Discussion Form Question

Crisis of Meanings: Divergent Experiences and Perceptions of the Marine Environment in Victoria, Australia

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Tanya J. King Anthropology, SAGES, The University of Melbourne

The oceans of the world are regularly depicted as under threat from human exploitation with the problem portrayed as being of ‘global’ concern. In a world market characterised by the division of labour, many of those who eat fish do so without directly experiencing the ocean as a domain of productive utility. Rather, their encounters are with representations that depict the ‘natural’ world as an aesthetic object of contemplation, and environmentalist discourses that identify human activities as threatening marine ecosystems. So prevalent is this experience that tangible institutions, such as state fisheries management bodies, have emerged, acting to reinforce the ontology of this ‘contemplated’ ocean, giving weight to the illusion that humans can, and should, appreciate it only from afar. In this representation, commercial fishers are regularly depicted as transgressing a ‘natural’ boundary between humans and the environment. It is when the world is simultaneously encountered as an object of consumptive utility and aesthetic utility that the human role in the environment becomes ambiguous and a sense of crisis arises. This paper investigates disjunctions in experiences and understandings that contribute to environmental anxiety, and debates over the appropriate use of the ocean.

Introduction Fish populations and marine ecosystems are increasingly presented as under threat from human exploitation with the problem portrayed as one of ‘global’ concern (McGoodwin 1990; Van Weigel 1995; Crean and Symes 1996; Aplin el al. 1999; Suzuki and Dressel 1999; Rees 2003). Images of massive ‘factory’ ships, defensive fishers and enormous hauls of dead fish typically feature in depictions of a ‘...global fisheries crisis that looms as a critical threat to world food security’ (Cowan and Schienberg 2002). However, there seems to be another crisis, noted by Dickens (1 996: i): ‘one of the main features of contemporary environmental crisis is that no-one has a clear picture of what is taking place’. People understand the world in ways that correspond to their particular experiences. This paper thus investigates disjunctions in experiences and understandings. The purpose is to consider not an ‘actual’ environmental phenomenon but the sense of crisis that arises when multiple, conflicting experiences and understandings are encountered simultaneously, and how this ‘crisis’ manifests in debates in Australia about the appropriate use of the ocean.

The image of ‘the globe’-‘the blue planet’ or ‘the Earth’-as a universally shared object of contemplation and as under threat from those who fail to act on their responsibilities as

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custodians, is of interest to anthropologists and others (Milton 1996:53, 2002; Harre, Brockmeier and Muhlhausler 1999; Hutton and Connors 1999; Ingold 2000a). Ingold contrasts this notion of a contemplated ‘globe’ against that of a ‘sphere’ (Ingold 2000b). While the former exists as an ‘artificial’ cognitive reconstruction, a world upon which life can be contemplated and romanticised, perhaps as human-free, the latter is a life-world that individuals encounter directly. My position differs somewhat from that of Ingold, in considering tangible representations of the ‘globe’ to be as genuine as any other item encountered in a life-world, while allowing that understandings will vary according to the items encountered. ‘Global’ perspectives are sustained by ‘transcultural discourses’ (Milton 1996: 225), of which ‘environmentalism’-which depicts the world as an object to be protected-is one. The language of environmentalism, once considered radical, is now a moral standard, a guide with religious connotations-a labarum’-that is commonplace in public discourse (Eder 1996: 180). In the media, human interaction with nature has become problematised, a problem that is tangible, symbolised by ‘the globe’, and familiar to almost everyone who has access to television, internet, magazines or newspapers. The ‘globe’, in the Ingoldian sense, may represent a world that is an object of contemplation, but the symbols themselves are daily encountered by the Australian public as tangible phenomena.

For different people, ‘transcultural’ items, such as ‘the environment’, take on various meanings that reflect diverse, and changing, relationships to the world (Milton 1996: 156-7). The representation of the ocean as human-free, as mare nullius (Jackson 1995),’ is only sustainable if one does not engage with the ocean itself, but rather, engages with a representation of the ocean. For many, knowledge of the ocean is limited to this abstracted experience. Others negotiate this ‘represented ocean’ when engaging with the ocean itself. For example, those who extract from the marine environment, such as oil companies and recreational fishers, are often compelled to publicly defend their actions from those who charge that they are compromising the mare nullius ideal. For others who experience the ocean as a space for recreation, by yachting, surfing or diving, the domain is championed for its ‘aesthetic utility’, and what they personally ‘take’ from the ocean are primarily intangible or ephemeral qualities such as ‘beauty’, ‘relaxation’ or ‘peace and q ~ i e t ’ . ~ In combination with various economic and political factors, this detached representation, this ‘map’, is often confused with a dynamic marine ecosystem. It is when the world is simultaneously encountered as an object of consumptive utility and aesthetic utility that the role of humans in the environment becomes ambiguous, and a sense of crisis arises (Eder 1996: 148-9; Milton 1996). In the context of a labarum of global environmentalist discourse, I argue that this ambiguity is irreconcilable, because models of the world in which humans can choose not to engage with ‘nature’ will always be disrupted by the reality of living in a world that incorporates ‘nature’. Perspectives that idealise the contemplation of the ocean limit the role of humans in the environment to that of destructive agents (Ingold 2000b: 215).4 The increasingly tangible role played by the notion of the ‘globe’ in Western discourses, with its representations now part of the life-world of most people, informs the pervasive sense of environmental ‘crisis’.

