IT’S INTERESTING HOW some events leave you perplexed and a little sad. That happened to me on the strip between Main Beach and The Pass.

“This is probably one of our last catches around here”, said the fisherman. “It’s this marine park thing – it’ll be the end of us around here”.

Of middle age and weathered as you would expect a fisherman to be without becoming a characture of himself, he speaks with me briefly before joining his mates to drag in the net. It takes four of them to do that. I continue to take pictures, zooming out to capture the group then zooming in to get close ups of the large, silver fish flopping about entangled in the nylon lattice.

He had been fishing these waters for some years and the impending doom he feels comes from the campaign to declare the shoreline around here a marine park. For everyone, that will mean no fishing. For this fisherman, it means going further north or south and putting out his nets in the shallow coastal waters there.

The squeezing of the middle

The campaign to declare the marine park has been more than controversial around Byron Bay. It has been vociferously and determinedly fought both by those wanting the declaration and those that don’t. As usually in this town, the middle ground had been squeezed out and the controversy polarised.

The green lobby here can be a tough, uncompromising bunch and they fight hard. Over the past 25 years they have defeated some formidable opponents including the financially powerful Club Med. They have a lot of support in town and it comes for the most part not from some stereotypical green fringe but from conventional, middle class folk. Sure, that green fringe exists but it is its unmediated alliance with those respectable middle class folk who have made Byron home over these past three decades that brings it strength.

The polarisation of opinion, so typical of Byron Bay, means that local government elections are fought hard. Ask around, and you soon find that council has a bit of a reputation as a den of unruly renegades of varying political hues. It all depends who you ask, though, and those that support the present mayoral incumbent, Jan Barnam, will expound on her virtues. Not so her opponents who in 2005 had T-shirts printed bearing the slogan “Not happy Jan”. Just a further sign of the polarisation.

Cr Barnam is a Green, a product of Byron’s environmental struggles. Youthful looking with long brown hair down to her shoulders, her size belies an articulate, critical mind. She is given to the occasional display of temper, characteristics suited to a sometimes fiery politician. Jan is admired among the region’s environmentalists but not so by some others.

An effect of the squeezing of the middle ground of opinion, as has happened in Byron Bay, is that issues become polarised and their resolution comes down to the wielding of political strength. Its either this or that, not some middle ground that can achieve at least some of the demands of both contenders. This is the way that environmental politics have evolved in Australia.

Issue are not so simple

The voice of that professional fishermen hauling in his net has an edge of resentment to it. Clearly, he feels that he and his industry are being pushed out.

I’m not a fisherman and I like the idea of marine parks. I also like the idea that fishing can supply a town with a portion of its locally produced food and continue to supply a livelihood to local people. It’s iniquitous to be asked to choose between park and local food and that is why I resent the squeezing out of the middle band of options and opinion.

But it isn’t quite so simple, I discover. As I talked to the fisherman I learn that most of his catch goes north, up Brisbane way. What happens to it then I do not know. Does it go into the city’s food supply or is it cleaned, frozen and exported? Fair enough if it goes to feeding the city because Byron can be included in Brisbane’s regional food catchment – the region from which the city draws most of its food. It’s clear that the population of Byron is too small to sustain anything more than the smallest fishing industry.

I wonder, as I click the shutter of my camera time after time, whether I am witnessing the sun set on another of the country’s small industries. I feel a tinge of sadness at what might be the loss of a way of life in Byron Bay. At the same time I feel that the town might gain something with the declaration of a marine park. It’s a dilemma.