Please, let us feed you
I have been fishing commercially for 37 years. I currently fish the southern waters out of Bluff and own a 16m trawler that bottom trawls.
We employ three crew and support many local engineering shops and suppliers in our region. I supply fish to two companies, which is both exported and sold fresh in New Zealand. Some landings can be up to 25 different species of fish. You may well have eaten the fish I catch, perhaps from your local fish and chip shop or supermarket.
I grew up on farms, but when an uncle who was a fisher took me for trip when I was 16, I fell in love with fishing, because of the freedom you get out there on the water, seeing the wildlife and finding that no two days are the same.
But it's a job that comes with many challenges such as the brutal cost of fuel and gear and compliance costs caused by the many rules we have to follow.
Another thing that's tough is the constant use of misinformation to shut us down. It can be really troubling to read opinion pieces like the one in the Otago Daily Times the other day by Gwynne Dyer (23.6.25).
I understand that Gwynne is a British-Canadian military historian and author who has also worked as a professor and journalist. He's done a lot of things, but I didn't see fisher on that list.
Gwynne was celebrating the release of the film Ocean, which is narrated by Sir David Attenborough.
You will have seen this film getting a lot of attention in the media. It shows the absolute worst-case examples of bottom trawl fishing and says that this fishing method should be stopped worldwide.
The issue for a fisher like me is that the film and Gwynne's column are talking about situations that don't hold true here in New Zealand, including here in Otago and Southland.
No honest fisher (and I can tell you, most of us are very honest and straight talking) will tell you trawling is perfect. Yes, there was some pretty rough activity in the past, back in the 1960s and '70s when people fished over all sorts of terrain and took as much as they liked. These days, it's a very different story.
I have been fishing for long enough to see the changes. Nowadays, we are very restricted in where we fish. And we're bloody careful. We cannot and do not trawl through coral beds. Our nets cost about $20,000, so it would be financial suicide to destroy gear.
The areas we trawl have been trawled since trawling was first used and they are flat sandy or mud bottom. The idea that we're somehow running around, letting loose with trawl gear and damaging the oceans is just nonsense in my experience. It's not what happens.
There are strict limits on how much fish you can take. That's because of the Quota Management System.
A report out of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN the other day said our management systems in New Zealand had given us one of the best sustainability records in the world. It says that 85.5% of all the fish stocks in our area are sustainably fished and those sustainable stocks are responsible for an estimated 95.7% of landings.
Most of us have cameras on board these days (except for the really big vessels that have government observers and the really small vessels that don't have the power supply or places to put cameras).
The Ministry for Primary Industries has now rolled out cameras on 218 fishing vessels, meaning we have the most cameras on commercial fishing boats of any country.
A big challenge for us in fishing is that people can't come out on the water with us every day. If you could come out on my vessel with me, you would see how careful we are. You would see how we stick to our traditional fishing areas. We use modern gear and all our experience to try to avoid capturing seabirds or mammals.
I love what I do. I've been fishing for a long time. I want people to understand that what gets me up in the morning is the fact that I am working in a beautiful natural environment, seeing an ever-changing sunrise or sunset and the wildlife at sea.
I am also very proud that I am harvesting a food that has no additives, no pesticides and is considered a healthy brain and heart food by many scientists.
As a fisher, I ask you and guys like Gwynne, please let us continue to put food on your plate.
— Pat Nyhon is a commercial fisherman.