The paper begins by considering how globalisation and the division of labour have contributed to the diversification of human relationships with the ocean.’ Then, three ways of knowing and utilising the ocean are described, beginning with the most abstracted, but also the most common. First, I will describe publicly accessible, media images of the ocean that focus on the aesthetic qualities of marine ecosystems and depict ‘healthy’ oceans as mare nullius. Second, I consider the understandings of fisheries ‘experts’-particularly fisheries managers-whose own experiences and understandings of the ocean, while

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influenced by popular images, are largely mediated by state-sanctioned representations, or ‘management tools’, that are themselves grounded in political, legal, economic and scientific considerations. Third, I tum to the perceptions of Victorian commercial fishermen6 who engage with ‘management tools’, in which popular representations of the ocean are implicit, and who have experiences generated through their extractive use of the ocean that are not shared by either the public or the ‘experts’.

The discussion revolves around two government initiatives that affected fishermen of Comer Inlet, Victoria, in recent years. In 2001, shark fishermen of Bass Strait were subjected to massive industry restructuring orchestrated by the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA). These changes altered the access rights of fishermen to the public resource of Commonwealth fish stocks, through the introduction of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs)’ (cf. McCay 1995; Palsson and Helgason 1996; Lockhart and Purcell 2003). Around the same time-just prior to the 2002 Victorian State election-there was renewed political enthusiasm for implementing Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in Victorian waters, including parts of Comer Inlet.8 Both initiatives sought to reorganise human interaction with the ocean, and both were justified, by their supporters, as necessary to avert environmental catastrophe. In the context of these events, multiple competing narratives crystallised, variously valorising and demonising particular ways of engaging with the marine environment. Often, however, these narratives were oxymoronic, simultaneously representing the ocean as a place for engaging and a space for contemplation. The ambiguity of these messages served to fuel the sense of social and environmental ‘crisis’. In concluding the paper, I argue that this sense of crisis is strongly informed by the coming together of incongruous experiences and representations of the ocean, either between groups with competing interests, or within individuals who are compelled to simultaneously negotiate the ocean as an inhabited environment, and as a merely contemplated world. As the contemplated world, the ‘globe’, takes on increasing importance in the West, not just socially but also at the level of state institutions, this ‘crisis’ becomes inevitable.

Divided experiences Nature, as we perceive, understand and engage with it, is produced through iterative discourses between human action and the world (e.g. Heidegger 1962; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Bourdieu 1998; Harre, Brockmeier and Muhlhausler 1999; Ingold 2000a, 2000c; Button 2002). As ways of relating to the world and systems of production change, so too do cultural understandings of nature (Palsson 1991 : 54). Significant changes to production systems occurred during the Industrial Revolution, when efforts to increase labour efficiency compelled people to focus on specific, differentiated tasks (Clark 1997). Those who produced items from the natural environment became separated from those who consumed the products, the different experiences becoming associated with various ideals of environmental utility, and linked to a moral value. Eder (1996: 148-9) describes how ‘the culturally universal classification of pure and impure was projected onto the relationship of city and country’, to the extent that ‘...at the end of the eighteenth century, instrumental interaction with nature was felt to be repulsive, a violation of moral and aesthetic sentiments’. From as early as 1880, Australian capital cities established public transport links to nature preserves on the urban fringes for use by people seeking a weekend retreat from the perceived relative impurity of the city (Hutton and Connors 1999: 64).

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Australian environmental advocates who express their views through art and poetry, have tended to prioritise the aesthetic value of the environment, championing protectionist roles and discouraging ‘instrumental interaction’ (Eder 1996: 149). Such attitudes, explains Ingold (2000b: 2 14-9, are perpetuated by iin ‘interventionist’ discourse that ironically suggests a mode of interaction that opposes actual intervention. I prefer to use the term ‘anti- instrumentalist’ to convey the same sentiment without the ambiguity.’ The words of early underwater photographer, Noel Monkman, a principle advocate for the creation of marine parks in the Great Barrier Reef, illustrate this perspective: ‘It doesn’t belong to you, it ... doesn’t belong to any living person. It doesn’t belong to our unborn children. None of us own it. We’re only privileged to see it. Not to take it away, not to sell it. We’re caretakers, and that’s all’ (in Hutton and Connors 1999: 99 original emphasis). This anti-instrumentalist discourse has been reflected in political trends. Despite the increasing tendency for Australian governments to favour international economic concerns over environmental issues, Australia has a long history of environmental protectionism compared to other Western nations (for an overview see Hutton and Connors 1999; Walker 2002: 256). For example, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), formally instituted in the mid-late 1970s, was one of the first Western institutions created to protect the marine environment from commercial interests (Hutton and COMO~S 1999: 99-106). Popular representations of the ocean, too, tend to reflect this anti-instrumentalist discourse. While many Victorians are familiar with the coast, most encounter the underwater environment through documentaries, press releases or films (such as those described below) that focus on the recreational values of the domain, and convey an anti-instrumentalist message. Few experience the submarine environment as a domain of human activity. Aesthetic valuations of the environment are able to exist separately from consumptive modes of engagement.

