Meet the woman at the centre of Tasmania’s salmon war
Frances Bender owns one of Australia’s biggest salmon farms – now she is fighting for an industry she believes is in danger of destroying itself and the environment. Samantha Trenoweth finds out why.
It is a bitterly cold, grey morning in Hideaway Bay in southeastern Tasmania. Frances Bender is up early, out on the water. She’s holding a plump silver and pink salmon, just hauled from the depths of these icy waters. “This is a beautiful fish, as beautiful as you could hope to find anywhere in the world,” says Frances, the 56-year-old executive director of Huon Aquaculture, Australia’s second largest salmon producer. “To grow a fish like this, we need healthy marine environments, and if we don’t act now, we risk losing not just these pristine environments but also the community’s trust, which would be a tragedy for the industry, for Tasmania and for Australia.”
Frances Bender is a passionate woman. Passionate about salmon, about her industry, and the people who work for her. But mostly she’s passionate about the environment – so passionate she is taking both the state and federal governments to court. “She’s the most determined person I know,” says her husband and business partner, Peter. “She won’t back down.”
Frances has been driven to the Supreme Court in a fight to save her business and the jobs of more than 2000 fellow Tasmanians. An increasingly tall stack of scientific studies has indicated salmon farms in Tasmania’s ecologically fragile bays and inlets are taking a devastating environmental toll. Frances and Peter believe it’s possible to run a sustainable business but that the government is not providing the regulation the industry needs, leaving less cautious farmers free to overstock pens, pollute waterways and threaten the future of the industry. Frances and Peter, along with Tasmanian green groups, are demanding tougher restrictions.
“I was born in this valley,” Frances explains. “I’ve lived my whole life here. My three beautiful children have been raised here. These waterways that everyone’s concerned about are the same waterways that I grew up around and that I still spend my holidays on. We’re not a fly in, fly out group of people who don’t care. We don’t want to trash the place we live in. I can’t help but personalise this.”
Surviving against the odds
Frances grew up in Dover, about 15 minutes down river from where Huon Aquaculture has its home base. Her father was an abalone diver and she was “an athletic, outdoorsy kid, and a tomboy”. The eldest of two daughters, she “learnt to do all the practical things – help out on the boat, drive the dinghy. There were no allowances made for being a girl. There were jobs to do, so you did them.”
On her sixth birthday, Frances’ dressing gown caught fire and she was rushed to hospital with third degree burns. She wasn’t expected to survive.
“I was reflecting on that day recently,” she says. “I was thinking how difficult that must have been for my parents and my sister, and I was also reflecting it probably added to my determination and my stubbornness. To survive something like that, to be in hospital for 18 months, to learn to walk again – that must have been pretty difficult for a six-year-old. I have a very limited memory of it, which is a good thing, but it must have been hard for all of us because we lived remotely and I was in hospital in the city and then I had to go to Melbourne for operations.”
Frances still carries an injury to one of her hands sustained in the fire. “I look at Turia Pitt and Sophie Delezio, who have been burned and suffered so much more, and I’m full of admiration. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and I believe that.”
Frances remembers a teacher from her local school who regularly “brought schoolwork and read to me”. Those visits helped instil a love of reading. “I was quite academic at school, and always forthright and outspoken. I was a debater and I was told to stop asking difficult questions at Sunday School. I’ve always known my own mind.”
When Frances was 12, her father was involved in a diving accident and developed decompression sickness or “the bends”. There was no decompression chamber in the south of Tasmania so his fellow divers put him back in a diving suit with a regulator and mask, tied him to a ship’s anchor and sent him down. “They calculated what they hoped was the right depth and the right amount of time, and took turns staying with him through the night. If they hadn’t done that, he’d have died,” Frances says. He survived, albeit with some health problems. It was Frances’ dad who first heard about the opportunities for fish farming in Tasmania, back in the 1980s, and suggested Frances and Peter give it a go.
Frances and Peter met at the opening of a scenic railway in the island’s south. Frances was working in a bank and Peter was a local sheep and cattle farmer. “We married young – I was 19, he was 21 – and I became a farmer’s wife,” she smiles, “though I actually think farmers’ wives should just be called farmers, because that’s what they do. I worked on the farm and in Peter’s family butcher shop and as the shearers’ cook and I did the book work. When the children were born, we planted an apricot orchard as a diversification to the business.
