‘I and Ritchie will pick you up at 10 p.m.’ Artie Riesenweber’s exclusive use of the first-person singular in all references to plural human gatherings at which he was present intrigued me; it always did. This invitation was not unusual. Artie had a history of being extremely generous with his time and encouragement. He had taken me fishing on numerous occasions. I particularly remember the time in 1959 when he took the Kingscliff Amateur Fishing Club junior team of six, including his son Ritchie, and me, to Tangalooma on Moreton Island for an all-night fishing competition against the Miramar Fishing Club. I shall never forget the long walk back to the jetty from Craven Creek at 5 a.m. carrying a bag full of bream, flathead and whiting. I virtually crawled the last few hundred yards dragging the bag behind me.
On the occasion of this latest offer of Artie’s to pick me up, we were just leaving the Kingscliff rocks at about 4 p.m. It was a gorgeous afternoon in May 1963, I think.
The fishing that afternoon had not been great; we had caught only a couple of decent, but not huge, bream, but we had both been inspired by the very large school of big tailor that was occasionally evident in the face of the larger swells. Artie and I were confident that of the five or six fishermen on the rocks that afternoon we were the only ones who had seen them. More correctly, we were the only ones who had realised that the just visible silver shade was in fact a school of big tailor. We were also confident that we were the only ones there who knew what action was most likely to catch them.
Artie’s invitation had followed a lengthy discourse on whether the sea was calm enough for tailor to come en masse into The Alley that night. The water was beautiful for daytime tailor fishing, but as the tide was on the turn to run in there was little chance they would come in during this tide cycle. The Alley was deep and the whole scene looked excitingly fishy. Artie’s confirmation that we would return to The Alley at 10 p.m., just after the top of the tide, cemented our agreement that it was definitely worth a try. The tailor we could occasionally see were definitely big; the possibility of doing battle with them was truly exciting. The ploy of waiting for the dropping tide well after dark had worked previously.
Ritchie was my age. He was a very good fisherman and I enjoyed fishing with him and Artie. The three of us duly arrived in Artie’s Toyota shortly after ten, at which time the full moon and extremely light westerly made conditions most pleasant for fishing. The slight sea that was running provided an almost constant cover of foam over The Alley. This was more sea than was ideal for tailor in the middle of the night. With a few more years’ experience I became convinced that it could not be too calm for tailor on the dropping tide late at night (chapter 5). But on this night the rest of the conditions were perfect. We agreed that because of the foam it looked better for jewfish than tailor, but we knew this before we took the chance to come out late. We were optimistic that the extra light from the full moon would sway the behaviour of this school in our favour.
The first half-hour produced not a bite of any sort. All three of us were aware that the chance we had taken was now most likely to result in an early return home empty handed. I tried letting my pilchard sink more in the hope of salvaging the night by catching a decent jewie, or perhaps a few schoolies (the full moon in May was much more favourable for big schoolies than the larger members of the species), but none wanted to play ball. Then I had a really good, determined and strong bite. I connected and hoped for a jewie, but soon realised it was not, even though it was a significant fish. It turned out to be a very big bream, close to 3 pounds. A short while later, Artie and Ritchie both caught a bream of about the same size, but after an hour or so we accepted that the tailor were not coming. We discussed the alternatives, and Artie and Ritchie decided they would give it away. I opted to stay and fish for bream; I had brought a light rod in addition to my tailor gear and had put a pound of excellent white pilchards, which had been caught only the day before, in my bait Esky. The possibility that it might be a bream night was in the original mix of options; the excellent white pillies I had were a definite factor. I told Artie I would make my own way home along the beach. The tide was dropping and within a couple of hours it would be easy to cross the creek at the mouth.
The Reisenwebers’ vehicle had hardly left the rocks when I hooked my second bream. On the 9-pound line and light rod this was a great experience; it was a magnificent specimen of around 3 and a half pounds. For the next four hours or so I enjoyed some of the most magical bream fishing imaginable; the stuff fishing fantasies are made of. It was unquestionably the best I had ever experienced to that time. The night was beautiful; hard to get better! The fish I caught were all what could only be described as big bream. Most were exceptionally big, for Kingscliff at least. They had no trouble swallowing a quality white pillie on a 2/0 hook and they bit as though they were not at all aware of the trap that my baited hook represented. The bites were consistent, but you had to wait for each one. Practically every bite was expressed by the line just getting tight and staying that way. My strike was followed by the characteristic strong, even run of big bream on light gear and a determined, clean fight with an occasional short ‘pig rooting’ run and an almost polite, head shake.