Dickens (1996: i) charges that ‘the division of labour is a key but neglected factor underlying people’s inability to adequately understand and relate to the natural world’. Those who extract produce from the environment as part of their specialised tasks have become behaviourally, conceptually, geographically-even morallydivided from those who do not. Fishermen encounter the ocean as they catch fish to sell to anonymous others; metropolitan fish-eaters pay for their fish at restaurants and markets and encounter the ocean in the form of aestheticised representations; fisheries ‘experts’ mediate producers, consumers and the environment, by engaging with representations of each, technology enabling them to work from any number of locations. Though there is some overlap, the division of labour has rendered these people, these environments, largely anonymous to each other. The ocean is experienced as ‘real’ for all of these people, but the experiential contexts in which these realities are formulated differ.

The public-media(ted) representations The global trend towards task differentiation perpetuates the distinction between those who produce and those who consume, and as some people catch fish for many others, most people experience the ocean in absentia. Unchallenged by conflicting experiences, the public is potentially able to imagine an Ocean ecosystem without humans. If, as Merleau- Ponty (1962: 353) noted, ‘...any internal experience is possible only against the background of external experience’, more Victorians experience fish as anthropomorphised images on a television screen than as creatures made of flesh and teeth.

This section presents two examples of how the marine environment was represented in the media during the period of my research. The first is the animated film Finding Nemo; the

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second, the media campaign that promoted implementation of MPAs in Victorian waters. Both examples mediate the experiences and understandings of the public, giving people the impression that they can come to ‘know’ the ocean from their lounge rooms; both depict the underwater environment as sacred, exotic. and for aesthetic consumption only; both anthropomorphise marine life, and yet suggest that humans do not belong in the ocean they depict.

Finding Nemo Finding Nemo (Stanton and Peterson 2003) is a story set primarily around marine animals of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). While this domain is only marginally more a c c e s s i b l e d u e to tourism infrastructure-than other underwater environments, it is a highly salient national symbol (Smith and Free 1996: 11). So prolific are depictions of the GBR that even those who have never dived on the reef may feel that they have an intimate knowledge of the environment. Indeed, in Finding Nemo the GBR seems to have imagined itself into reality. Though the following comments are from North American reviewers, accessed via the official Finding Nemo web site, reviews such as these compelled Australians to attend the movie in record-breaking numbers (Bolt 2003: 23; Pixar 2003). In many of these reviews, Pixar Animation Studios have been applauded for their ‘realistic’ depiction of the ocean. For example, one reviewer writes, ‘I have never been to Australia, but I just can’t imagine scenery more beautiful’ (Minton 2003). Another commented that ‘[tlhe computer graphics create a visual world that you would actually see if you dived down 50 feet on a coral reef (Clifford 2003). For these reviewers, Pixar has both reflected and informed their imagined notion of underwater life. With no alternative experiences to challenge the images presented on the movie screen, some have melded the symbolised with the symbol, and imagined themselves ‘diving down 50 feet on a coral reef in the Great Barrier Reef ...’. But, of course, watching a film of diving cannot be equated with actually diving. The former is a representation created by humans with a particular, anti-instrumentalist message in mind. While this understanding is one in which humans are not part of the marine environment, it is generated in a thoroughly social-and terrestrial+ontext.

Finding Nemo features a range of anthropomorphised marine species, and reflects the anxieties of the public at which it is directed (Bolt 2003). Nemo is a young clownfish, living happily with his widowed father, Marlin, in a suburban coral reef, when he is taken from his underwater home by a human diver and placed in the artificial environment of a fish-tank. One of the other captives articulates the impropriety of their predicament: ‘Fish aren’t meant to be kept in a box, kid. It does things to you’. In his search for Nemo, Marlin explores the ocean and meets a host of other sea-creatures with human personalities. Though some are more helpful than others, they all have a place in the ocean. There is even a group of sharks who, having seen the error of their ways, have converted to vegetarianism. The only time Marlin encounters an actual person is when his party is threatened with capture by a commercial fishing boat. Despite humanising every other creature in the film, the crew of the boat are depersonalised, expressionless, grey, ghost-like men in matching wet-weather gear. Their strangeness is highlighted because they fail to recognise what even sharks have come to realise: ‘Fish are friends, not food’. In a moment of triumph over the encroaching human threat, the fish thwart their potential captors and return home.

Though heavily anthropomorphised, the film leaves no doubt about the place of humans in the marine environment: there is none. Fish belong in the sea, and humans do not, and to transgress this fundamental boundary by extracting fish upsets the natural order.

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The unsustainability of this perspective was noted by Andrew Bolt, a newspaper columnist with a reputation for expressing controversial opinions. Bolt (2003: 23) criticises the simplicity of the ‘messages’ conveyed in the film: ‘humans are vile but nature noble,. . . killing is always wrong,. . . eating meat is mean’. His concern is that the film’s ‘too-easy, no- pain, nature-worshipping New Age-ism’ inculcates children with an unrealistic understanding of nature:

What Finding Nemo doesn’t explain . . . is what the sharks will eat now that they’ve given up meat ... children (are being) taught a morality that is so impractical ... that it soon becomes a game of pretend. .... Despite spruiking vegetarianism, Finding Nemo has a commercial tie-in with McDonald’s, which now includes a Nemo toy fish with every Happy Meal of dead cow or gassed chicken. (Bolt 2003: 23)

The disruptive effect of the ambiguity Bolt highlights-ating meat while ‘spruiking vegetarianism’-is greatly diminished because the context of each experience is kept separate. Fish can be contemplated and consumed simultaneously because people rarely experience the entire process whereby fish are taken from the ocean, killed, gutted, cooked, coated in tartar sauce and eaten. In industrialised societies, the narrative of vegetarianism has arisen in tandem with the tendency to acknowledge a distant, contemplated, romanticised nature (Eder 1996: 155-60).

