ABSTRACT
Perca fluviatilis is a European fish, but in Australia, fishers of the Murray-Darling Basin called her redfin. She was a settler fish, arriving in the mid-nineteenth century alongside other travellers: trout, salmon, tench and roach. Here oral history testimony from the Talking Fish project is employed to develop an understanding of the ways that local people in the Murray-Darling Basin valued the redfin they caught through recreational fishing. Twentieth-century fisheries scientists classified redfin as one of eleven invasive species in the basin, but fishers saw redfin in a different light. The loss of redfin in the 1980s from a contagious epizootic hematopoietic necrosis virus (EHNV) was met with lament from these fishers at the same time that her demise was celebrated by scientists.
In everyday life, redfin disrupt the neat categories that shape conservation work – that is, aliens are bad and natives are good. For recreational fishers, redfin were easy to catch and good to eat, and therefore they were bound up with intimate memories of family holidays, intergenerational relationships and a history of self-provisioning. In this chapter, I argue that these different perspectives on scarcity signal a conceptual gap between conservation ideals developed from evidence-based science and the lived experience of people of the basin. The loss of redfin was counted differently according to how people were connected to the rivers of the Murray-Darling Basin.
