If this photograph once seemed amazing, now it is shocking. If the caption was once jaunty, it is now nauseating. It hasn’t, as meme writers like to say, ‘aged well.’
It was published in The Weekly Graphic and New Zealand Mail on 22 January 1913. The caption title reads: ‘The result of an hour’s fishing in the Hauraki Gulf – a record catch of Hāpuka.’ A boy of around seven sits beside a pile of fish, many of them bigger than he is. How many fish? There are so many, it is hard to tell by counting, but when I find the rest of the caption on the original page online, it tells me. Beside 45 hāpuku ‘ranging up to 65 pounds’, three fishing launches and ‘eight or nine’ fishing lines dispatched ‘a number of snapper, several sharks and a large octopus.’
Hāpuku, hapuka, whapuku, or groper – this cherished species has many names. It was said that the big fish could tell when its name was being used, so the name rarawai was used during traditional fishing expeditions. Hāpuku are slow growing and can live up to 60 years. Some of the fish in that photograph, in other words, will probably be older than you.
These days we think of hāpuku as ‘deep-water’ fish, in the same way we think of kea as ‘alpine’ parrots, although kea fossils have been found in North Island sand dunes. Current kea habitat is little more than a fragile refuge, a shadow of their former range.
Imagine seeing a photograph of kea sand-hopping on a Wairarapa Beach. In some ways, this photograph has a similar impact, showing just how common hāpuku once were in the inner Hauraki Gulf. Nowadays, like kōura (aka crayfish/spiny rock lobster) and scallop, they are functionally extinct in these waters and won’t be returning any time soon without drastic action.
If it is hard to imagine what the gulf used to look like, above and below the waves, when this photograph was taken, the State of our Gulf report (2020) gives us some idea. It puts the decline in key fish stocks at 57 percent, seabirds at 67 percent and whales and dolphins at 97 percent.
After years of reports, counter-reports, meetings, even more dire reports, surveys, impassioned opinion columns and letters which died in government filing cabinets, the Tīkapa Moana/Hauraki Gulf Marine Protection Bill seems, finally, like a step in the right direction.
The government is, says Forest and Bird, “to be commended for the mahi which will establish two marine reserves, five seafloor protection areas, and 12 high protection areas in the Hauraki Gulf, acknowledging customary rights within seafloor protection areas and high protection areas.”
Researchers from the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Auckland are encouraged by the Conservation Minister’s promise that funding will be available to monitor protected areas. “Assuming the right data is collected,” they wrote pointedly in Newsroom, “we could learn a lot about the value of these protection measures.”
But the Institute of Marine Science, Forest and Bird, and other conservation groups have expressed incredulity at a last-minute amendment to the bill that would allow commercial fishing in areas the government will call ‘high protection’.
If we look at DoC’s map of the bill’s protection areas within the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, the areas with the highest protections (extensions to two marine reserves) appear as tiny purple specks. The so-called ‘high protection areas’, with fewer protections than the reserves, are the ones which look like band aids.
Most humans, and 100 percent of the kōura, scallops, snapper and hāpuku I have consulted, would prefer the stricter protections of the Hākaimangō – Mātiatia (North-West Waiheke) Marine Reserve: a grassroots proposal supported by the Ngāti Paoa Trust Board. (To learn more about it, see friendsofhaurakigulf.nz).
You can find Forest and Birds’s petition to Stop fishing in High Protection Areas here: www.forestandbird.org.nz/petitions/stop-fishing-high-protection-areas
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