As most Victorians only ever encounter the ocean on holidays to the coast, and because relatively few ever experience the underwater environment, their knowledge of the marine environment is something of a blank slate (Smith and Free 1996: 8; Aslin and Byron 2003). It is upon this blank slate that imaginations can create seascapes, creatures, whole ecosystems, that reflect other physical, environmental and social dynamics, such as those represented in Finding Nemo. The propensity for the media to shape the understandings of the public is not lost on those who advocate for a particular style of engagement with the environment (Aslin and Byron 2003). An example of strategic anti-instrumentalist advocacy is described next.

The campaign for Marine Protected Areas in Victorian waters In preparation for the promotion of MPAs in Victorian waters, a series of focus groups was commissioned by the Victorian National Parks Association in order to gauge the response of Victorians to proposed ‘no take’ zones, and to suggest a campaign to promote their implementation (Smith and Free 1996).” The survey found that:

Extremely low awareness.. . necessitates that the campaign start by building awareness of Victoria’s marine environment. Currently the marine environment in Victoria is undervalued at least partly because it is not known. The campaign should have as its objective that the community become at least as familiar with the marine flora and fauna in Victorian waters as they are with tropical waters. (Smith and Free 1996: 6)

The study indicates that visual images of the sea bed including seagrasses, coral, and a variety of creatures and fish were most effective in terms of introducing people to the existence and diversity of marine life. (Smith and Free 1996: 9-10, original emphasis)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The media campaign that ran throughout 2002 introduced the Victorian public to a dazzling array of marine flora and fauna. Images of sea creatures produced by the National Oceans Office, the Commonwealth agency promoting regional MPAs nationally, were

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digitally enhanced and so brightly coloured that they were barely distinguishable from the cartoon characters in Finding Nerno (National Oceans Office 2002). ‘Fact Sheets’ provided maps of proposed MPAs, and information on the value of the areas in question. Comer Inlet was described as follows:

Tucked in behind Wilsons Promontory, Comer Inlet is the forgotten gem of the Victorian coast. ... On a calm day the water develops a glassy sheen, disturbed only by the occasional penguin, a diving cormorant, or a pod of dolphins. Attractive seagrass meadows on shallow mud banks beckon beneath the surface waters. (Department of Natural Resources and Environment 2002)

In this description, Comer Inlet is valued, at least in part, because it is undisturbed by humans. It is an object of contemplation. Indeed, Comer Inlet could be described as ‘tucked in behind Wilsons Promontory’ only when observed from an aerial photograph, or a map, and particularly if the viewer gazes from the State capital, Melbourne.

Further down the ‘Fact Sheet’, under the title, ‘What you might see’, is a description of two Comer Inlet creatures. The spotted pipefish, is described as a ‘master of disguise’, while the second creature is introduced as follows: ‘If a squid could be called cute, it would be the shy, tiny, Southern Dumpling Squid. Rotund, big eyed, and brightly coloured, they are night feeders, burying themselves in the sand during the day.. .’. Though it seems that only the most dedicated diver would ever actually see either the spotted pipefish or the southem dumpling squid, the media campaign to introduce their existence nonetheless sought to incorporate them in the imagination of the Victorian public.’’

The reliability, the factualness, of the picture created during the pro-MPA campaign was reinforced by the strategic use of biological science. The notion that scientists are able to appraise the real world and report objective facts to the public is a persistent myth (Milton 1993; Finlayson 1994; Harre, Brockmeier and Muhlhausler 1999; Latour 1999; Howitt 2001 : 1 16-7; Walker 2002). Many scientists (and non-scientists) consider ‘scientific’ information to be privileged, objective fact (though part of the scientific endeavour is to discover new ‘facts’ that supplant the old ones).’* At a public seminar titled ‘Protecting life in our seas’ (O’Hara 2002), a commercial fisherman questioned the speaker about the appropriateness of the specific location of parks, suggesting that their placement was flawed. The latter man responded, ‘I’m the scientist that provides the input of data, not the economist and you should probably direct your question to someone else.. .. Again, I wasn’t the decision maker, I just present the facts’. One of the ‘facts’ he noted, almost apologetically, was that the extraction of anything from the marine environment upsets the natural order. ‘(That is) the way it is!’, he proclaimed. Some fish stocks, he argued, were a mere twenty five percent of the size they were 200 years ago. The marine scientist explained that he was not anti-fishing and he ate fish himself, but any form of fishing was fundamentally at odds with a healthy marine ecosystem. ‘You’re taking fish out of the marine environment, which don’t eat ... [other marine species] which don’t eat the kelp and.. . this unbalances the ecosystem’. Of course, even scientific facts are pervaded by social categories that order the natural world, categories in which production and consumption can be distinct experiences. Eating fish, while arguing for the cessation of fishing, is only possible in a context where someone else catches the fish that are eaten.

Public discourse and state management: an emerging reality The populace inform, and react to, the public discourse presented in the media as ‘political animals’, adjusting their behaviour, consumer patterns and voting preferences accordingly.

