Australia: Tunarama festival swims against tide

MELBOURNE, Australia — At Tunarama, you can toss a five-pound fish as far as your strength allows, and win money.

You can try your hand at peeling a shrimp in a contest that allows use of only one hand but permits the use of other body parts, if it helps. You can build a boat from scratch in two hours — then take it to sea and hope you don’t sink. And you can raise money for charity by entering a beauty pageant. Even if you’re a bloke.

In short this annual festival is eccentric and very much Australian, not least because it takes place in a sun-kissed town which, as with so much of modern Australia, owes a debt to the European migrants who helped create its character and its wealth — in this case, sea-savvy settlers from Croatia and Italy.

“It’s just a fun, fun event,” said Mike Gill, Tunarama's spokesman. “There’s nowhere else in the world that actually has a world championship tuna-tossing competition.”

Fun it may be, but this is an event and a town — Port Lincoln, in South Australia state — where smiles were shuffled with frowns when Tunarama 2011 opened on Jan. 22.

As its name suggests, this is a festival built around a fish the world takes for granted, and a fish on which many in this coastal town depend to make a living. It is also a marine resource in desperate danger as the world indulges its love, wherever it can get it — tuna in a can, tuna in a sushi bar, tuna in a sandwich, tuna in a cheap restaurant salad. (Americans consume 2.5 pounds of the tinned stuff per head each year, according to the National Fisheries Institute.)

How much does the world love tuna? A giant bluefin tuna sold for a record $396,000 at auction in Tokyoon Jan. 5. Why? Supply and demand. And supply is running dangerously low.

“The closer to extinction, the higher the price,” said Genevieve Quirk, a volunteer for Greenpeace Australia.

Greenpeace, in tune with environmentalists around the world, wants fishing of bluefin tuna largely banned until ocean stocks are replenished to healthy levels, a veto she said needs to last decades.

“For stocks to return to sustainable levels, we need to stop fishing,” Quirk said.

She offers a grim statistic to support her argument: the population of southern bluefin tuna, the prized fish that sustains the industry in Port Lincoln, sits at just 4.6 percent of “unfished levels” — in other words, roughly 95 per cent of their number has been wiped out.

As with many debates over environmental sustainability, the tuna debate pits insistent activists against industries whose owners and employees say the green agenda relies on exaggerated claims and extreme job-killing measures. This is no less true in Port Lincoln, where an estimated one in seven people out of a population of about 14,000 work in the tuna-related industry.

For a lucky few it pays millions. For many more it pays the mortgage.

But last year, Australia agreed under a global agreement that its southern bluefin quota would be slashed by 25 percent. That decision piled grim news upon bad tidings: seven months earlier Port Lincoln’s — and Australia’s — last tuna cannery began phasing out production. Operations moved to Thailand.

Other tuna-built millionaires are staying put.

Hagen Stehr, whose Port Lincoln-based company Clean Seas Tuna is a giant global presence with lucrative exports to tuna-loving Japan, is one who is quick to anger over the push to shutdown the industry that made him rich.

“We should not be a political football and that’s what we have become with the Greens movement,” Stehr told GlobalPost. He was referring to Australia’s Greens party, which gained influence last year when elections left the ruling Labor Party dependent on its support.

Stehr said surveys of waters south of Port Lincoln indicate claims of tuna devastation are overblown. “There are so many bloody fish out there,” he said, claiming recent survey flights had spotted close to 12,000 tons of tuna in a day.

“That’s the most fish we have seen here since I came here 50 years ago,” said Stehr, a German immigrant.

But Quirk from Greenpeace dismisses such claims.

“He [Stehr] has a vested financial interest in telling the types of lies he’s proffered to you,” she said. “These numbers [on declining stocks] are irrefutable facts.”

It’s a debate that will likely occupy the thoughts of Port Lincoln residents in coming days. But while locals ponder what lies ahead, thousands of happy vacationers will be enjoying the summer sunshine and silliness that make Tunarama an iconic gathering, being held for the 50th time his year.

At the  festival's head office, Mike Gill said the town will not buckle. “Port Lincoln is resilient. Anything that’s thrown at them, they adapt. Even the quota. People are just going to get on with it.”

Stehr said of the event: “It will be fun, but maybe a bit subdued. This town has taken a big hit and the consequences of that are just coming through now.”

At Greenpeace, Quirk counters that the big guns who control the town’s tuna trade have only themselves to blame for current circumstances.

“That huge dependence [on tuna] is a thing of the past. Previously they had a fishing industry that employed a large number of people. But it’s been reduced to a small elite who make enormous profits from a species that is close to extinction,” she said.

Nonetheless, Tunarama celebrations will go ahead as they have since 1962. And as with the industry generally, much has changed since then.

In the Tuna Toss, the frozen fish once hurled by contestants has been replaced by a more efficient polyurethane model.

In the beauty pageant, Miss Tunarama is now crowned the Tunarama Ambassador — a change necessitated by the determination of the odd male to compete. (Bikini bodies still get a look in. At the Beach Bods and Boardies event men and women strut their stuff in swimwear.)

One-handed peelers of shrimp — prawns as Aussies invariably know them — will ponder which other limb they might use to propel them to victory.

In the boat-building contest, competitors will have two hours to build a vessel from plywood, then hope it floats. And like the tuna fishermen of Port Lincoln, once at sea those amateur boat wrights will be pushing hard against a seemingly irresistible tide.