Style: July 01, 2022

Style | Feature 29
I would follow him everywhere. When I was three years
old, dad made me a fishing rod out of a long, thin piece
of wood and I found a blue, wedge-shaped fishing lure left
in the DOC hut next door. Dad was concerned I could
accidentally get a hook stuck in my skin or, worse, in my eye,
and wouldn’t allow me to use an actual sharp hook on my
lure. And he had his reasons for being concerned.
Our only contact with the world was an emergency
locator beacon given to us by a local fisherman, Geoff
Robson. This device when activated will send a distress signal
to the rescue coordination centre via a passing jet plane or
satellite. In a best-case scenario with good weather, one of
the local rescue helicopters could get us to a hospital within
about five hours. In a worst-case scenario with bad weather,
it could be days. Therefore, my parents were very cautious
about what we were and weren’t allowed to do and what
tools and equipment we could use.
Not having a hook didn’t bother me in the slightest and
I spent many hours fishing in the river mouth with that
blue lure. I was always in search of ‘Fishy Bear’, a large
mythical fish that had taken the hooks of two possum
hunters who stayed in the DOC hut. Sometimes I would
throw my lure out in the river near dad’s net and would
return to find a fish on the line. I was always over the moon
and wouldn’t stop talking about my catch for days. Little did
I know, dad would go down early and take a fish from his
net to attach to my line before putting it back in the water
for me to find later.
During the spring months a small amount of whitebait
comes up the Gorge River. Dad would set his whitebait net
at the bottom of ‘the bluff’, a large limestone cliff, originally
carved by a glacier and now covered in rātā trees, which
lies about 200 metres upstream from the river mouth and
forms the gorge that gives Gorge River its name. When I
was two or three, dad hand-stitched me a small whitebait
net out of lace curtain material, and after that I would
always have my net set in front of his. Again, unbeknown to
me, dad would go down first and put a couple of whitebait
in my net.
We never caught many, and on a good day there might
be 20 or 30 bait in my net and a couple of hundred in
his. To me that was an amazing catch. If there were more
whitebait in the Gorge River, there would have been lots of
whitebaiters’ huts to go with them. We were quite happy
to have the river to ourselves and were content with just
catching a feed here and there. Mum would mix the small,
translucent, five-centimetre-long fish with egg (if we had
any) and fry them in the pan.
As soon as I was able to walk I would follow dad
wherever he went. Every two weeks with the full and
new moons we would have spring low tides, when the
tide would drop lower than normal, making it possible
to find pāua. I would follow dad up the beach to find
these camouflaged shellfish that cling to the undersides of
seaweed-covered boulders right where the crashing waves
meet the shore.
When I was three years old, dad made me a blunt,
square-ended pocket knife. On one really calm day I
followed him right out to the edge of the splashing waves.
I saw a huge pāua under a large rock and carefully
pried it off with my little knife. I was so happy that evening
that mum took a photo of me on our camera with my
first pāua!
Other times we would collect mussels at the south
end of the airstrip. Usually mum would send me down to
the ocean to get some sea water and she would boil the
mussels in it for a couple of minutes. This would give them
extra flavour and we would pry open the shells at the
kitchen table looking for the juiciest mussels. The leftovers
would be marinated in vinegar and salt for the next day.
Because we always rely on the food from nature around
Gorge River, we only ever collect what we need. If we
see only five pāua then we know we can only take one or
two. And if the rock has 50 mussels, we can take just 10.
This relationship with nature is critical if you want to live
sustainably off the land.
Despite my family collecting food at Gorge River for
the last 40 years, the fish stocks have not decreased.
Sadly, there are very few such places left in the world.
Natural food supplies are the first to pay the price for
overpopulation and poor resource management. The
fact is that most of the world’s fish species have already
been decimated beyond repair and humans are directly
to blame.
Looking back on the way that I was raised, and on our
relationship with the land, I feel lucky to have learned
first-hand about the delicate balance of living sustainably
in nature.
Edited extract from The Boy From Gorge River by Chris Long.
HarperCollins. RRP $39.99