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In setting political agendas on the environment, ‘it is the media who take over the role personal experience once had in political issue-making.. .’ (Eder 1996: 182). In industrialised states such as Australia, political expedience demands that marine stewards attend to the ocean as it is understood by the majority of the voting public. Hence, management bodies must respond to scientific findings, the demands of various lobby groups, abide by rules of law, economics and international (trade) relations, as well as acknowledge the anthropomorphised ocean that is represented in the media. The organisation charged with managing those Victorian fishermen who operate in Commonwealth waters is the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA).

AFMA manages commercial fishing on behalf of a public who simultaneously prioritise the aesthetic utility of the ocean and who eat more fish than ever before. These perspectives can coexist for a centralised bureaucracy, symbolised on paper, because they are detached from the experiences upon which they are based. AFMA does not control actual fish, but rather, manipulates representations of the interaction between humans and the ocean, institutionalising the conceptual divide. When models, or ‘management tools’, are ascribed monetary value, legal status or public importance, they acquire a significance beyond that of mere symbols, and must be negotiated in their own right. Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), for example, are the commodification of the idea of fish, and can be traded without producing or protecting a single marine creature. This section considers how these ‘paper fish’, and other representations that depict humans as separable from the ocean, have emerged dialogically with public discourse to create a budding new world that stands alone from the physical environment it represents.

Located in Australia’s capital, Canberra, in a land-locked territory, the distance between the ocean and the AFMA offices is symbolic of the abstraction of AFMA’s ‘management tools’ from the environment it supervises (cf. Lund 2001). Information about that environment is limited, and influenced by political and economic contexts. The Commonwealth Government is described as having a ‘stranglehold’ on research finding for natural resource management (Finlayson and McMahon 1994: 93), and the ability of scientific processes to adequately inform government decisions are depicted as, at best, dubious (Seager 1994: 113-15; Webber 1994: 117; Hutton and Connors 1999: 97; Walker 2002: 278). Management strategies are firther influenced by a variety of factors. As noted above, the Government has progressively shifted focus from local environmental issues to global economic concerns (Hutton and Connors 1999: 259; Walker 2002); legal disputes repeatedly stall, and redirect, industry structures (Administrative Appeals Tribunal 2002; Federal Court of Australia 2003); the monopolistic media continues its dialogic relationship with political issues, policy directions and industry (Hutton and Connors 1999: 99-108; Walker 2002: 278). In acknowledgement of the latter point, AFMA commit a small staff to monitoring the media and administering public responses and presentations. Primary sources of information on the ocean are mediated through various representations, including those of scientists, the media, and the ‘management tools’ described below.

The anthropomorphised media representations described above are reflected in Australian fisheries management discourse and policies. The labarum of environmentalism is reflected in rules that have authority, legality, and are ‘real’ in the sense that they are widely disseminated and there are accepted consequences for breaking them (e.g. Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999). For example, marine creatures of public value, known in environmental management parlance as ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ (e.g. seals, whales), are legally protected (Satterfield 2002; cf. Kalland 2002). Fisheries managers are compelled to acknowledge this valuation, though many recognise that public

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affection for a creature does not necessarily reflect an economic worth or biological scarcity. Fisheries manager, Elise,” illustrated the public pressure to protect Pseudorca cr~ssidens,’~ a species variously referred to as ‘killer whales’ or ‘Orcas’, with reference to a film about a boy who befriends and liberates a captive killer whale: ‘Everyone loves Orcas-Free Willy and all that! ’.I5 Elise could never publicly dismiss the value of ‘charismatic mega-fauna’, however, because failing to recognise ‘natural symbols’ such as whales, dolphins and seals, could place her beyond socially defined limits of propriety, or even ‘sanity’ (Douglas 1973; Foucault 1973; Eder 1996: 31). For example, both commercial fisherman Wayne Cripps and fisheries policy analysis specialist Milton Freeman recently recommended that Victoria’s burgeoning seal population be culled, and their carcasses marketed. Patty Mark, of Animal Liberation Victoria, responded: ‘It’s horrible, it’s disgusting, it’s absolutely barbaric and it’s insane.. . ’ (Buttler 2004: 3). Environmentalist valuations, like fisheries management institutions, have been acted into reality (Bourdieu 1998: 40).

In the world of fisheries management, a world most regularly negotiated by fisheries managers and other ‘experts’, fish can be represented by a mark on paper. In response to a query about his experience on commercial shark fishing boats, a fish stock modeler explained to me that he did not actually engage with the marine environment in the course of his work: ‘No! My shark are on the computer screen’. Indeed, in the context of fisheries management, when the distinction between actual fish and representations of fish is unclear, the latter are regularly referred to as ‘paper fish’. ‘Paper fish’ emerge in the context of a world in which items such as public and political pressures, trade agreements, legal constraints and legislative objectives have salience, are relevant and are ‘real’. These items are ‘real’ in that they impinge on those who occupy this world. For example, Australia must demonstrate efforts to regulate the capture of wild fish in order to participate in international fish markets. ITQs are a ‘management tool’ that have been introduced to many of Australia’s Commonwealth fisheries in the past fifteen years, and represent-n paper-the amount of fish that each eligible fisherman is allowed to catch. One must have quota in order to fish legally, and the transferable nature of ITQs means that the right to fish can be bought and sold. ‘Quota brokers’ facilitate these transfers, deriving income by engaging with representations of fish. Units of quota, or ‘paper fish’, can be abstracted from the ocean, monitored by AFMA, traded between individuals like any other commodity, created and destroyed, literally, with the stroke of a pen.

