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The Tasmanian government has announced a fishery rights deal in Tasmania.  Could this be a pathway for Treaty?

Written by Professor Emma Lee · 9 December 2024
 Abalone is a cultural keystone species that represents 40,000 years of Tasmanian Aboriginal care for sea country. With a new fishery rights deal, a new pathway for Aboriginal rights has been forged in Tasmania, writes Professor Emma Lee.
 
 

Professor Emma Lee, Premier Jeremy Rockliff, Rodney Dillon and Rob Anders.

When I first met Uncle Laddie Timbery at La Perouse in the late 90s, a Dharawal man whose extended family met with Captain James Cook in 1788, he summed up that past encounter as some ‘whitefella named Jimmy Cook came in here and stole all our fish’.

It is often overlooked that fish are at the heart of the colonial moment.  For coastal First Nations, fish were the first food resource to be rapidly depleted to feed the establishing colonies.  In Sydney, the Dharawal defended their fishing grounds using spears and canoes, losing out to both the gun and purse seine nets.  This pattern of fish capture played out across all subsequent new colonies around Australian coasts, mirroring the same depletions against Aboriginal people.  The loss of fish was not just a matter of starvation for First Nations, but a battleground over the spiritual and cultural connection to the oceans as foundational to Aboriginal sovereignty.

I am a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman and in our world view, women are of the sea, men are of the land and everyone comes from night sky country. In Tasmania, Aboriginal women were at the forefront of first contact with French expeditions arriving in the 1770s. The strangers in the French boats landed in a female domain – what washes up, belongs to us.  

Some years after this initial encounter, Francois Peron reports on how he was interrogated by ‘these inexorable women’ who mimicked and mocked them.  Peron also records his crew’s first meal upon Tasmanian shores comprised abalone, dived upon by the women who stayed underwater for incredible lengths to fill woven baskets full with the iconic shellfish. 

Abalone is a cultural keystone species that represents 40,000 years of Tasmanian Aboriginal care for sea country and it was taken away from us to be owned and controlled by colonial societies.

Over 220 years later since Peron, abalone is coming back to Tasmanian Aboriginal people.  At Mannalargenna Day, the annual tebrakunna country festival in December to celebrate Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, the Tasmanian Premier, Jeremy Rockliff, announced a substantial agreement over abalone fishing rights. 

Over the past eight years, I have helped lead fisheries research and practice as a founding board member of the Land and Sea Aboriginal Corporation Tasmania (LSACT), a social enterprise comprised of multiple Aboriginal organisations. In 2022, LSACT established Tasmanian Aboriginal Seafoods and leased 40 commercial abalone quota from the Tasmanian government.  This was a historic agreement that saw us become the first Aboriginal at-scale abalone fishers in Australia and globally the first registered charity to hold commercial rights to abalone.  We fish under the same conditions as all other commercial fishers, although we do it sustainably and prohibit harvesting during spawning season, which is an unfortunate Tasmanian industry standard to align with high-demand periods like Chinese New Year.

In just under three years LSACT has established an inaugural abalone fisheries food tourism trail in Tasmania by partnering with local and high-end restaurants and created an education program for 60 Aboriginal trainees over the next four years to boost workforce capacity and Close the Gap to reduce juvenile justice interventions.  Aboriginal-led regional development and innovation is providing community benefit-sharing to all Tasmanians.

So when Jeremy Rockliff announced that a renegotiated lease with LSACT would include security of tenure over the abalone quota in perpetuity under a buyback arrangement, a new pathway for Aboriginal rights was forged in Tasmania.

Tasmania really stands apart from every other Australian jurisdiction in that there is no enabling legislation to create equity for Aboriginal people.  There is no Native Title, no land rights legislation and in October the Tasmanian government shelved land returns all together.  The only handback of lands ever to have occurred was twenty years ago and that was for remote Bass Strait islands that comprise less than one percent of all Tasmanian land.  A break from government inaction in 2005 to return culturally important lands, that window closed again straight after.

I believe that the collegial abalone deal between the Tasmanian government and LSACT is the basis for developing a Treaty with Tasmanian Aboriginal people.  Our commercial fishery was highlighted as one of 24 recommendations under the Pathway to Truth-telling and Treaty report delivered to the Tasmanian government in late 2021.  It is the only recommendation to have been implemented in full.

The contestation over fish that characterised much of the coastal frontier wars can be healed.  If Treaty is to be accomplished, then starting the negotiations through returning fishing rights is appropriate.  If Tasmanian Aboriginal people can heal toxic colonial relationships through sharing a feed together, then Treaty can become a place of broad, diverse and inclusive dialogue that looks to benefit all Tasmanians.  As beneficiaries, LSACT believe that working together to build healthy fisheries is a major step forward for Tasmanian Aboriginal rights.

 

Emma Lee is a Professor with the National Centre for Reconciliation, Truth, and Justice, Federation University, and board member of Land and Sea Aboriginal Corporation Tasmania.