE.
About the last place one would expect to come across a really fine
piece of delicate humour is amongst official correspondence, and yet in
a formal letter from Dr. E.P. Ramsay, the Curator of the Australian
Museum, to Sir Saul Samuel the following passage occurs. Speaking of
the New South Wales exhibits at the International Fisheries Exhibition
of London, 1883, the doctor proceeds to remark:--"People here,
imagining that we must have already developed extensive fisheries, from
the large collection of food fishes which we exhibit, were not
less surprised at our very limited materials and methods of capture
than at the immense undeveloped wealth of our fisheries and fish
fauna." Now, I venture to say that a more unconsciously subtle
insinuation at the crude methods of fish capture at present employed in
our Australian fisheries was never penned. But what makes it so keenly
effective is that it really hits the right nail on the head. In giving
evidence, also, before Mr. Frank Farnell's select committee of 1889,
Dr. Ramsay, upon being asked whether he thought our fishermen were
abreast of the times with regard to appliances, replied:--"They are
about 200 years behind the times."
To my mind another most convincing proof of the crude methods of fish
capture employed in Australian waters is to be found in the following.
In one of the Fisheries Reports it is gravely recorded that "some very
valuable gear IN GENERAL USE amongst English, Norwegian, and American
fishermen, had been destroyed in the Garden Palace fire, but that the
commissioners had been able to replace the otter-trawl and the
beam-trawl." The very fact that these appliances, in active use at the
present time by those in the foremost front of fishery enterprise, are
regarded in the light of curiosities in Australia, proves only too
forcibly the correctness-of this opinion as to our primitive fishery
appliances.
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