The cost to AFMA, in time and money, of allowing fisheries managers to accompany commercial fishing voyages as observers, largely restricts the latter from experiencing the ocean as a productive domain. Though many experience an ongoing relationship with the coast, and while their living is indirectly made through ocean produce, few extract fish directly from the sea. Rather, fisheries managers engage with a larger-scale representation of the ocean, pieced together from a variety of sources that includes media, fishermen, scientists and politicians. This information offers fisheries managers a broader perspective than that available to individual fishermen. However, the information is largely founded upon engagement with symbols. Though fisheries managers garner information from commercial fishermen, the latter are typically encountered in the context of fisheries management structures, usually at meetings or on the telephone from Canberra. The salient ‘things’ in the world of fisheries managers include deadlines, budgets, contracts, meetings, office hierarchies, behavioural guidelines, 9 a.m., 5 p.m. and weekends, court cases, other government bureaucracies, licences and a host of acronyms such as ITQ, TAC, MAC, FAG, BAP and GHAT.I6 Christina described a particular deadline as ‘solid’, conveying the tangibility of such items in her life-world. As Lund (200 1 : 20) suggests of identity papers in

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Peru, ‘documents become more than a simple representation of reality but rather become the reality itself. The following example illustrates the persuasiveness with which these symbols can represent the ocean.

In certain situations, boat skippers are required to telephone AFMA each time the fishing net is hauled. As nets are sometimes hauled in the middle of the night, some AFMA staff work from home, staying awake to receive telephone calls. AFMA employee, Justin, described the excitement of these communications as stemming from being part of the action on the boat, of being, in his words, ‘right there with them’. Though Justin has, in fact, spent long periods of time at sea, and can no doubt visualise the on-board conditions, he is not actually on the boat. Rather, he is at home engaging with his telephone.

Most Victorians do not come even as close as a phone call to catching the fish that they eat, but instead rely on people like Justin to manage Commonwealth fisheries in a way that results in access to fresh seafood without threatening the non-consumptive ideal. AFMA are charged with the difficult task of facilitating fishing while protecting fish from humans. This scenario is only possible as an abstraction. However, by depicting its role as regulating interaction between humans and the ocean, the state institutionalises the boundary, positioning those who extract from the ocean as always potentially blameworthy for environmental problems, and hence in need of regulation. The divide between instrumental human activity and the environment is established in the public consciousness, as a labarum, and institutionalised by the state (Button 2002: 156). In the context of this anti- instrumentalist discourse, those who regularly engage with the ocean as extractive users are readily depicted, both morally and legally, as transgressing a ‘natural’ boundary. Fishermen personify this transgression by extracting produce from the ocean. Commercial fishermen do not typically experience the underwater environment in the course of their occupation, and are therefore potentially able to ‘imagine’ an underwater environment according to the various representations described above. They do, however, engage with the ocean directly, and as extractive users, contradict the representation of the ocean as mare nullius. It is to the somewhat ambiguous experiences of commercial fishermen that I now turn.

Commercial fishermen: ambiguous experiences A conceptual boundary between humans and the ocean does not match the experiences of commercial fishermen who work at sea. Indeed, fishermen have been transgressing that boundary for around 10,000 years (McGoodwin 1990: 49). In encounters with AFMA, fishermen often express incomprehension at perspectives gleaned through a mediated experience: ‘Canberra and reality are not closely related, (and) the more centralised the management, the worse it’s getting...’. While those who work the waters of Bass Strait encounter media representations and ‘management tools’, they also have alternative experiences in which different categories of understanding are salient. Though commercial fishermen experience a distinction between land and sea, a holistic view of the world incorporates engagement with both terrestrial and marine environments. This section describes that reality as experienced by the ocean-going fishermen of Comer Inlet.

Despite internal frictions, there is a strong sense of a commonality between those who go to sea in search of fish (Minnegal et al. 2003). Jak, a Victorian commercial fisherman articulated the common experience: ‘Talking about similarities between fishers from here and other parts, no matter where one goes in the world a fisher can always talk easily to another and the issues are generally the same’.’’ Some men regularly refer to embarking on a fishing trip as ‘going home’, to a place more ‘real’ than that on land. I was told by one

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fisherman that being ‘at sea is reality’ while the terrestrial world is ‘just shit.. . and you don’t know until you go to sea!’.

As noted above, many urbanites leave their usual environment and seek a ‘wholesome’ respite in coastal regions, thus emphasising the distinction between domains (Eder 1996: 148). However, fishing families tend to holiday at other fishing ports or in coastal regions, places that are both classifiable as ‘wholesome’ and experientially familiar. Another fisherman, Bob, recoiled at the thought of going ‘inland’, joking that he would need to take a vial of seawater to keep around his neck at all times. I tried to explain my own partiality to farmland, the environment in which I grew up, by suggesting that there was something appealing, comforting perhaps, about coming home dusty and sweaty, smelling of livestock and hay. Bob looked repulsed, sceptical at best, and muttered ‘give me fish guts any day.. .’.

