The Cynic 42 Marj's Musings 44 Fishing Report

It's big business these days.

Monetising Spirituality

Words Jay Houhlias Photo Con Sciousness

Feeling anxious, overwhelmed or just downright lost? Want to be yourself, create your own path and be on your own journey? Have you tried spirituality?

Yes, you probably have. I know that, because spirituality is seeping into all the cracks and crevices of our society. This means that everyone is more spiritual, self-aware, peaceful, loving, understanding and well equipped to deal with life’s extensive repertoire of blows. That all sounds quite good, I bet many people love the idea of spirituality all up in their cracks and crevices.

But we are deceived. The mainlining of spirituality, or the guise it now masquerades under, is in fact deeply egregious. This is because spirituality has now moved on from its pure, original habitat within ourselves and out into just about anything that can be condensed and packaged for user friendliness.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the term spirituality is derived from the word spirit, meaning something inside yourself or something untouched and unaffected by the world around (you might say, for example, the woman had an unbreakable spirit). Therefore, we can surmise that spirituality implies the practice of something pertaining to the spirit, something internal and unseen. This is where we have run into trouble.

Unfortunately, the spirituality of today has been hijacked, and it is no longer about what’s inside of us, but rather what we can convey to others and the world about ourselves. It’s a form of branding and categorisation. It’s now a slogan we throw around to impress people and justify our actions instead of doing what needs to be done for ourselves, and ourselves alone. A good way to test if you are genuinely practising something spiritual is to see if you feel the need to show or tell others about it.

But telling others is only one half of the problem. As our title implies, spirituality has become a product, and the more it’s pushed as a product, the less meaning it has. It’s now found in self-help books, insincere and generic advice, clothing, jewellery - some people even feel as though certain foods they eat give them a spiritual edge. Doing or engaging in all those things is not the issue, the issue is when the fundamental definition is transgressed - spirituality cannot be told or enforced upon you and has nothing to do with externalities.

The question, ‘Are you a spiritual person?’ is a bad one. What you are basically asking is, ‘Are there things that you don’t tell people about?’ And yes, of course there are, it would be impossible to tell people everything you experience, how you’ve perceived that experience and what you plan to do about it. If we can agree that this is impossible, why are we trying to dilute our experience down to something that needs to be shown and proved?

From mine, the solution is quite simple. Your spirituality stuff is your spirituality stuff. I truly believe that it is absolutely none of my business nor anyone else’s. How your spiritual inklings express themselves about things don’t need to be explained or justified to anyone. Your process is your own, how you get to where you feel you need to get to is on you. I can’t be the only one who finds it intolerable when someone feels the need to tell me they are spiritual rather than letting their actions and the results of those actions do the work.

The more you outsource spirituality, the less magical and your own it becomes. I’m doing completely fine with my own stupid magic, just saying, if anyone wants to know, or talk about it.

All the buzz right now.

Bee Aware!

Words Dr Marjorie O’Neill, Member for Coogee Photo Cardi Bee

On the top of most people’s minds right now are two particular concerns: the worrying state of our environment and the rising cost of living. Bees offer us a way of doing something positive to help address both of these problems. By looking after our bees we can actually do a lot for the environment, and by spending more of our time working to protect our bees we can reduce our expenditure on more costly entertainment and leisure activities while also producing our own honey. A real win-win!

Bees are part of the biodiversity on which we all depend for our survival and we cannot live without them. Bees are one of the world’s most important pollinators for food crops, with an estimated one out of every three bites we consume dependent on pollination. They provide high-quality food including honey, royal jelly and pollen, as well as other products such as beeswax, propolis and honey bee venom. Bees and their products have been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. Honey is used in the treatment of a wide variety of conditions including wound healing. In addition to its nutritional value, honey has antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory and anticancer properties.

The importance of bees for human survival cannot be overstated and we all need to be concerned that bee populations continue to decline due to the use of pesticides and other environmental factors including climate change. The American bumblebee has declined by a massive 89 per cent in relative abundance and continues to decline toward extinction. Fire and drought kill millions of Australian bees. The devastating 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires had a serious impact on native bees, resulting in at least 11 species of bees meeting International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) criteria to be listed as threatened.

