Environment
Frankenfish
highly valuable public licences, be they poker machines or public waters – is still not being achieved in a state that is the poorest, sickest, and most disadvantaged in the nation. Richard Flanagan’s exposé of the salmon industry Of course, Tasmania has changed considerably, but as Toxic James Boyce vividly and viscerally depicts, the stench of failed governance, despite the PR façade, has not been lessened by the popularity of its food and wine, the creativity of its people, or the quirkiness of MONA. Flanagan sets out the reality of the Tasmanian salmon inToxic: The rotting underbelly of the dustry, which sells its product as the epitome of clean and green. Tasmanian salmon industry After a modest start in the 1980s, in the past fifteen years it has by Richard Flanagan become a huge and virtually unregulated heavy industry that has transformed south-eastern waterways. Penguin Random House It is testament to the reverence with which Tasmanians $24.99 pb, 224 pp regard the island’s most celebrated author that so many people efore reading Richard Flanagan’s new book, Toxic: The with knowledge of what has gone on behind closed doors and rotting underbelly of the Tasmanian salmon industry, it is inside the underwater feed lots have been prepared to go on the useful to remember that Australia’s southern isle was once public record. Toxic connects jaw-dropping expert testimony the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. During the first fifty with revelations uncovered by a few dedicated journalists and a years of the colony’s existence, a small ruling élite achieved a ground-breaking Legislative Council inquiry, with little-known near monopoly over the island’s most lucrative natural resources, scholarly papers and international reports, to provide a devasthe subservience of the majority convict population, and consid- tating critique of not just a rogue industry but the system that erable profit from the public licences and patronage associated facilitates it. with political power. Far from these privileges ending with the People with a long-standing connection to the D’Entrecessation of transportation, self-government allowed the estab- casteaux Channel and Huon Estuary already knew the cost of lishment to so entrench their interests that no substantial sepa- salmon shit. The ecological loss in the past decade is obvious to all ration existed between the promotion of them and the functions who fish, sail, snorkel, or just walk the increasingly slime-covered of the state. The enduring cost of a historically corrupted polity rocks of these formerly pristine waterways. But Toxic ’s revelations was well highlighted (including by Flanagan) during the envi- concerning faecal volume and impact go far beyond everyday ronmental conflicts of recent decades, but despite the saving of observations. The industry’s current expansion into Storm Bay the Franklin River and the demise of forestry giant Gunns, a will, when fully realised, result in pollution equivalent to the fully functioning democracy seems as distant as ever. Even the sewerage outflow of a city of three million people. The catamost basic task of government – returning a public profit from strophic impacts of this giant sewer – from jelly fish explosions to the potential release of highly toxic heavy metals currently confined to sediment in the Derwent River – have never been disclosed in the public domain. In other jurisdictions, the expert testimony provided to Flanagan on the harm done to Hobart’s drinking water by salmon hatcheries alone could be expected to provoke a level of official concern. But as final proof of the book’s central thesis, despite its publication coinciding with an election campaign (a coincidence sparked by the premier’s calling the poll a year early), neither the Liberal Party nor the ALP has thought it necSalmon pens in Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania, 2016 (Christopher Bellette/Alamy) essary to comment.
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18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021
