Joseph Christensen

Historical perspectives of fisheries exploitation in the Indo-Pacific

The waters of the Indo-Pacific were at the centre of the global expansion of marine capture fisheries in the twentieth century, yet surprisingly little has been written about this subject from a historical perspective. This book, the first major study of the history of fishing in Asia and Oceania, presents the case-studies completed through the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) initiative. It examines the marine environmental history and historical marine ecology of the Indo-Pacific during a period that witnessed the dramatic escalation of industrial fishing in these seas.

Shark Bay Snapper: Science, Policy, and the Decline and Recovery of a Marine Recreational Fishery

Since the mid-1990s Shark Bay’s inner gulf snapper fishery has become one of the most intensively-studied and better-understood marine recreational fisheries in Australia. It provides an important case-study of the impact that recreational fishing can have on highly targeted stocks, showing that recreational fishers, by virtue of their greater numbers and their uptake of technologies developed for the commercial sector, can have an equal if not greater total catch than professional fishers in the same or similar fisheries. The Shark Bay case-study also demonstrates the complexity of the challenges associated with sustainably managing marine recreational fisheries. The effectiveness of traditional recreational management measures is increasingly being questioned. As more and more jurisdictions move towards implementing ecosystem-based management approaches, strategies to ensure sustainable harvests will be required for all sectors—commercial, recreational and artisanal alike. This chapter highlights the role that effective biological research and robust management intervention can play in assisting the recovery of a stock fished to the brink of collapse. Whilst the recovery of the inner gulf snapper stocks is continuing, it constitutes one of the few documented examples worldwide of the successful recovery of a marine recreational fishery through the promotion of sustainable, scientifically-based recreational harvest levels. The focus on ecological outcomes and other factors that contributed to the successful restoration of inner Shark Bay’s recreational snapper fishery are being recognised as essential elements in the reform of recreational fisheries management elsewhere.

Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World

This book examines the dangers and the patterns of adaptation that emerge through exposure to risk on a daily basis. By addressing the influence of environmental factors in Indian Ocean World history, the collection reaches across the boundaries of the natural and social sciences, presenting case-studies that deal with a diverse range of natural hazards – fire in Madagascar, drought in India, cyclones and typhoons in Oman, Australia and the Philippines, climatic variability, storms and flood in Vietnam and the Philippines, and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia. These chapters, written by leading international historians, respond to a growing need to understand the ways in which natural hazards shape social, economic and political development of the Indian Ocean World, a region of the globe that is highly susceptible to the impacts of seismic activity, extreme weather, and climate change.

Bordering on Danger: An Introduction

The diverse societies and cultures of the Indian Ocean World share a common historical experience of hazard and risk. This chapter examines the role of natural hazards as a unifying element in Indian Ocean World history by reviewing the dangers that confront those who reside around the borders of the Ocean and, in reviewing the case studies that make up this book, explores patterns of adaptation that emerge as a consequence of exposure to different forms of risk on a daily basis. The collection, we suggest, responds to the growing need for transnational environmental histories of a region that is of growing economic and geopolitical significance, yet which remains highly susceptible to climatic variability, extreme weather events and periodic seismic activity.

Unsettled Seas: Towards a History of Marine Animal Populations in the Central Indo-Pacific

A central theme of this book concerns the importance of historical perspectives for understanding the challenges that confront marine capture fisheries in the twenty-first century. This chapter explores this theme in relation to the Central Indo-Pacific, a body of water that lies at the geographic and geopolitical heart of the different case studies brought together in this volume. The Central Indo-Pacific is one of the world’s principal marine biogeographic realms. It is made up of the eastern Indian and western Pacific oceans, and the seas linking the two—the South China Sea, the seas and straits of Southeast Asia, the Coral Sea, the waters separating Australia from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, and Australia’s northern continental shelf. Here, I cover a period similar to the timeframe of the book’s other chapters, which extends from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. This was a period of profound transformation in the marine fisheries of the Central Indo-Pacific, brought about by the intensification of established fisheries and the advent of new industrial fishing practices. My aims are two-fold: to discuss some of the challenges that confront marine environmental historians working in this region; and to describe the major patterns to the transformation of fishing during the period under review, which propelled the Central Indo-Pacific to the centre of the global expansion of marine capture fisheries.

Their Inescapable Portion? Cyclones, Disaster Relief, and the Political Economy of Pearlshelling in Northwest Australia, 1865–1935

The pearlshelling industry in Northwest Australia developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along one of the world’s most cyclone-prone coasts. Periodic losses of lives and boats were commonplace and contributed to pearlshelling’s reliance upon imported Asian labour in an era marked by implementation of the White Australia Policy and its restriction elsewhere in the Commonwealth on non-white labour. This chapter focusses on the cyclone of 27 March 1935, the single worst disaster to beset an industry that weathered more than 70 storms since its inception. It explores the reasons why this storm, falling as it did at a time when pearlshelling faced growing Japanese competition, helped to inaugurate Commonwealth assistance to Australian communities to aid recovery from natural disasters, locating concern for the industry’s future and coastal settlements it supported in the context of broader social and political concerns over the prospects for European settlements on the continent’s remote and inhospitable Northwest coast.

Pearling’s objects, industries and communities

Just over a century ago the Western Australian port of Broome was home to one of the world’s largest pearling fleets, responsible for more than a quarter of the global supply of high-quality mother-of-pearl shell. The industry is the subject of an extensive scholarly literature focussing on culture contact and the impacts of colonialism, histories of Indigenous and Asian labour, and interactions between Indigenous and Asian peoples. Lustre: Pearling and Australia worked to bring these themes to lives, presenting pearling’s history from the perspective of the communities most closely involved init...

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing in Historical Perspective

The phenomenon of ‘Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing’, or ‘IUU fishing’, is among the most pressing challenges confronting fisheries scientists, managers, and conservationists in the twenty-first century. IUU fishing is an activity which seeks to avoid official monitoring and for which a deficient of reliable information often exists, yet global studies of its extent suggest that it may have accounted for as much as 20 % of the world’s marine capture harvest in the final two decades of the twentieth century. This chapter considers IUU fishing from the historians’ perspective. It provides a short history of IUU fishing, locating the phenomenon in the global expansion of marine capture fisheries and the changes to the regulation of fishing industries and control over maritime space and marine living resources that took place during the twentieth century. Three case-studies of IUU fishing from the Indo-Pacific are examined in detail: the Southern Ocean fishery for Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides); the presence of Indonesian fishers in the Australian Fishing Zone; and Japanese under-reporting of Southern Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus maccoyii) catches. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the potential for further investigations of IUU fishing from an historical perspective.

Introduction: Historical Perspectives of Fisheries Exploitation in the Indo-Pacific

Historical knowledge has an important role in addressing the problems facing marine capture fisheries today. The growing awareness of the value of historical perspectives underpinned the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) project, a 10-year global research collaboration concerned with the long-term interaction of humans and the marine environment. The chapters presented in this volume developed out of HMAP Asia, one of HMAP’s 12 regional case-studies, and a sub-project designed specifically to address a lack of knowledge about the history of fishing and the historic impact of human activity on marine environments in Asia and Oceania. At a time when overfishing and declining fish stocks remain pressing problems for marine scientists and fisheries managers, the task of establishing baselines that expose the full extent of ecological change is as important as ever; understanding the scale and extent of historic change is a necessary first step towards achieving sustainability in marine capture fisheries. Historical Perspectives of Fisheries Exploitation in the Indo-Pacific represents an important step in what we hope will be ongoing international research on the marine environmental history of Asian and Pacific seas.