naviarhaiku617 – an autumn nightfall

The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week reminded me of a song I'd started writing about a fish.

Murray cod are Australia's largest freshwater fish and, as a freshwater person, I kinda relate to it. 

In particular, the line about the skeleton prompts me to share this remarkable discovery: 

Archaeological otoliths from midden sites in the Lower Murray River region that are at least 5000 years old, show that in the past, monstrous Murray cod (more than 220 centimetres long!) once lived in this part of the river, and were targeted by the Indigenous people who lived there, the Ngarrindjeri. 

These fish are known to be protective fathers and travel long distances, like salmon, to return to their home to spawn.

They nearly were made extinct by large-scale fishing and, in recent years, have become an aquaculture crop.

If I drive west there are many breeding ponds where cod are grown for meat, and if I drive east there's the John Lake Centre where the techniques for propagation were documented.

The story is that Lake was told a cod had taken residence in a neighbouring dam, where he found it used a 44-gallon drum like it was a treehollow for spawning young.

Anyway, I can talk about cod for a while since I put together an exhibition about them.