THE LIBERATOR
How an ageing Communist's bizarre crime spree involving 15,000 pest fish changed New Zealand's environment forever.
Stewart Smith is an old man, propped up on a walking frame in the morning darkness. He is re-learning how to walk after surgery on one hip and both legs, watching in silence as they raid his workshop, the product of his life’s work.
It was 5am, and they numbered around 30. They quietly moved past a giant concrete tank sucking water through a bore and feeding it through the building.
Many decades earlier, the old man earned the nickname Shotgun Smith for how aggressively he defended his West Auckland garage from thieves. Now he is 92, living alone in his lair, pondering what to say when they discover what he has in his tanks.
It happened by pure coincidence. A few weeks earlier, a boy was alone and wandering the streets in Massey. He came across a Caltex petrol station; next to it, he saw a crumbling old garage, paint peeling from the exterior.
Something caught his eye. Near the forecourt, a creature was wriggling in the gutter. It looked like a ko¯ ura, but larger; most strikingly, it had a steely dark shell.
The boy went home and told his dad. When they returned, dad wrapped the creature in a sweatshirt, and they brought it home to their fish tank.
He rang the Department of Conservation, which sent someone out to investigate. The official immediately recognised what he’s looking at; a West Australian smooth marron, a species not found in New Zealand.
Word got around, and several agencies got involved because, based on where the marron was found, there were likely to be more.
A biosecurity report prepared two months later said marron ‘‘have the ability to become widespread throughout New Zealand, invade many habitats, affect ecosystems and all levels of the food chain’’.
The raid happened 16 days later.
For most of the day, Smith watches. At first, he says nothing. Then they figure out what he’s up to, and he knows the jig is up.
About a decade ago, writer Bryan Winters was told about a Communist who loved to fish. It caught his interest. ‘‘He’d left quite a lot of money, and part of his last will and testament was he wanted a book published telling his story,’’ Winters says.
Stewart Smith had even suggested a title: That Pommie Bastard.
The life of Stewart Smith was long, colourful and driven by an uncommonly strong sense of purpose.
By the time he died in 2008, aged 95, Smith had left a permanent legacy in his adopted country’s network of ponds, rivers and lakes.
This account of Smith’s life and legacy is based on official documents and hundreds of pages of Smith’s personal notes, as well as interviews with people who knew him, several of whom requested anonymity.
They reveal an enigmatic figure largely forgotten, but one who has had an outsized, and permanent, impact on the country’s environment.
‘‘Imagine if one guy was responsible for the introduction of rats, possums, rabbits, stoats and pigs to New Zealand,’’ one former official familiar with Smith’s activities says. ‘‘Stewart Smith was pretty much that guy, but he just did it to freshwater ecosystems around the country.’’
Over the course of four decades, Smith released many thousands of fish into rivers, lakes and ponds. The vast majority of his liberations were illegal.
He was prosecuted at least twice, but Smith continued his releases well into old age. He became bolder, more audacious, culminating in the 2005 raid, which likely stopped what Smith planned to be his last, and most significant, liberation.
‘‘He’s had more impact on freshwater than any other single human being,’’ another former official says. ‘‘He was really one of New Zealand’s arch environmental criminals.’’ For much of his adult life, Smith would breed exotic fish in a network of tanks behind his workshop and release them into waterways.
He outfitted his car – initially a Ford Zephyr, and then a Lada Niva – with oxygenated fish tanks that could keep fish alive for days.
He would liberate the fish wherever he could. He would recruit accomplices in raids on farms, dams, and public waterways.
Smith diligently chronicled his activities. According to his own records, Smith was personally responsible for liberating more than 15,000 fish between 1964 and 1987, in hundreds of locations. Most were in the upper North Island, between Rotorua and Kerikeri, but they extended as far south as Christchurch.
He liberated fish in small farm ponds and major rivers; pristine dune lakes and city water supplies. His address book bulged with people who had asked him for fish, which he always supplied, sometimes as far away as Wellington.
He would smuggle fish eggs into the country by hiding them in his pocket while going through Customs. Once he established a new species in New Zealand from a handful of fish eggs an associate sent to him in the post.
‘‘He was clearly a hugely resourceful and tenacious man, with an incredible amount of passion and drive,’’ one of the former officials said. ‘‘It’s such a shame when you think how that energy could have used towards something positive.’’
The fish he liberated, generally speaking, flourished. Much like New Zealand’s native land birds, its freshwater fish had evolved in an environment with few natural predators. New species can shake up an ecosystem that evolved in a delicate equilibrium – and in New Zealand, the result has been chaotic.
To understand why Smith did what he did, it pays to understand the long-simmering battle over who gets to fish what. New Zealand has several dozen native freshwater fish, most nocturnal, discrete and tucked away in streams far from civilisation. Few of them grow larger than 10cm; they don’t make for great angling.