“Looking back now, it was an idyllic, settled life. I’ll never regret the fact that our children were born in Tassie and grew up in the Huon
Valley. It gave them a grounding in the things that are important in life – the intangibles, like your roots, where your food comes from and how hard the people work who produce it.”
Frances and Peter have been married for 37 years. Their three kids (James, Paul and Laura) have grown up and left home, although James and their son-in-law, Boz, work in the family company. Frances and Peter began farming salmon back in 1986. They were among the pioneers of the industry. Back then, the entire Tasmanian industry produced 50 tonnes of salmon a year; now Huon does that in a single night.
Today, Huon Aquaculture is a publicly listed company with an
I have decided to speak openly and frankly.”
annual turnover of $233.74 million. Frances and Peter have done extremely well from it – between them they earn about $800,000 annually, and the Bender family’s shares have an estimated value of $290 million. Clearly, they have substantial financial skin in the game. But meeting her, it’s evident Frances’ real passion is about the industry and the environment that sustains it. While forestry and woodchipping have declined, the salmon industry has been able to provide a steadily increasing stream of work for thousands of Tasmanians. “Finding these sorts of jobs in regional and remote Tasmania isn’t easy,” she says. “We’ve been able to give employment, hope and pride to people who have lost their jobs.”
Not all Tasmanians appreciate Huon’s contribution to the state. Christine Materia represents a group called Neighbours of Fish Farming, which wants all salmon farming moved from the water to tanks on land. Christine lives on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, south of Hobart, and is concerned that since salmon farming began in the area, locals have reported declining fish numbers and increasing numbers of seals.
“Then there are human impacts,” she says, “the noise of the boats, lights on the leases at night, the effects of the farms on water quality.” Salmon farming can damage marine life below the pens and increase the risk of toxic algal blooms.
For the most part, though, the environment movement stands with Frances. “As an environment group, we’re not always going to agree with Frances,” says Laura Kelly, Strategy Director for Environment Tasmania, “but we respect her leadership.” Laura praises the action Huon has taken to improve its own green footprint and its commitment to move future expansion out of inlets and bays and into open ocean or on-land facilities. “Frances has been really courageous and her leadership has helped protect the Tasmanian environment, particularly in Macquarie Harbour,” she says. “If it wasn’t for the work Frances and Peter have done, a lot of the damage in that harbour wouldn’t have come to light.”
In Macquarie Harbour, on the edge of the World Heritage Area on Tasmania’s west coast, the oxygen level in the water has plummeted, local marine life has been threatened and salmon have been dying at unprecedented rates. A study by the University of Tasmania and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies has found that the levels of dissolved oxygen “now observed in bottom waters throughout the Harbour present a significant potential risk to the ecology of the Harbour … There has been a significant decline in the total abundance and number of species … at all of the [fish farming] leases.” As a result, the Environmental Protection Authority has recently strengthened biomass (or fish stocking) limits in the harbour. Frances believes these limits are still not sufficient to protect the long-term health of the waterway.
Frances and Peter claim that the responsibility for much of the environmental damage in the harbour rests with the government for allowing a major competitor, Tassal, to rapidly increase stocking to unsustainable levels. Yet those levels are within regulatory limits, which is the crux of their legal case. Tassal has consistently defended its environmental record. A spokeswoman says: “Tassal meets the regulatory frameworks as set by the Tasmanian Environmental Protection Authority. Additionally Tassal voluntarily operates to a high standard of compliance through the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.”
Frances says: “Over three years we’ve been trying to solve this issue behind closed doors, without risking the reputation of the industry. Sadly, that didn’t work. So I have decided to speak openly and frankly now.”
Now her life is a roller-coaster ride of meetings with lawyers and ministers, and consultations with community and industry groups, as well as steering Huon Aquaculture. But Frances has no intention of giving up until she has a commitment from government that will ensure her industry moves forward sustainably. “There have been days when I’ve felt pretty battered,” she says, “because it’s been difficult, stressful and nasty at times. But then you run into someone in the street and they touch you on the arm and say, ‘well done’, and it just lifts you.
An old lady came up to me in the supermarket and said, ‘Well done, love, you’re brave.’ Things like that empower me to keep on going.”