Bob, like many others, grew up in a fishing port, in a context where commercial fishing was salient to his experience of the ocean. A skilled fisherman, he was told that he had a ‘gift’ for catching fish. He deflected the praise, suggesting that his ability was the result of having grown up around fishing operations, watching his predecessors and peers working, the skills he learned from them becoming ‘second nature’. His knowledge was inextricable from his experiences.

Like other fishermen, Bob was familiar with the motion of a boat; the feel of wet rope; long periods away from land; the smell of blood, ammonia and ‘fish-guts’; the clack-clack- clack sound of fishing machinery in operation; a fluctuating income; negotiating social relations in close quarters; working in wet conditions; working in an environment both feared and romanticised (Hoffman 2002); setting his schedule to the moon and tides; extracting produce from a domain that is largely out of sight; working in a medium integral to his livelihood, and yet in which he would quickly perish (Acheson 1981: 276). For fishermen, the experience of making a living through extracting produce from the ocean is salient, relevant, ‘real’. The experience is ‘real’ in that their physical and social reproduction directly relies upon the outcomes of their extractive activity. Comer Inlet fisherman, Joe Pinzone, has referred to his fishing expedition as a search for the ‘money fish’ (McCleod and Borelli 2000). Like ‘paper fish’, the ontology of the ‘money fish’ emerges in the context of action in a particular physical and social reality. The former is paper that symbolises fish, while the latter is fish that represents money. One frustrated fisherman noted the difference in his experience of ‘fishing’ and its outcome, after receiving a large package of paperwork from an AFMA manager: ‘I’d like to see him try and eat what he produces!’.

As extractive users, fishermen experience a world in which they interact directly with the marine environment. As commercial fishermen subject to government regulation, and as members of the public, they experience a ‘represented world’ in which a non-extractive relationship between humans and the ocean is normalised. They are increasingly compelled to simultaneously negotiate these experiences in order to facilitate their physical and social reproduction. As Milton (2002: 5 1-3) reminds us, all representations are encountered in the same way, although the knowledge constructed is necessarily different. People regard representations as variously literal, metaphoric, or false, depending on their existing framework of understanding. When fishermen simultaneously encounter conflicting discourses they occasionallydepending on the context-respond by stylising themselves as either noble custodians who are ‘at one’ with the ocean or villainous rapers and pillagers. More often, however, they simply refer to the exclusivity of their experiences, which transgress the false paradigms in which their roles are consigned to caricatures. I was often told that those who had no experience of fishing-those who, as was the mantra among some fishermen, had ‘never been, never seen, never done’-simply could not understand the industry.

CRISIS OF MEANINGS: DIVERGENT EXPERIENCES AND PERCEPTIONS 36 1

As the global perspective on environmental problems becomes increasingly institutionalised in public discourse, media and state representations, fishermen are increasingly compelled to acknowledge that the wider community has begun to imagine the Ocean in a way that erases fishermen from the sea. The ocean can be imagined as mare nullius, and its products as consumable, only when these perspectives exist separately from the marine environment itself, and from each other. It is when these narratives converge that a sense of crisis ensues. Fishermen are compelled to experience these perspectives simultaneously. Perhaps the internal crisis this creates contributes to the high levels of stress and anxiety amongst Australian commercial fishermen that is currently under investigation (Anon. 2004).

Conclusion Australians understand the ocean in ways that are influenced by the contexts in which their experiences arise and the items they encounter. Fishermen encounter the ocean directly, extracting fish and selling them to a largely anonymous public, via a chain of processors and retailers. Able to access seafood without going to sea, the non-fishing public may encounter the marine ecosystem as a domain for recreation or as a fragile object of contemplation, in which humans do not belong. Fisheries managers encounter ‘management tools’ that model the ocean and human users, making their living by manipulating these representations. Their goal is to satisfy both those who catch fish, and those who would like to eat fish without disturbing the ocean. The publicly accessible labarum of anti-instrumentalist sentiment evident in representations of the ocean, such as the film Finding Nemo and the campaign promoting the implementation of MPAs in Victorian waters, present the ocean in a way that contradicts the experiences and understandings of those who directly extract from the marine environment. Of course, the dilemma is irreconcilable, as is, I argue, the ‘crisis of meanings’ that confounds discourses on the use of ocean resources. At this point 1 return to the discussion initiated by Ingold to advance our understanding of this crisis.

When Ingold (2000b) described the distinction between ‘spheres’ and ‘globes’, he envisaged two completely different ways of knowing the world, the former gleaned through direct experience, the latter cognitively reconstructed through a detached appreciation of an ‘artificial’ representation (Ingold 2000b: 215). Eder (1996: 45) similarly depicted this decontextualised perspective as somehow unreal: ’From this viewpoint.. . the observer understands himself by deduction and calculation, that is, by an operative construction’. If the global perspective is considered ‘artificial’ then one might conclude, as Ingold does, that environmental ‘crises’ occur because people have become alienated from the reality of their environment (Ingold 2000b: 2 15).