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NZ Herald
a day ago
- NZ Herald
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Demonised: Roman woman Fulvia is remembered in this 1819 drawing by Bartolomeo Pinelli of her piercing the tongue of Cicero's severed head. Photo / Getty Images Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Book of the day: Two takes - one fact, one fiction - on life of Roman aristocrat Fulvia Demonised: Roman woman Fulvia is remembered in this 1819 drawing by Bartolomeo Pinelli of her piercing the tongue of Cicero's severed head. Photo / Getty Images In a forthright introduction to her excellent biography of Fulvia, British classicist Jane Draycott points out that 'we have more literary, documentary and archaeological evidence' for her than for 'almost any other Roman woman during the Late Republic'. These were the chaotic decades leading up to Octavian being installed as Emperor Augustus in 27 BCE. Draycott writes that much of the evidence for Fulvia is negative in the extreme. 'Nearly all of the authors writing during her life or immediately after her death were enormously hostile towards her … Later authors took those portrayals and doubled down on them, adding spicy details that may be true or may simply be exaggerated falsehoods, designed to infuriate as well as titillate.' The cover of Fulvia: The woman who broke all the rules in Ancient Rome shows a shocking scene imagined by a 19th-century Italian painter. That's not a lover in bed with Fulvia – it's the severed head of her and her husband Mark Antony's sworn enemy, the proscribed orator Cicero, with her hairpins piercing his tongue. She is recorded as having done this (though definitely not in her bed) after his assassination, when his hands and head were cut off and publicly displayed in Rome. His ceaseless, lurid attacks had included calling her 'a thoroughly rapacious female' and 'a woman as cruel as she is greedy'. Many others, particularly Octavian, joined in. She was 'repeatedly publicly pilloried in front of the entire Roman Senate and wider Roman society for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere'. This 'deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation ensured that the allegations made against her have survived for two millennia, while most attempts at defence have faded from view'. Portrayals of her were also 'heavily influenced by the author's feelings about her husband' at the time. The Late Republic featured incessant battles of every kind, from elections and trials to gang clashes and outright war, between constantly shifting sets of rival candidates for the most powerful positions in the ruling Roman hierarchy. Elite Roman women were not supposed to play any part in these contests, despite being drastically affected by them. As soon as they started menstruating, they were expected to marry men chosen by their male elders, in a market dominated by considerations of status, wealth and alliance. They were then to suffer dutifully through the exile or death of husbands or their frequent divorces and remarriages, often to far younger women, prompted by perceived political or material advantage, when ex-wives might lose all access to their children. Yet Draycott shows a surprising number of elite women are known to have become politically involved, exerting their influence to improve the fortunes of their husbands and relatives. They included Fulvia's aunt and her future sister-in-law. Fulvia's first marriage, probably when she was 15 or 16, was unusual: her husband, Publius Clodius Pulcher, was not markedly older than her, and his acquired last name meant 'beautiful' (with golden curly hair). His family, the Claudii, was far more prestigious than hers, but he had a dodgy reputation and high debts. As an only child, Fulvia had an enormous inheritance from both sides of her family. During roughly 12 years they had a son and daughter and spent a remarkable amount of time together, in public as well as in private. After she helped Clodius fight an election, he was murdered by the henchmen of his plebeian rival Milo. Instead of holding his funeral with all due ceremony, Fulvia ensured that mobs of rioting supporters carried his bloody corpse to the Forum, where they built his funeral pyre. Two takes on the life of Roman aristocrat Fulvia. Photos / Supplied New Zealand author Kaarina Parker's stunning first novel, Fulvia: Power. At any cost, with its elegant classical cover, culminates in this scene, but she shows Fulvia herself leading the procession. As Parker frankly explains, she has deliberately varied some known details for the sake of the story: Fulvia is 18 when she meets Clodius, has sex with him before the wedding, and gives birth to her daughter before her son. 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Otago Daily Times
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Nuclear test participants' stories spotlighted
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NZ Herald
6 days ago
- NZ Herald
Croatian Joseph Mikulec got the autographs of kings, presidents and others as he walked more than 320,870km
