Fall 2021 Children's Sneak Previews

Coorong Mulloway, Prawns And Chips

Pour the beer into a big mixing bowl and allow it to go flat.

Make the batter well in advance by raining flour into the flat beer whisking as you go, until custard consistency (slightly thick, do not over whisk batter it will become tough and do not add salt as it will sog the final batter).

Set aside for a day for best result, but two hours of resting will relax the gluten.

Peel and slice the potato into thick fingers and rinse under cold water for a 20 seconds or so to remove starches, drain well.

Pop them straight into a high sided pot with plenty of cold water.

Bring up to a simmer over a medium low flame and cook gently until really soft, carefully lift out and spread out on a tray .

Cool in fridge.

Pop the chips into a litre or two of good quality oil in a large pot on a low to medium flame.

When the oil reaches 120C water will evaporate from the chips and bubble the oil.

This is the ideal temperature, continue to cook for about 6 or 8 mins until chips are crispy but still really pale.

Carefully remove from oil and spread out on tray with tea towel to drain oil.

Refrigerate the chips until cold (1 hour)

Increase the temp of the oil to 180C and re-fry the chips till golden and crisp (about 3 mins) , remove and set aside on paper towel.

Place fish fillets in batter (it may need more beer now to thin to coating consistency as it thickens during resting)

Remove fillets from batter, tap off excess, and fry 180C until fish cooked through (around 5 minutes).

Remove from oil and drain on paper towel.

Repeat with prawns but cook only 2 or so minutes

Salt the fish, prawn and chips and serve with a shooter of vinegar and extra sea salt on the side.

Mayonaisse method:

Using a food processor or stab mixer, blend eggs.

While still mixing, add mustard then slowly drizzle in the oil until you have a nice thick emulsion.

Be careful not to add the oil too quickly otherwise you will split the mix.

Add lemon juice.

Add salt and pepper to taste add a tablespoon of boiling water (it stabilizes the mayonnaise).

Mulloway Overfished In NSW

The peak body for the NSW commercial fishing industry has voiced some concerns over new restrictions on catching mulloway.

The Minister for Primary Industries, Katrina Hodgkinson, says the science clearly shows mulloway is overfished and stocks need to be replenished.

She says the ratio which measures the lifetime reproductive potential of the mulloway is well below what it should be.

"The SPR (Spawning Potential Ratio) of 40 per cent is a reasonable target for mulloway, but it's currently about 10 per cent for mulloway," she said.

"An SPR below 25 per cent is considered high risk and an indicator of overfishing, so now at 10 per cent it's pretty clear across the board of all industry that we've spoken that everyone recognises there is a big problem with mulloway and we need to refresh the population and put some really strict rules in place."

The State Government has introduced a number of new restrictions which will commence on November 1.

The minimum length has increased from 45 to 70 centimetres, and commercial estuary fishermen will be allowed 10 fish between that size if caught as by-catch.

For recreational fishers, the new size restriction also applies, and in addition their bag limit has been reduced from five to two fish.

The Professional Fishermen's Association's executive officer, Tricia Beatty, says they've welcomed some aspects of the changes, but are uncertain about others.

"We honestly don't know what the impact is going to be on our fishers," she said.

"We have concerns regarding our estuary fishers who will have to change their operations, and that's always a costly exercise and we're already a heavily burdened industry.

"They'll have to look at different mesh sizes and different areas in which they fish, and we honestly don't know what the impact will be of these changes on our estuary fishers.

"Some of the estuary fishers tell me they're already operating in a way that they don't come across too many mulloway. Others have said that they do ,and they'll have to take a step back and look at their operations and make changes."

Ms Hodgkinson says she believes the government has stuck the ideal balance for both sides.

"A total ban would've driven a faster recovery, but it was considered preferable to balance the rate of recovery with the impacts on recreational and commercial fishers," she said.

Ms Beatty says that while there's understanding that the NSW Government will lift the restrictions once stocks have recovered, there's no guarantee of it.

"My concern would be that this is a long pathway and it'll take a while for the mulloway stocks to recover as well," she said.

But the Minister says the restrictions will be lifted once the stocks have recovered.

"Once we've look at the stocks and once they've recovered to a certain level and we can see that there's an increase in the SPR, and that the stock is much more sustainable, then we'll review those bag and size limits once again," she said.

Mulloway, Not Carp, Belong In The Murray River's Estuary

Most Australians have never visited the Murray River, and even fewer know that it ends in a vast and shallow freshwater lake. The freshwater lake is separated from the Southern Ocean by 7.6 kilometres of barrage that were built in the 1930s across the five channels that converge on the Murray River's sea mouth.

The barrages dammed the estuary and the artificial lake now sits almost 1 metre above sea level and covers an area of about 650 km² (250 mi²). This artificial lake is so vast that you can't see from one side to the other, and it evaporates the equivalent of about two Sydney Harbour's full of freshwater each year. It is full of carp, a pest fish introduced from Europe.

Before the barrages were built mulloway, Agyrosomus japonicas, were a mainstay of the local fishery. Milang, a little port on the shores of Lake Alexandrina was home to a hundred mulloway fishermen who routinely sent off several hundred tons of fish to the Adelaide and Melbourne fish markets. Back then the central basin of the wave-dominated barrier estuary was sometimes full of freshwater and sometimes full of salty water, the nature of the mix depended on the tides, the winds and Murray River flows.

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According to South Australian historian J.C. Tolley it was the ocean that most affected the size and position of the Murray River's sea mouth:

The position of the channel at the mouth is governed principally by the ocean... During the great 1956 flood, the highest ever recorded on the lower Murray, the river outlet, although wider and deeper than normal, was situated in the easterly section of the overall movement pattern and was in a similar position as the situation of the mouth during the dry year of 1914.

However in April 1938, during a violet storm the mouth doubled its width in a few days and a great deal of sand at the western extremity was washed away. Within two months the channel had narrowed and when surveys were carried out 12 months later the position of the outlet was in almost the same situation as before the storm. During this period there was no great fluctuation in the volume of fresh water coming down the river.

Murray River flow was usually good in spring, but by mid summer it had often slowed and if conditions were calm a sandbar would quickly form and sometimes block the Murray's sea mouth. Then usually by March a south westerly wind had picked up. The old fishermen say, that at that time of year the mulloway would hangout in the underwater canyons beyond the Murray's mouth, as though reluctant to come in. Then on the big tides, always with the full moon, large schools would race through the Murray's sea mouth.

The year the barrages were sealed, the mulloway came in and then were trapped, on each ebbing tide, churning in the channels below the barrages. There is an old photograph of the Goolwa wharf groaning under 160 ton of dead mulloway.

Now the dominant fish species in Lake Alexandrina is the pest, European carp, Cyprinus carpio. This is a freshwater species, it wouldn't exist in the lake except for the barrages that dammed the estuary and stopped the tide.

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Henry Jones a commercial carp fisherman from Lake Alexandrina told ABC Rural not so long ago that,

In 1981 they [carp] hit our area and they exploded in the next two years. The commercial fishermen called a summit and they invited all our prospective customers who they thought would buy carp…

They picked out cray fishermen, because we thought they could pay a bit more for them, and the human consumption market… we've got so many orders for carp we can't fill our orders.

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