By 4 a.m., when I decided to call it stumps, I had seventeen bream in my favourite pool. I tried unsuccessfully to fit them all in my creel, so had to settle for threading five or six on my ‘jewfish rope’ (chapter 9) and carrying them across the opposite shoulder to the one that took the weight of my packed creel. The conditions for the walk home were perfect and I crossed the cold, tea-tree stained water at the mouth of the creek at no more than knee depth, but the load, including my gear and unused tailor bait, did necessitate a couple of stops along the beach to change shoulders.
Weighing the catch at 7 a.m. revealed that the seventeen bream totalled slightly more than 51 pounds. The biggest was an ounce under the magical 4 pounds. To this day it remains the biggest bream I ever caught at Kingscliff. In fact, I never saw an authentic 4-pounder caught there. I did see one taken at Hastings Point and I saw Keith Pritchard catch one off the beach at Black Rock, south of Pottsville Creek. Since that time I have caught only two 4-pounders elsewhere and even a 5-pounder in Botany Bay in 1993, but 4-pounders just did not frequent Kingscliff. There were other places on the north coast where 4-pouders were relatively common; Evans Head, including in the mouth of the Evans River, was one such place. But Kingscliff was not.
Nine others of my catch that night were over 3 pounds; a few smaller fish, about 2 pounds, brought the average size down. My father was far more excited about this catch than he had ever been about my hauls of other species, even jewies; he was, after all, a bream fisherman. He helped me wash them and pack them into two banana boxes. In fact, we repacked them twice just to make sure their impact was readily appreciated by all who saw them, and of course because of our own appreciation of how special they were, both as a catch of fish and as a wonderful presentation of seafood. When Dad finally stepped back and admired the collection he stated, ‘Rob [the way only my family addressed me], you may never see a better catch of bream than that!’ ‘Aw, Dad,’ I said incredulously, ‘I’m only 16 and I am sure I will get a lot better at catching bream.’ My statement may have been true, but Dad was much closer to the mark. To this day I have never seen a catch of such quality bream, let alone caught one myself. I caught more bream on many occasions, but never averaging 3 pounds.
Dad’s final acknowledgement of the value of the catch was to select one of about 2 and a half pounds, scale and gut it and take it upstairs for breakfast. Watching Jack Kearney cook and eat a whole bream was to witness a wonderful culinary event. His enjoyment of every aspect of the process was infectious.
The fish had to be meticulously scaled and cleaned, quickly washed, in salt water if possible, and then patted dry. It had to be grilled, under moderate to high heat depending on the size of the fish. It would not be sliced or cut in any way but as soon as the skin began to sizzle a smear of butter was deemed necessary, followed by another just before removal from the grill. One turn was all that was allowed, and over-cooking was not to be countenanced. This made timing, which only came from experience, and devoted, full-time observation of the cooking process, imperative.
Once cooking was complete the real artistry began. Dad would always position his bream most carefully on his plate then sit up and address it with due reverence. The only condiment allowed, additional to the smear of butter in the cooking process, was salt. My wife still frequently reminds me of Dad’s statement: ‘Anybody who puts lemon on fish, particularly a grilled bream, doesn’t really like fish.’ When confronted by lemon-lovers his defence was that lemon was OK if the fish wasn’t really fresh. But why would you mask, or even overpower, the beautiful pure sea smell and wonderfully subtle taste of really fresh fish with such a dominant flavour as lemon? He did have access to the freshest of fish and he believed that in bream, whiting, dusky flathead, jewfish and garfish he had access to some of the finest fish in the world. If you wanted something stronger, then have a slab of tailor, grilled for breakfast. Others just might be forgiven for putting lemon on tailor, but such behaviour was to be discouraged, particularly if the tailor was really fresh.