Recognising this, early European settlers decided to bring their favourite sports fish with them. Trout flourished in New Zealand’s cooler waters, with limited competition. The trout fishery is now so prosperous it attracts anglers from around the world.
Some immigrants, including Smith, did not grow up trout fishing, which in England was a sport reserved for the elite. They fished for the socalled ‘‘coarse fish’’ – among them rudd, perch, tench and carp.
This class divide bled into New Zealand. While trout soon followed the immigrants, attempts to bring in coarse fish were rebuffed, largely because they would compete with trout.
And so Smith, who paid dues to New Zealand’s Communist Party for much of his life and had a pathological dislike for social hierarchy, sought to level the playing field.
Smith’s liberations began in the early 1960s while he ran his commercial garage.
He started with one of the most damaging coarse fish: perch.
Perch were already in New Zealand, mainly in Canterbury and Otago, but not widespread. They are carnivorous and have a ravenous appetite. Not only do they eat other fish, they also eat each other.
Smith, with the help of two local boys, took perch from Hamilton’s Lake
Rotoroa and spread hundreds of them around Auckland. In 1965, Smith moved to tench. He started with four, enough to establish a breeding stock at what he called his ‘‘office pond’’.
As his operation ramped up,
Smith started breeding goldfish (a type of carp, not the type commonly kept as a pet), koi carp, gambusia, and golden orfe.
But it was another fish that became Smith’s signature – rudd, a stocky freshwater fish with coarse skin and rubyred fins. They are prolific breeders and primarily eat aquatic plants, preferring natives over exotics, meaning they share a diet with native freshwater species. For that reason, rudd are sometimes called ‘‘the possums of waterways’’. There had been no rudd in the Southern Hemisphere until Smith liberated them into a pond at Wainui school, north of Auckland, in 1969.
Over 20 years, Smith released more than 10,000 rudd, 2300 tench, 1000 perch, and hundreds of koi, goldfish, and orfe. Among his favourite spots was Waikato’s Waihou River, where he once released 2000 rudd in one go at Te Aroha’s boat ramp.
He typically avoided major waterways, but still managed to populate them by putting fish into a nearby drain or stream, which, upon the next flood, would sweep fish into the river.
Smith was so prolific it became difficult to keep track of where the fish were ending up.
Authorities noticed the sudden appearance of rudd and knew who was responsible – Smith regularly bragged about his liberations.
In 1974, Smith was prosecuted for the first time.
His fish were destroyed, his tanks were poisoned and his car was confiscated – a setback which stopped his liberations for four years.
‘‘Fascism is a long way from dead,’’ he bitterly wrote in his diary.
That period, however, came with vindication. In 1975, rudd was declared acclimatised in Auckland and Waikato, essentially recognising that it was here to stay. To this day, Auckland/Waikato is the only region where rudd is established to the extent it is not considered ‘‘noxious’’, a feat entirely due to Smith.
Smith’s fish continued to spread, even though his liberations had paused.
When he started up again, he realised his fish had been too prosperous. He decided to start releasing perch again, under the logic they would predate on rudd and tench.
It was at this point he started falling foul of his few allies. Not only had he returned to spreading perch, but he was also releasing koi carp, a bottom feeder notorious for damaging waterways. He was talking about importing gudgeon and even flirted with bringing in ferocious carnivore pike.
Smith’s notes end in 1988, when he was prosecuted again, this time by the Auckland
‘‘I don’t think he approached it like some evil ogre, thinking ‘I’m going to do harm to New Zealand by doing this’.’’
Bryan Winters
Acclimatisation Society. His fish were destroyed, equipment and notes seized. He was fined $4950, and his beloved Lada Niva was confiscated.
There were numerous sightings of Smith around rivers and lakes in the early 2000s. He was hard to miss: he was an octogenarian, roaring about the countryside in his new $40,000 off-road vehicle.
A 2003 report produced internally for the Department of Conservation notes several of these sightings. The report was ostensibly about threats to Auckland’s freshwater ecosystems; a major one of those threats, it concluded, was Stewart Smith, who was referenced by name dozens of times.
There’s a pristine lake near the Kaipara Harbour called Lake Rototoa.
It is the best of a group of dune lakes that dot the western Northland coastline. Among its population were dwarf inanaga and dune lake galaxias, both of which are highly rare and on the brink of extinction.
Then Smith started his liberations.
In 1970 he liberated more than 100 rudd into Rototoa. They prospered. So much so that, 30 years later, Smith returned with perch, in an effort to control the rudd he had unleashed.
It proved to be a near fatal blow for the lake. Rudd, which feed on native macrophytes, reduced the lake’s water quality. Then the perch started dominating the native species. Between 2003 and 2011, monitoring showed dwarf inanga numbers had dropped by more than 99 per cent, and the species is now functionally extinct in the lake. Ko¯ ura numbers had dropped by 90 per cent and common bullies by 80 per cent.