In June this year, Varroa mites (Varroa destructor), the most serious pest of Western honey bee colonies and one of the primary causes of honey bee decline, was detected in NSW near the Port of Newcastle. In an effort to contain the Varroa mite, more than 1,500 hives and between 15 million and 45 million bees have been euthanised on the NSW Central and Mid North Coasts. The Department of Primary Industries efforts to contain the threat appear at this time to have been successful and there has been no detection of the pest in Sydney, but our environment has sadly lost a great number of bees.

We can all quite easily and inexpensively help protect our busy bee friends. Little steps matter and it starts with not using pesticides. Instead of spraying those weeds, let’s pull them out instead. Better still, just leave them for our bees to enjoy, especially if they flower. As spring approaches, plant those flower seeds so our bees have something to eat (they love purple). If you are ready to go a bit further, consider housing a beehive in your yard or encourage your local school to invest in one or two (native bees don’t sting). The Sydney Bee Club is a great source of information and inexpensive workshops.

As a beekeeper myself, although I must confess that my sister Bridget is the expert and does most of the work, I can attest that bees can be a lot of fun. Just watching bees go about their day is truly lovely, and although checking the hives and then harvesting the honey is quite a bit work, the result makes it worthwhile. Knowing that you are doing something important for the environment is rewarding in itself, but enjoying honey that your own bees have produced is unbeetable!

The early bird gets the snapper.

Sydney Snapper Fever

Words and Photo Lewis Kennedy-Hunt

When I hear the word ‘snapper’, locations like Coffs Harbour, Port Phillip Bay and the Far South Coast of New South Wales instantly spring to mind. Sydney, on the other hand, doesn’t quite boast the same reputation for this sought after species, with considerably less reef systems and overall snapper holding structure in comparison. However, when the summertime plagues of kings and pelagics start to thin, reds seem to become the go-to for a lot of local fishos. It is this fraternity of hardy anglers who persist through the colder winter months that would argue Sydney is somewhat of an unsung hero when it comes to the snapper.

Pink Snapper (Pagrus auratus) are a drag-peeling, lure crunching sport and table fish that us Aussies love to chase right around the country. They are an unmistakable and unique looking fish with their brushed pink skin and iridescent blue spots. They love environments with reef, kelp and gravel and can be found in shallow inshore waters right out to hundred-odd metre depths. They can be targeted all year around, although the winter months are generally when the bigger ones are caught.

By no means do I consider myself an expert on snapper, but I do love to spend a bit of time chasing them during the colder months. My personal favourite method to target them is out of my tinnie in the washy and turbulent inshore waters around the local rock ledges. However, I would not recommend this style of fishing to anyone as it is extremely dangerous.

Fishing the washes from a boat, using a lighter setup with 10lb braided main line and 20lb leader is all that you really need, with the majority of fish ranging between 30-60cm. I prefer to chase these fish on lures as opposed to bait, with a soft plastic rigged on a ¼ ounce jighead being my weapon of choice.

The best times to target snapper in the shallower water are dawn and dusk when the light becomes less harsh and the fish begin to move up higher in the column out of the deeper areas. Snapper have large caudal fins that they use to power back down to the kelp once they’ve been hooked, so they need to be fished with heavy drag and a liberal dose of authority.

Snapper are not just a target for boat-based anglers, but rock fishos as well. The Beast Publisher James Hutton is known to get out for a bit of land-based snapper action off the stones from time to time. When fishing from the rocks, a burley trail of pilchards or prawns combined with a lightly weighted presentation of the same bait floated down at your feet into the trail is a pretty reliable method. As always, wear a lifejacket if you are fishing from the rocks.

Bigger snapper will tend to avoid the shallower water in preference of deeper reef systems and it is those who are able to fish further off the coast that will have a greater chance of catching a true trophy sized specimen. Reports and photos of horse reds up to 80cm have been doing the rounds, most caught at a Northern Beaches reef on both soft plastics and bait, and an 85cm snapper was caught off Botany, which is huge for Sydney. Closer in, the pansized snapper have been in good numbers for those just looking for a feed.

Overall, it seems that the snapper fishery is very healthy right now off Sydney, offering anglers some feverish fishing. They are definitely one of my favourite species to target and are just about the only thing I fish for from the boat during winter. Their eating quality, in my opinion, is up there with the best you can get in our waters and my family often forgive me for the 6am racket when I return a few hours later with fresh caught snapper for dinner.