For all seafood, he was a purist, and he was the best fish eater I ever encountered. For the last six or seven years he was in the pub in Murwillumbah he would make an annual ten-day pilgrimage to Mackay with three of his mates to fish the Barrier Reef on a charter arrangement. All the way up he and his friends would wax lyrical about how they were going to eat nothing but very fresh fish for the whole week. Dad found considerable humour in his colleagues’ predicament; by the second night, they would all be searching for a steak. Sausages would do. Anything but fish. He never found the temptation to follow suit irresistible, even to the end of the trip.
Dad approached his whole bream with immense deliberation and reverence. He dismembered it with the precision of a surgeon. He ate every bit immediately it was removed from the carcase. He slowly and deliberately dissected the meaty bits and meticulously picked the succulent white flesh from the bony areas. He loved every morsel, but many times he would tell me, ‘You know, many people don’t eat the cheeks and the wings [the breast around the pectoral fins], but these are actually the best bits.’ Once again, his wisdom could be confirmed by the available evidence.
It took Dad an age to eat a bream, but when he was finished not a morsel could be found on the chassis. His enjoyment of the fish, its value as food and the process of eating it were sublime. This enjoyment was so obvious that it was infectious. It always gave me tremendous pleasure to sit with him while he ate a bream, even if I was not eating one myself. To this day I cannot eat a bream, no matter how it is cooked, without thinking of Jack Kearney.
My love of grilled bream, even though considerable, never rose to his dizzy heights. Dad was not a big man, but his ability to eat fish was disproportionate. I particularly remember one morning when I arrived home from the rocks at about 7 a.m. with six or seven large bream. They were still alive when Dad selected one of a little more than 2 pounds that would be his breakfast. At the completion of the ritual of preparing it and cooking and eating it he, as usual, espoused the virtues of whole bream. On this occasion he particularly enthused over the nutritional value of this type of fish cooked in this manner: ‘It is such great food, and you never feel heavy or over-full. It has to be good for you.’ I was pretty sure he was only after some encouragement, so replied, ‘There are plenty there, Dad. Why don’t you have another one.’ After some rather shallow protestations about not wishing to be seen to be greedy, he accepted this would indeed be a good idea. His obvious enjoyment of the next hour was confirmation that it was.
My second encounter with very special bream was entirely different. It occurred five or six years later. I was fishing in No Hopers for live bait using my faithful mullet rig and cubes of fresh white bread. There were lots of mullet feeding aggressively, so there was plenty of surface action. I had caught about six mullet when I hooked something bigger. I quickly suspected it was a bream; I often caught them fishing for mullet and their fight is not hard to pick. But I was not ready for this particular bream.
It looked like a normal bream of about a pound and a quarter in weight. A nice fish. When I landed it I could see that one of the number 10 hooks was through the edge of the operculum (gill cover) and not in its mouth. As I went to unhook it, I realised the impossible: it did not have a mouth. At least not a normal bream mouth. In fact, it did not have functional jaws. Where its mouth should be was a perfectly circular hole with the diameter of a drinking straw. There was not even a crease where a mouth would normally be, or had been. There was no sign of scarring or previous trauma around the head or elsewhere.
I was astounded. As a bream, everything else was perfect. It was fat and looked perfectly healthy. How could a bream, which was supposed to prey on at least crustaceans, even survive without being able to grab, hold and crush prey such as crabs, prawns and bivalves? I had always accepted the popular wisdom that these hard-shelled creatures were what bream lived on. If not, why have the strong crushing and grinding teeth that are a characteristic of the species? How could this particular fish possibly thrive being restricted to items smaller than about a tenth of an inch? And presumably soft ones at that!
I felt sorry for this fish that had fallen foul of one of the few things it could eat, wet bread. But I needed to show people this remarkable specimen. I had never seen anything even remotely like it. It constituted a threat to all of the assumptions we had about what bream ate and what they needed to eat to prosper. The hole it had for a mouth was so small I also wondered how it could get enough water across its gills to keep its oxygen supply up. Perhaps bream don’t breathe through their mouths after all? Do the gills do it all, in and out?