The lake had also been a popular rainbow trout fishery, but almost immediately after perch were introduced, the fishery collapsed.
It’s a common story when exotic fish are introduced: just like rats and possums on land, they tend to dominate whatever ecosystem they end up in.
‘‘Competition between native species is very balanced in an ecosystem,’’ says Dr Cindy Baker, a freshwater fish scientist at Niwa. ‘‘They tend to have different niches and it all works together well. Once you put these introduced fish in, you have more overlap in niches for certain species, and that’s where you have more competition for food resources.’’
Introduced fish have a significant effect on New Zealand’s freshwater biodiversity, Baker says, particularly in lakes, from which they are hard to remove.
Even as an old man, Stewart Smith had a plan.
He could no longer roam the countryside, but he could still breed fish. Which is why, during that raid in 2005 when he was 92, he dreaded what the authorities would do when they looked inside his tanks: he knew they would find 600 gudgeon, a species never seen before in New Zealand, which he was planning to release in Lake Taupo¯ as his final act.
Smith had talked about this plan for a long time. He first mentioned it off-handedly in a 1972 news article in the Auckland Star, then again in a 1988 news article. But it wasn’t clear how serious he was. He had wanted to breed enough gudgeon, approximately 10,000, to fill the lake.
It’s not entirely clear how Smith smuggled gudgeon into the country. An investigation concluded Smith had likely received them from an associate who had since died. Due to a lack of evidence he had imported them himself, Smith was not prosecuted.
An internal biosecurity report said gudgeon ‘‘were considered likely to become widespread throughout New Zealand in all lowland freshwater systems, and were ranked as having potentially high impacts on both native and introduced fish species that inhabit these environments’’.
The day after the raid, gudgeon was declared a pest species, allowing them to be destroyed. Smith’s tanks were cleansed, leaving him with nothing.
Gudgeon were also found in a pond near Helensville, and exterminated there, too. Smith had told one associate he released gudgeon in potentially dozens of other waterways, including the Hikutaia Cut on the eastern edge of the Hauraki plains north of Paeroa, which would have been devastating.
The biosecurity report said that ‘‘would mean the feasibility of eradication from these waterways is extremely low’’.
A sweep of those waterways found no sign of gudgeon, although no extensive search was undertaken in the Hikutaia Cut or the adjacent Waihou River. To this day, it is unclear if gudgeon were ever released.
Following Smith’s death in 2008, authorities returned to his lair to destroy whatever he had left in his tanks. They were let in by Smith’s nephew, his closest relative, who was not close to his uncle.
They expected to find more gudgeon, but didn’t; just a few schools of rudd. Nevertheless, the tanks were drenched with a lime solution to destroy any trace of life, and a sucker truck dealt with the contaminated water, ending the complicated legacy of Stewart Smith.
‘‘Like us all, I think he was an inconsistent personality,’’ Bryan Winters says. ‘‘He enjoyed fishing, and genuinely felt that spreading these fish around was going to benefit people. I don’t think he approached it like some evil ogre, thinking ‘I’m going to do harm to New Zealand by doing this’.’’
In his writing, Smith often talked about the joy of fishing, particularly for children. He believed New Zealand was deficient in this sense – apart from eels, which he believed were too scary and snakelike for kids, there was no way for a child to grow up fishing in the way he did.
Curiously, Smith himself was not a regular angler.
‘‘He came to some of our meetings – he was very well-read and he didn’t suffer fools gladly,’’ said John Jossevel, a founding member of the West Auckland coarse fishing club, which began in the early 1980s.
Smith is still advancing his cause beyond the grave. Every couple of years, several coarse fishing clubs receive a $5000 donation from the S Smith Trust, financial documents show. Last year, the West Auckland club received $10,000. It pays for trophies and catering and stationery and other things that keep the club going.
Stewart Smith is a boy, roaming the streets of East London with his fishing rod.
He often fishes alone, in the Lea canal, while the other boys play rugby after school. He sometimes finds little ponds, where he fishes for perch, pike and, best of all, gudgeon. When he hooks a gudgeon, he sells it to other fishermen to use as bait.
He loves his parents, even when money issues ruin things. His father is a gambler and once loudly abused his mother while Smith listened in the next room.
But there was always fishing: ‘‘My childhood in England was happy, largely due to those hours spent fishing,’’ he later wrote.
Smith was only 15 when his father told the boy that he and his brother would be going to New Zealand, alone. His coarse fishing days, and his childhood, was over. But it didn’t have to be for the next generation.
‘‘He said to me once, the greatest pleasure a boy can have is fishing,’’ one person who knew Smith said. ‘‘He was always yearning for that boyhood pleasure he had fishing in the canals as a boy. He wanted to replicate that here.’’