132 NEW SOUTH WALES 
they are able to shift from one spot to another without any picking up 
of heavy kellicks or beating to windward, are able to count out more 
fish on a fair day’s “outing” than any of our professional fishing 
crews. A thousand fish, we are informed, is not an extraordinary 
catch for some of these clubs. While on the subject of fishing clubs we 
may here mention that a very intelligent witness examined by the 
Commission (Mr. M‘Carthy) has informed us of the discovery by him 
of an extensive “shell bank,” ata distance of about 10 miles eastward 
of these Coogee grounds. This bank is said to carry only about 20 to 
30 fathoms of water, and to be very narrow, in fact so narrow that the 
steamer finds great difficulty in lying-to on it. The soundings in the 
immediate neighbourhood of the ridge, which extends in a N.W. and 
8.E. direction for about a mile (so far as Mr. M‘Carthy was able to trace 
it), show from 70 to 90 fathoms, from which we are able to form some 
idea of the character of this remarkable upheaval or submarine sand-ridge. 
Between Coogee and Cape Banks (the northern headland of Botany 
Bay) the fishing-grounds are wholly confined to those in the offing, there 
being no lagoons or inlets capable of being worked by nets. There are 
about a dozen schnapper grounds within these limits, but none of them are 
f much importance. Nannygey are often caught in quantities in the 
epths off Long Bay Head, and schnapper have at times been found to 
abound off Marubera and Little Bay (wide); but until we reach the 
long line of rocky ground which forms the submarine extension of Cape 
Banks, none of the grounds hereabout possess the necessary conditions 
for school fish. “What fish there are do not seem to be settled on any 
one ground, but, as is the case on all foul grounds, they roam from 
patch to patch in small schools. The entrance to Botany is foul ground 
as a rule, and although wide off Cape Banks there are some very fair 
school-fish grounds, yet they have never been much appreciated by 
fishermen, who prefer the “ bumboras” and off shore grounds to the 
southward of Cape Solander, Long Nose, and Curranulla Head, 
notwithstanding the strength of the southerly current in the summer 
months which, off some of these headlands, runs like a sluice. But 
Botany, though never equal to the Long Reef and Broken Bay grounds 
for school-fish, has always held its own for net-fish ; indeed it is doubtful 
whether even Broken Bay, with tits far greater extent of net grounds, 
has ever been or is now more productive than are the beaches and flats 
of Botany. This inlet, though shallow, covers many thousand acres of 
water ; and as two salt-water rivers—George’s and Cook’s—flow into it, 
there is no lack of spawning or nursery grounds. Although of late 
years as many as a dozen net boats have regularly plied the beaches and 
flats of Broken Bay, yet fish are still caught. Of course the processes 
of exhaustion common to all the grounds near Sydney have been in 
active operation at Botany, and especially that most destructive of all 
forms of fishery the stake-net ; yet notwithstanding all this, Botany is 
perhaps less impoverished considering the amount of fishing continually 
going on than any inlet or harbour within fisherman’s distance of 
Sydney. But the evidence of witnesses well acquainted with the 
resources of Botany leads immediately to the conclusion that, unless 
arrested by legislative restraints, these’prolific grounds will in a very 
short time succumb to the stake-nets and the small mesh as surely as 
our other fishing-grounds have succumbed. 