Dad and I discussed the implications of this discovery for quite some time. I thought about it overnight and we discussed it again the next morning. If we had not seen this specimen, both of us would have had a lot of trouble believing it. Up until then we thought we knew quite a lot about bream and their feeding habits. We had a lot to think about. If this fish had been skinny, we would have been able to accept it much more easily.
As astounded as I was by this bream, the next day something equally remarkable happened. I was back at No Hopers after mullet for jewfish bait when I caught two more bream. The first was a perfectly normal fish, but the second was exactly the same as the one I had caught the day before. It was the same size, both in length and girth. It had exactly the same funnel for a mouth and in all other external aspects it was an absolutely normal bream.
I have now had more than fifty years to ponder this truly remarkable pair. If only I had preserved at least one of them! Even a photograph would have done. I have spent much of that fifty years and the bulk of the ten before studying fish biology and fisheries science. I am still flabbergasted by these two. But they have taught me a lot about fish behaviour.
The serious abnormality they both had must have been a birth defect, almost certainly genetic. There is the possibility that the abnormality was caused by chemical interference at the egg or larval stage, but the deformities from such action are usually asymmetrical. These two were peas of a pod and the assumption that they must have come from the same batch of eggs is difficult to dismiss. Could they possibly have been two members of a different species? If so, should there be more of them? Net fishermen at least would have encountered them. If it was a developmental abnormality, it is difficult to conceive of circumstances that would create two identical creatures. There was no sign of physical trauma. The bodies had no scarring whatsoever.
Apart from the revision of what bream live on that these two fish provoked, they also forced a rethink of kinship in the species. They were captured a day apart at exactly the same place. It would be brave to even suggest they had not been together absolutely all their lives, right from the egg. Based on the assumption that their growth rate was similar to normal bream, this would have been of the order of six or eight years.
It is difficult to believe these two could have come from different batches and sought each other out while swimming around the coast of NSW. I knew there were advantages associated with being with mates of a similar size, but this takes mateship, or sibling fidelity, to an entirely new level. They were not obviously hydrodynamically disadvantaged by their condition and there was no evidence they had suffered in any physical way. There was no apparent reason for them to even feel sorry for each other; in all aspects other than an abnormal mouth, they appeared perfectly healthy. So what was the compulsion to stay so closely together for their whole life?
What are the implications for bream behaviour generally? Is there incredibly strong sibling binding in the species, or even fish generally? There is also the obvious question: were these the only two? If they were, then it seems remarkable that both survived and thrived, in spite of what appeared to be a severe handicap. Why did the only two to be recaptured, as far as I am aware, get recaptured at the same time at the same place? If they were not the only ones, then how many were there? An angler using normal bream gear would never catch one; they could not even fit a normal bream-hook in their mouth! But net fishermen would catch them with, presumably, similar efficiency to normal bream. I have never heard of any being reported. Fisheries scientists from NSW Fisheries have sampled many thousands of bream from commercial catches, including measuring in excess of 20 000 in the last fifteen years, and in response to my questioning they have reported that they have never seen a bream with such an abnormality. No fishermen have raised such an issue with them. This effectively eliminates the other, somewhat remote, possibility that my two specimens were of a totally different species.
The whole experience still causes me to ponder the strength of one of the planks of evolution: survival of the fittest! In all other aspects, these two specimens appeared fit and healthy. Yet based on their functional anatomy they appeared extremely seriously handicapped. There must be at least a little more latitude in the criteria for survival in the marine environment than I had been taught there was!
The two stories above could be taken in isolation to suggest a predominance of bream around the Kingscliff rocks that were abnormal, either in size or functional capability. This was certainly not the case. Every autumn there would be good numbers of very normal bream, about a pound in weight. In the late 1950s and early 1960s I would fish for them mainly in The Alley and The Bream Hole using crabs or yabbies for bait. Later, when I had access to frozen bait, I changed to using mainly white pilchards or froggies.
