Mailing address

The thing Jean Simmonds remembers most about 1992 is how the harbour suddenly grew quiet.

“Our harbour is like a natural amphitheatre, the sound echoes around,” she said.

Before the moratorium, “on calm evenings, the harbour would be crazy with boats.”

The putt-putt of make-nbreak motors, the buzz of outboards and the rumble of diesel engines would fill the harbour with noise.

“All of a sudden, there was no sound,” she said. “It was like a death, it was lifeless.”

Still, this Northern Peninsula community fared a little better than most.

The fish plant was closed in 1992, but it re-opened the following year and has been operating ever since.

Not a thousand jobs, but enough to keep a few dozen people working.

The plant was owned by the Green family in Winterton in 1992.

After the moratorium, they managed to diversify, turning to things like snow crab to keep production lines running.

Eventually, the operation was bought by Quin-sea. Now it’s owned by Royal Greenland.

About 50 people still work there from Conche and the surrounding area.

But the population of this rural town is less than half of what it was in its heyday.

From the 1960s until the mid-1980s, Conche maintained a steady population of 450-500. According to the 2021 Census, 149 people live here now. And there aren’t many young people in the mix. Nearly 100 children attended Sacred Heart Allgrade School in the town.

After the moratorium, the numbers started to drop. Statistics from the province’s education department show the decline was gradual at first — 84 in 1996, 83 in 1998 — then more significant as time went on — 71 in 2000, 53 in 2002, 38 in 2004 — dwindling away until, by 2015, there were just 13 children.

The school was closed in 2016 and, these days, the 16 kids who live in the town are bused to nearby Roddickton.

“There were no young people getting involved in the fishery,” says Simmonds.

Some of those who were attached to the fishery hung on for a couple of years, she said, with support from the compensation programs dubbed NCARP and TAGS.

Some, like her brother, retrained. He found a job at sea on the offshore supply boats — rotational work that allowed him to continue living in Conche, coming home for his bi-monthly shore leaves.

Others, though, ran out of options. They had no choice but to pull up and leave, betting their futures on Western Canada.

“I know one family here, three brothers and their wives and children left,” she told Saltwire.

“It was tough on the families that left. They held on to their houses here for as long as they could.

“But as the years roll by, you realize they’re not coming back.”

HARD CHOICES

There had been a glimmer of hope in Port Union a few years after the moratorium.

Shellfish — snow crab and shrimp — were the new fisheries, and by the late 1990s, the old FPI plant was processing shrimp.

The jobs weren’t as plentiful, however, and the processing season didn’t last long. About 120 or so people found work at the plant for about 12 to 20 weeks a year.

The Dykes held on to their house in Port Union for a few years after they moved, renting it out for about six years, hoping they might eventually return and would have it to come back to if Alberta didn’t work out.

“But then, at some point, we knew we probably wouldn’t be coming home again to live, and we decided to sell it.”

By then, their children had a stronger connection to Alberta than to their parents’ home province.

Still, they maintained strong connections to their Newfoundland family with summertime vacations, threemonth-long visits from the grandparents, and VHS tapes going back and forth in the mail during those growing-up years.

The Dykes’ daughter, Alyson, even chose to spend a whole year living with her grandparents, attending a year of high school to spend more time with her Newfoundland family.

Annette doesn’t look back with regret about their decision to move.

“The only downfall was my kids probably didn’t have to (the) same connection with my parents and family that I would have liked them to,” she says.

“But if we hadn’t done that (moved), then maybe we would be living in Port Union right now, but I wouldn’t have a connection with my grandchildren because my son and daughter might have had to move away.”

Annette said she’s “pretty content” with the way things are right now.

“My immediate family is all together, and we live in a nice little town,” she said.

“It was hard choices, but sometimes it’s the only choice you can make. If you want to do well by your family, you just got to go where the jobs are, and that’s what a lot of people did.”

LIVING LIKE NOMADS

Tonia Kearney wasn’t even born in 1992, but the loss of the cod fishery shaped her life.

Her father — the son of a fisherman and master boat builder — grew up in Conche in the 1970s.

“He grew up around the fishery and around the boats, but it was never presented to him as a viable option,” she told Saltwire.

Inshore fishermen were seeing cod catches dwindle even before John Crosbie made the announcement that drove the final nail in the coffin. Her grandfather was already warning his son not to get too interested in the cod fishery because it might not be around much longer.

By the time Kearney was born, the fishery was shut down.

From the time she was two, her parents were living like Nomads — dividing their time between Sylvan Lake, Alberta, and their hometown of Conche.

“We spent almost 10 years going back and forth,” she said.

Her father worked in the oil sands and her mother attended university in Alberta.

“We would stay out there until about April every year, come home to Newfoundland for a few months, and then go back in September,” Kearney said.

When she came back to Conche for those summer visits, and later to attend high school, she spent lots of time roaming the community with her friends, exploring the outdoors and the abandoned homes.

“We grew up hearing stories of how lively and thriving things once were around here,” she said. “And we would kind of wonder where that place was because it didn’t feel like the place we were in.”

STILL TIED TO HOME

A degree in marketing eventually led Kearney to Australia, where she works most of the year with an advertising agency.

However, she’s still tied to Conche and re-living her childhood in a way, dividing her time between Melbourne and the Great Northern Peninsula.

Because the moratorium is still shaping her life today.

These days, she’s helping tell the story of the events of 1992 and beyond through an enterprise called the Moratorium Children (https://www.moratoriumchildren.com/). She’s enticing people to spend time in the remote community she calls home, to enjoy the wild and wide-open spaces, feel the power of the wind, smell the flavours of the ocean, and learn about the impact the moratorium had on a community that had depended on cod since the arrival of Basque sailors in the 1500s until the cod fishery was shuttered 30 years ago.

Kearney doesn’t have a memory of the moratorium announcement and aftermath, not like Simmonds and Dyke do.

She has no recollection of the discussions that went on around the family dinner table as her parents and others pondered what to do next.

Still, when she looks around Conche today, there’s one thing that, for her, is the most tangible example of the impact of the moratorium.

“There’s this beautiful old house that’s not too far from where I live. It’s been abandoned for years … probably one of the last homes that’s still abandoned,” she said.

Kearney and her friends, in their teenage years, used to sneak into some of those older empty homes, looking for ghosts.

This one particular house, she said, is a conjoined structure. It was home to two families and their children.

The last time she peeked inside, there were still dishes in the cupboards and quilts on the beds.

“It was as if they had left with the intention to come back, but never did,” she said.

She considers it a living metaphor of the moratorium, evidence of a desire to return but no way to come back.

“On one of my trips in there, I found a calendar. Probably marking the last year someone lived there,” she says.

“It was 1992.”

Toni Kearney