8 minute read
James Boyce
Before reading Richard Flanagan’s new book, Toxic: The rotting underbelly of the Tasmanian salmon industry, it is useful to remember that Australia’s southern isle was once the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. During the first fifty years of the colony’s existence, a small ruling élite achieved a near monopoly over the island’s most lucrative natural resources, the subservience of the majority convict population, and considerable profit from the public licences and patronage associated with political power. Far from these privileges ending with the cessation of transportation, self-government allowed the establishment to so entrench their interests that no substantial separation existed between the promotion of them and the functions of the state. The enduring cost of a historically corrupted polity was well highlighted (including by Flanagan) during the environmental conflicts of recent decades, but despite the saving of the Franklin River and the demise of forestry giant Gunns, a fully functioning democracy seems as distant as ever. Even the most basic task of government – returning a public profit from 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.
Of course, Tasmania has changed considerably, but as Toxic 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.
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Flanagan sets out the reality of the Tasmanian salmon industry, which sells its product as the epitome of clean and green. After a modest start in the 1980s, in the past fifteen years it has become a huge and virtually unregulated heavy industry that has transformed south-eastern waterways.
It is testament to the reverence with which Tasmanians regard the island’s most celebrated author that so many people with knowledge of what has gone on behind closed doors and inside the underwater feed lots have been prepared to go on the public record. Toxic connects jaw-dropping expert testimony with revelations uncovered by a few dedicated journalists and a ground-breaking Legislative Council inquiry, with little-known scholarly papers and international reports, to provide a devastating critique of not just a rogue industry but the system that facilitates it.
People with a long-standing connection to the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and Huon Estuary already knew the cost of salmon shit. The ecological loss in the past decade is obvious to all who fish, sail, snorkel, or just walk the increasingly slime-covered rocks of these formerly pristine waterways. But Toxic’s revelations concerning faecal volume and impact go far beyond everyday observations. The industry’s current expansion into Storm Bay will, when fully realised, result in pollution equivalent to the sewerage outflow of a city of three million people. The catastrophic 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 necessary to comment.
Frankenfish
Richard Flanagan’s exposé of the salmon industry
James Boyce
by Richard Flanagan
Penguin Random House $24.99 pb, 224 pp
Salmon pens in Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania, 2016 (Christopher Bellette/Alamy)
In chapter after confronting chapter, Flanagan takes the reader deep into the dark reality of this ‘health’ food. There is much information about what the forlorn fish (and, by extension, the human consumer) eat, including the global supply chains that threaten Chilean fisheries and Amazonian forests, while the use of dangerous chemicals for transporting feed and turning dead-grey flesh a marketable red poses further dangers to estuary ecosystems and human health. The close link to industrialscale battery chicken production (chicken body parts comprise much of the salmon’s diet) is both stomach-turning and sadly apposite.
Central to Toxic is also a chilling account of the hidden life of the caged fish themselves, a suffering exaggerated by the fact that, unlike Norwegian fjords, where the industry was developed, Tasmanian waters are too warm for Atlantic salmon to survive in without further gross intervention in their lives.
Deprived not just of freedoms seen as the foundation of ethical farming – freedom from discomfort; pain, injury, or disease; fear and distress; and the freedom to express normal behaviour – these extraordinary animals, whose wild cousins conduct miraculous long-distance migrations across oceans and up rivers, are kept alive through an intervention innocuously known as ‘bathing’. Toxic teaches us that this involves regularly vacuuming fish from their nets into bladders of fresh water to kill amoeba before being vacuumed back into pens. Amounting to around twenty per cent of production costs as the waters of eastern Tasmania are warming faster than almost any on Earth, giant factory ships undertake this bathing, further industrialising the waterways and ensuring the carbon footprint of the industry is almost ten times that in Norway.
Even with regular dousing, around ten per cent of animals commonly die in their cages. Others suffer severe deformities. A sizeable group of salmon, almost uniquely in the world, have their chromosomes deliberately altered to further speed up their growth, meaning that about one-third of ‘triploids’, or what Flanagan terms ‘frankenfish’, find difficulty in even moving. This is battery farming on steroids. Vast quantities of antibiotics are entering the food chain to the detriment of all life.
The extent of regulatory failure documented in Toxic is staggering. Even after the infamous saga of the industry’s expansion into the World Heritage Area of Macquarie Harbour, which resulted in the Environmental Protection Authority being taken to court by one salmon company in a desperate attempt to get the EPA to reduce over-stocking by another, there were no consequences for Tassal, despite this ASX-listed corporation having damaged precious wilderness and possibly condemned the Maugean Skate to extinction.
When truth is spoken in a small community, it is never without cost. The courage of those who have gone on the record (not forgetting the author himself) ensures that, despite the tragedy it documents, Toxic is not a depressing book to read. Flanagan dedicates his book to ‘all the brave women’ who helped him write it, and they are a remarkable collective. We hear frightening testimony from two scientists, Louise Cherrie and Barbara Nowak, who were formerly members of the Marine Farming Planning Review Panel but resigned after they discovered there was no interest in basic modelling to assess the ecological and health dangers of the industry’s expansion. Then there is the founder and twenty-year CEO of the celebrated Derwent Estuary Program, Christine Coughanowr, who, after successfully coordinating multiple stakeholders to slowly restore a river’s health, has seen decades of work undone by a rogue industry with carte blanche. A newly elected independent member of the Upper House, Meg Webb, clearly not yet understanding how Tasmanian politics is done, established the landmark parliamentary inquiry that is still underway.
Then there are the ordinary community members, like the brave resident who maintains her fight despite industry boats being regularly revved outside her home, and the young woman who spoke up at a public meeting only to find wallaby carcasses with cut throats in her garden. The documenting of such courage shows the scale of the challenge, but it does convey hope that change can be achieved when consumers demand it.
Toxic also reminds us that, despite industry pretensions, coastal estuaries remain common. No corporation owns these waterways; we all still share in their custodianship.
A paradox of Van Diemen’s Land history is that it never proved possible for the ruling élite to fully enclose the island. Soon after the invasion commenced, convicts wandered out of Hobart to live independently in the bush, and this practice of finding freedom in a bountiful natural environment created by millennia of Aboriginal management has carried on ever since.
For decades, politicians and their patrons crudely exploited this heritage by presenting environmentalists as outsiders wanting to lock ordinary Tasmanians out of their inheritance. But Flanagan’s exposé of the salmon industry could mark the end of this already fraying political weapon. Toxic’s damning critique confirms that it is not those seeking to protect nature who exclude people from nature’s bounty, but those who would destroy its very existence.
In its beginning and at its end, Toxic is a meditation on home. From his Bruny Island shack, source of family joy and wondrous words, Flanagan has personally witnessed the loss of species after species since the feedlots arrived. As with his recent novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020), he challenges us to open our eyes and face the truth of diminishment – not just of the natural world but of ourselves.
More than twenty years ago, Richard Flanagan saw an octopus crawl from Bruny’s sea, bearing witness to a magical kingdom beneath. The writer has passed on to his readers this gift of a glimpse into an extraordinary world, a homeland now being plundered and destroyed as we get on with our everyday lives. In an age characterised by spin or silence in political discourse, there remains a mysterious power in truth telling. After the publication of Toxic, I doubt Tasmania will ever be the same again. g
James Boyce is a Hobart-based writer and historian. His books include Van Diemen’s Land (2008) and Losing Streak: How Tasmania was gamed by the gambling industry (2017). ❖