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Photo / Kaitlyn Dolan, the Washington Post Mussolini, Ford, Tesla, Edison, King Edward VIII and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George were among 60,000 others who stopped whatever important business they were doing to sign the autograph book. It became Mikulec's life mission. As he became increasingly famous, world leaders, artists and luminaries from Egypt to New Zealand (in 1911) were thrilled to sign what was becoming a global 'Who's Who'. Some wrote full letters and included stamps, seals and photos. It was a time when metal detectors, gates and scanners didn't separate the public from the prominent. Usually, all it took was Mikulec's charisma to get past one grumpy guard. 'I walked up to 10 Downing Street, London, the other day,' Mikulec told the Evening Star in December 1919. He wanted to see Prime Minister David Lloyd George, but he was out and Mikulec left his book for him to sign. 'When I came back the autographs of most of the cabinet were in my book, and there were two photographers waiting to snap me on the way out,' he said. Mikulec gave lectures, bringing the world to the people who shared his wanderlust. He funded his adventures by charging admission to some of his story hours and selling postcards of himself to his legions of fans. Mikulec once said a Croatian publishing company was going to pay him US$10,000 if he could walk around the world in five years and give them exclusive rights to his story. But there's no evidence that materialised. Viktor Šimunić, left, the Mayor of Oroslavje, Croatia, and Roberto Kuleš, the president of its city council, bring the book to The Washington Post. Photo / Petula Dvorak, the Washington Post The truth was, he was his own remarkable hype man, alerting newspapers from New York to California whenever he was back in town with his massive book and quirky travelling clothes. 'I would say he was like an archetype of today's influencer or travel blogger,' said Roberto Kuleš, president of Oroslavje's city council and a member of the five-man delegation that travelled to the US East Coast last week to buy the book from Raab as part of a grand plan. Mikulec travelled for so many years that his provenance changed with political history. He was identified as an Austrian, a Croat and a 'Jugoslavian' as he circled the globe three times. He became a US citizen after living in Philadelphia for a few years when World War I disrupted his global travels. Mikulec was born in 1878 to a poor farmer who lived near Oroslavje, a small town on the outskirts of Zagreb. He was expected to work in the fields. But he declared his wanderlust in his youth. 'In 1901, when he said, 'I want to travel the world,' he was like a lunatic,' said Šimunić, who saw some of himself in Mikulec. The townsfolk told the dreamer: 'You must get married. You must have children. You must stay home. You must work and be ordinary,' Šimunić said. Mikulec managed to leave his family farm in 1901 to work in Italy and Malta. When his father died in 1905, the 27-year-old hopped on a steamboat to South Africa to begin a trip that would last nearly three decades. From there, he went to South America, where he camped in rainforests and survived on wild fruit, roots and nuts. He was an outspoken vegetarian. After his first visit to Washington, Mikulec crossed the US, lecturing at fire departments and town halls to anyone who wanted to hear about his adventures. His lectures included 'the tale of the snake that stabbed him near Matildas, of the Indian woman who pummelled him in Argentine, of Roosevelt and Wilson as they talked to him, of the bones of the whale on the Brazilian coast so enormous he could barely lift one rib, of Moros whose chests were so roughened by climbing shaggy trees that they looked like crocodiles,' the Detroit Free Press wrote in June 1919. He was the Edwardian era's Travel Channel, National Geographic, and travel TikTok. 'Mikulec appeared there in his tramping clothes, a red bandana around his neck and a big black thing under one arm,' a Washington journalist in Paris for the Evening Star reported when he spotted Mikulec in December 1921. The city was on edge after a bomb exploded in the US Embassy there months earlier. Another glimpse of the book. Photo / Kaitlyn Dolan, the Washington Post Officials at the embassy bolted at the sight of the man with a massive object wrapped in a black, waterproof covering under one arm, and 'two French gendarmes appeared and led Mikulec away', the Star reported. The massive object was the book. There were actually three books in total - the other two much smaller. One that had been with Mikulec's distant family is on display in the Croatian History Museum in Zagreb, which acquired it in 2023. Croatian historians had been buzzing at the news that the biggest book, the one presumed gone, surfaced in Philadelphia. As Šimunić learned more about Mikulec's story, he was inspired by the global impact a farmer from a small village had made. He commissioned a statue of Mikulec with the book on his shoulder. And he longed to buy the biggest book, the famous one in Philadelphia. He called Raab and asked for a digital copy of the pages. 'I told him, you don't know me, I'm a little mayor from a little city,' he said. 'But we have good intentions.' Šimunić handily won his most recent election this summer, fuelled by the dream that he would bring the book back to Croatia and elevate the story of his hometown hero. The US$225,000 to buy the book came out of the city budget. And not everyone there was happy about it, he said. It was electrifying to finally see the book last week in Philadelphia, Šimunić said. Raab said he, too, was moved by the moment. 'It's touching for us to know that it's going back home,' he said in his company's podcast episode about the book. 'Where it belongs.' Šimunić laid out his vision: 'So, first step is the statue. Second step, we must buy the book. And after we buy the book, we can build the museum. That's the real goal,' he said. The museum would become a pilgrimage for travellers like Mikulec and an Instagram magnet for travellers like the young mayor, who set out to see as much of the world as he could before returning to his small town to run it. 'More than 200 mayors signed the book all around the world,' he said. 'And my idea is, why not to contact today's mayors? And ask them to visit?' The Mikulec museum will have a replica of the book, but with the pages all blank, to be filled by the people who travel to Oroslavje. 'Mikulec went to see the world,' Šimunić said. 'And now the world can come to Oroslavje to see his story.'
