Fish always fresh for Friday

There is no truth in the story that Catholics eat fish on Fridays because the Pope made that a rule. Nor did any Pope ever attempt to do so to save the livelihoods of fishermen needing a bigger market.

I spent quite a lot of time on this, but here is the potted version, salted, smoked and dried like an Atlantic Cod.

Catholics were opposed to eating meat on Fridays (and, at various times, the 40 days of Lent, Wednesdays and Saturdays) simply because they wished to fast to celebrate their faith and strengthen it. Christ was crucified on a Friday. The ban was on eating ‘flesh’ and because fish were cold-blooded they were not regarded as flesh. Well, not exactly.

In England, and so in our own culture here, there is an interesting twist to this. When Henry VIII created the Anglican Church and abolished the Catholic Church in England fish were described as “Popish flesh” and eating it during fasts was discouraged. England had a huge fishing industry and it began to suffer dreadfully.

So when Henry’s son, Edward VI, came to the throne in 1547 he reinstated the laws about eating meat on fast days “for worldly and civil policy, to spare flesh, and use fish, for the benefit of the commonwealth, where many be fishers, and use the trade of living.”

That is a rather long introduction to a story about the influence of Victoria’s railways on the development of Gippsland’s coastal fishing fleets. I found it interesting, though, and relevant because Victoria experienced a huge demand for fish when the gold-rushes took place in the 1850s and 1860s.

A little later, in 1872, Anthony Trollope wrote on his visit to Australia that he was amazed that even ‘roadworkers’ ate meat three times a day – financially impossible for the English working class.

If you were in a rural spot where meat was readily available that was all good and well, but there was no refrigeration, and if you were a miner at Ballarat or Bendigo or Walhalla, meat was fairly hard to get.

Fish was already providing much of Melbourne’s protein demands.

Melbourne’s first ‘fish market’ was the north bank of the Yarra, just below The Falls. The fish came from Port Phillip and the boats could come right up the bank, about opposite Queen Street, to sell their catches.

Later, in the 1850s, as the Port Phillip catches fell away a little and the Western Port fishery grew, the carts would come up to the north end of Prince’s Bridge and that grew into a new outdoor ‘fish market.’

Later a handsome building was developed here for the market, but it was demolished to allow extension of Flinders St Station and its link through to Princes Bridge Station, the terminus for Gippsland trains.

This was the second bridge here, with a single arch. The third and current bridge was built in 1884-1888 to be ready for the International Exhibition of that year.

The work also included widening of the Yarra to lessen the frequent flooding on the south bank. The first bridge, in 1845, was a lower wooden structure, which replaced a couple of punts.

Back to the topic. Hastings became the main place for the small boats of the Western Port fishery to land their catch. Bear in mind that these were open boats of between 22 and 28 feet in length, usually with a stubby mast carrying a single sail – the wind was not always cooperative and the fishermen had to be tough to row the long distances involved, Fish came to Hastings from boats based at Grantville, San Remo and Tooradin, though they were usually well on the way to Hastings when they reached their fishing grounds.

The fish were packed into a dray with fresh vegetables and bags of salt and set off for Frankston along what was called the Fish Track. There it took to the beach, crossing only small creeks until it came to the Mordialloc

Creek. The crossing there was difficult and had to done in the darkness.

The road then went inland more or less along the Nepean Highway route and up St Kilda Road to the bridge. Being late meant getting lower prices.

Chinese vendors took up much of the catch and were quickly out into the suburbs selling door to door, though some had traditional fish shops.

Among the seafood which came up from Hastings, and Flinders, and Stony Point, were “mud oysters” which apparently tasted better than you might think.

These were caught by dredging, as scallops once were in Port Phillip with no realisation of the damage that was being done. The oyster catches grew less and less and the market died, despite attempt to revive it.

Most of the fishermen went out with only two, or sometimes three, people in the boat. For netting three were usually needed but for longlining two were enough. Both netting and long-lining were harmful to the fish stocks and the fishery was in decline by the turn of the century.

The railway came to Frankston in 1882, got to Baxter in 1888, and to Hastings, Crib Point and Stony Point in 1889. The Fish Track was redundant and the fish could be delivered almost at the new Fish Market in only three or four hours.

Being closest to the Strait, Stony Point became the port of choice for the boats that worked ‘outside’. It got an extended jetty at the same time, with a trolley track running to the station.

We should remember the work of the Chinese in those early days. There were fishcuring camps at Hastings, at Warneet (Chinaman;s Island) and Chinaman Beach in Corner Inlet.

At these camps fish were split, cleaned and dried, so they could be sent to China but, more importantly and perhaps in a greater volume, the dried fish were sent to the goldfields where getting fresh fish was impossible. The economic impact of this extra demand was critically important to the fishermen of Western Port.

It was the fishing traffic that built Hastings and not vice-versa. The town grew during the 1860s and most of the populace were either fishermen and their families, or boat-builders and repairers.

When the town was properly surveyed – difficult because the fishermen had been allowed to build their huts on Crown Land, three of the street were named for fish – pike, herring and mullet.

Salmon Street was probably not named for the fish but for Edward Salmon, one of the first fishermen there.

Mind you, the Gippsland railway reached Sale, on the Latrobe, in 1877 and then Bairnsdale in 1888, on the Mitchell. This, and the carriage of fish available on the Lakes steamers which went to those ports made the Gippsland Lakes a real competitor with Western Port.

We’ll talk more about that next week.