If reality is that which impinges on the lives of those who experience it, however, then not only is the ocean ‘real’, but so are those items, ideas and maps that represent the ocean. While engagement with a physical location promotes a particular understanding of that environment, an encounter with a representation of the area, perhaps a documentary, cartoon, or an actual map, similarly engages all of the senses in experiencing the context of the encounter. To suggest, however, that the map is the same as the place, or vice versa, is to be in error. Those who experience only an ‘operative construction’ (Eder 1996: 4 9 , such as a mare nullius environment, may develop the false impression that humans have a choice as to whether or not to engage with the ocean (Ingold 2000b: 215). However, this false paradigm, and its associated ‘sense of crisis’, grounded in the ambiguity of competing experiences and understandings of the ocean, is institutionalised in modem representations of the ocean such as those described above. As H o h a n points out, ‘because the

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paradigmatic systems by which many people organise their reality involve false divisions, the systems incorporate perpetual disequilibrium’ (2002: 1 14 original emphasis). It is because engaging with modem environmentalist institutions that reflect anti-instrumentalist ideals has become as ‘real’ as any encounter at sea, that ‘crises’ in our oceans are destined to continue.

Acknowledgements This paper draws on over two years fieldwork between 2000 and 2003, based in Port Albert, Comer Inlet, 229km southeast of Melbourne, Victoria. Research was f k d e d in part by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant awarded to Monica Minnegal and Peter Dwyer, and by a research scholarship from the University of Melbourne (MRS). My research could not have proceeded without a large number of people-fishermen, their families, ‘fisheries experts’ and others in ‘the community-who showed me extraordinary generosity, encouragement, patience, kindness, and friendship, and engaged with my ideas enthusiastically. I thank them all. I am grateful to Monica and Peter for their thoughtful and unwavering engagement and encouragement, not only in regards to this paper but throughout my research. I offer my thanks, also, to the numerous people who commented on drafts of this paper, including the anonymous reviewers. Previous versions were presented in 2002 at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and at the 2003 annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS), Sydney. My thanks to the contributors and conveners of the 2003 AAS session, and editors of this special edition, Yann Toussaint, Celmara Pocock and Jane Mulcock, who also provided excellent advice and encouragement.

Notes 1. The term labarum, while conveying any common moral standard, was originally a military standard

of the Roman army, represented by a Christian monogram (Davidson 1901: 506). The religious connotations are fitting for use in regard to prevailing moral discourses on environmentalism, which have been depicted as substituting for religious guidance in disenchanted societies (Bourdieu 1977; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Eder 1996: 187).

2. Although Jackson is using the term mare nullius in reference to Aboriginal knowledge of, and attachments to the ocean, her argument helps us to recognise that Western ways of perceiving oceans, as opposed to land, make the ocean particularly susceptible to misconceptions of being peopleless- and that this applies not only to Indigenous peoples but a broader sense of human-sea relations. It is in this broader sense that the present paper uses the term.

3. In the United States, the aesthetic utility, or ‘non-use value’, of the ocean is legally recognised (Wetterstein 1997: 4).

4. lngold (2000a: 20) distinguishes between ‘environments’, being the dynamically formulated worlds in which people live, and ‘nature’, being an objectified world that people imagine exists in isolation from human activity and history.

5. See Milton (1996: 154-9) for a critique of opposing depictions of globalisation as a force promoting cultural homogeneity, on the one hand, and heterogeneity, on the other. In this paper, the latter position is more relevant simply because most of the fish-eating public do not share the experiences of commercial fishermen.

6. The majority of fishers encountered during the fieldwork informing this paper were male, and commercial fishing was generally regarded as a male occupation. Even those few women who fished regularly referred to themselves as ‘fishermen’ and 1 use this term throughout the present paper.

7. Under an ITQ system, license holders are allocated the right to fish for a certain, limited, percentage of a periodically fluctuating total catch.

8. Part of the function of MPAs is to restrict the regions that can be commercially fished. When the

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parks were eventually implemented in Comer Inlet, some fishermen were displaced from their traditional fishing grounds.

9. I give my thanks to Monica Minnegal for suggesting the alternative term. 10. Three focus groups comprised a ‘cross section’ of Victorians, while the fourth consisted of

recreational fishers (Smith and Free 1996: I). 1 I . Ironically, but somewhat appropriately, each ‘Fact Sheet’ bore a disclaimer that acknowledged the

possibility of flaws in the ‘facts’. 12. I give my thanks to Jane Mulcock for suggesting the important parenthesised point. 13. All unreferenced names are pseudonyms. 14. Elsie was discussing Pseudorca crassidens, the false killer whale, as opposed to the killer whale

proper, Orcinus orca, made famous in the film Free Willy about a boy’s attempts to liberate a captive killer whale. The distinction between the two species is well known to fishers and fishery managers, including Elsie; the apparent conflation of the two in this passage suggests the somewhat generic status of charismatic megafauna in public discourses about environmental values in marine environments regardless of a species actual rarity or, indeed, taxonomic status.

15. International conservation groups protested after discovering that Keiko, the star of Free Willy, had spent 92 percent of his life in captivity (Brooks 2002:2). Alhough Keiko could not hunt or communicate with other whales, over $A36 million and seven years was spent unsuccesshlly trying to reintroduce Keiko to his ‘proper abode’.

16. These acronyms, in order, refer to Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ), Total Allowable Catch (TAC), Management Advisory Committee (MAC), Fisheries Assessment Group (FAG), By-catch Action Plan (BAP) and Gillnet, Hook and Trap Fishery (GHAT).

17. The use of the term ‘fisher’ in this quote is an anomaly. The words are taken from a written communication with a politically s a w y fisherman. It is possible that the fisherman’s reflexivity in the context of, what was in total, a politically charged comment influenced him to use ‘politically correct’ language.

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