One unusual feature of going to the rocks to fish for bream in autumn was the frequency with which I would find bream on the beach that had had been bitten off just behind the anus. The consistency of the placement of the bite was remarkable in itself. I do not remember it ever being so far forward that the body cavity was exposed, and it was never so far back that only the filamentous part of the tail was removed. The tell-tale semi-circular cut of tailor would be obvious. Several things surprised me about these occurrences. First, how frequent they were. Some years I would find at least two or three every time I walked the beach from our house to the rocks. Sometimes there would be half a dozen. Most of them would be very close to the rocks and often on the sand between the various rock outcrops. Second, they were of relatively uniform size, from about half a pound to just under a pound. I never found a single one much over a pound. This in itself was remarkable as the run of bream I regularly caught in the same general area at that time of the year was from about a pound to a pound and a quarter. Third, quite a few of the bream were still alive when I found them; they were still breathing, but they obviously could not swim.
I found it amazing that such a trauma had not killed them in seconds. Why did they not ‘bleed out’ in a minute or so, as many other animals would if cut almost in half? This characteristic is not limited to bream. Research on tuna bait fish in Papua New Guinea with Barney Smith and Tony Lewis gave us the opportunity to observe small schools of Stolephorus anchovies that we held in captivity. The method of netting these schools often accidentally led to small barracuda being included in what was transferred live to the research tanks. Monitoring of these fish commonly revealed that anchovies would be bitten off just behind the anus by these barracuda while in the tanks. We found it remarkable that they stayed alive on the surface, still breathing apparently at a normal rate. They would commonly stay alive for hours. Obviously, the blood-clotting mechanisms of fish are different to those of mammals. This observation I had been able to confirm in my studies of fish blood biochemistry and physiology at the University of Queensland in the late 1960s. Fish blood is indeed considerably different to that of mammals in many ways, including the way it clots. This finding did not of itself, however, fully explain the ability of fish to withstand trauma of a magnitude considerably greater than that which could be tolerated by most animals.
I had on numerous occasions seen tailor chase mullet, bite them in half, then swim off and leave both bits. Obviously, the tailor that bit these bream in half did not come back for the bigger bit! Nor did their mates. Maybe they didn’t even eat the smaller bit they had bitten off. But I do not remember ever seeing a single tail piece washed up on the beach. Tailor would bite on a piece of bream on a hook, so why did they not want these half bream? They had clearly been drifting around in areas where tailor were present. I found it hard to believe that tailor simply bit so many in half that they could not eat them all. Finally, what was so special about the size of bream that they picked on? If tailor were just chasing them for fun, why not chase and bite a bigger one? It was not going to bite back!
A satisfactory explanation of the significance of the occurrence of bitten bream remains beyond me. I can only conclude that the primary motivation for tailor doing it was for fun, not sustenance. I suspect jewfish chased mullet in the daytime for much the same reason.
One more unexpected experience with bream occurred in about 1961. I was fishing The Bream Hole, to the right of Round Rock. I was using yabbies and was catching a few nice, but not big, bream, a fraction under a pound average weight. Len Thompson arrived in his Jeep. This was one of only two or three occasions I ever saw Len drive to these rocks and the only time I ever saw him fish there. After brief pleasantries—we knew each other well—Len began to fish from the rock a yard or two to my right. He was using white pillies. His cast into The Hole landed no more than a yard from mine. He quickly caught a bream, as did I, but the one Len caught was significantly bigger than any I had. When the next six or seven he caught were also bigger than the same number I caught we both were intrigued. We were both getting bites in very short time, but his smallest bream was bigger than my biggest, and we had a decent sample size. His were about a pound and a bit each, all bigger than mine, but not hugely so. We discussed the anomaly and Len said that as he needed to go anyway, I could put the obvious conclusion to the test; he gave me what he had left of his pillies.
He left without waiting to see what I caught on them. What I did catch with my first cast was one of the bigger bream, but then, unfortunately, all of them went off the bite, even on yabbies. I have had numerous experiences when the introduction of extremely fresh bait, particularly pilchard of various species, resulted in bigger fish (chapter 14), but I cannot remember a more marked demonstration of feeding specificity-by-size of two groups of the same species that were not that markedly different in size.
I have no doubt that the bream I caught over the years on really good-quality pillies were, on average, bigger than those I caught on yabbies, but I had few opportunities to do a definitive test. I remain absolutely convinced that the bream I caught on even frozen high-quality froggies were considerably bigger on average than those I caught on live yabbies or worms.