Forty annual conferences for ASFB

In our Dec 2014 newsletter, Kevin Rowley published a colourful history of ASFB’s annual conferences. We have reproduced his article below.

The Australian Society for Fish Biology came into existence in mid-1971, and had an initial membership of 79 fisheries scientists and science administrators, drawn from fisheries agencies, museums and universities in eastern Australia and Tasmania (the inaugural members are listed in the Society’s first Newsletter dated August 1971, which was reproduced in the December 2012 newsletter). The broad aims of the Society were to “promote the study of fish and fisheries in Australia, and to provide a communications medium for Australian fish workers”. By 1973 membership of the Society had expanded to include scientists from Western Australia, Northern Territory, Papua New Guinea and South Australia, and consideration was being given to holding an annual conference to address the ‘communications’ objective. [Note that in 1973 the Society also voted to decrease the annual subscription rate from $2 to $1, as the bank account was burgeoning due to income of $246 with only $15 in expenses during the first 2 years of operation!]

The first annual conference of ASFB was a joint conference with the Australian Society for Limnology (ASL) and the Australian Marine Sciences Association (AMSA), and was held in May 1974 at the Noosa Lakes Motor Inn in Tewantin, Queensland. The venue was chosen in consideration of the overall ‘theme’ of the conference, the study of estuaries, as it allowed good access to the estuarine system of the Noosa Lakes. The venue also boasted a conference hall, barbecue area, swimming pool, restaurant and a “24-hour liquor licence for guests” — all for the sum of $8 per person per night, bed and breakfast! Camping sites were also available opposite the motor inn, for those who preferred the “economical outdoor life”. The Tewantin Conference was considered a “great success” as it enabled the members of ASFB from different states to meet together for the first time, and planning was commenced for the Society’s first conference in its own right.

 In August 1975, the Society’s second annual conference was held at NSW Brackish Water Fish Culture Research Station at Port Stephens, and was attended by 60 members (from a total Society membership of 145). In keeping with the ‘economical’ theme of the Society, those who could not afford accommodation at the Salamander Bay motel could avail themselves of a caravan at a nearby park for $7.50 a night for a van which slept 4 people! [And an interesting note was communicated from Liz Auty of NSW Fisheries: “Frustrated Males Please Note: Female ASFB members who wish to share with males are extremely rare, therefore, either bring your own or share with the males.”] A full program of papers (N = 20) was presented to the two-day meeting, and NSW Fisheries made the Research Vessel Kapala available for an ‘ocean excursion’. The success of this conference set the scene for many successful ASFB conferences in following years, and apparently generated a ‘modest’ surplus of about $200, further swelling the Society’s bank balance to more than $600.

I joined ASFB in 1976 and was fortunate to attend the third Annual Conference, held in the Victorian fishing port of Lakes Entrance over the weekend 18-19 September 1976, which coincidentally was ‘Grand Final’ weekend for the VFL, so some conference presentations on the Saturday afternoon were particularly poorly attended! This conference saw the instigation of the first of the Society’s awards, a prize of $50 for the best paper presented by a student. The award was in memory of the legendary fish taxonomist Gilbert P. Whitley, curator of fishes at the Australian Museum Department of Ichthyology from 1925 to 1964, in recognition of his prodigious career describing new species of Australian and Pacific fishes, which resulted in more than 500 publications. The award was won by a young C.M. (Murray) MacDonald for his paper on the systematics of percychthyid fishes.

The annual conference became the highlight of the ASFB calendar, with all Australian states eventually hosting the conference. The first South Australian conference was held at Victor Harbour in 1978, and in 1982 the first Tasmanian conference was held at the Westside Hotel in Hobart. Darwin hosted the first Northern Territory conference in 1986, and then in 1993 ASFB delegates migrated west to attend the first conference in Western Australia, held at the Sorrento Quay Function Centre.

While conference venues were expanding geographically, the content of conferences was also on the increase. The two-day ‘weekend’ format continued to be the basis for the conference; however, from 1985, it became the practice to have one or more workshops on relevant topics in conjunction with the conference, and, from 1986, ‘concurrent sessions’ were also introduced to the meeting format, to cover the increasing number of presentations.

Additional student awards were also introduced: the Student Travel Award in 1983, for the best written (unpublished) paper submitted by a student to the ASFB Executive to be presented at the conference; and the John Lake award in 1987, for the best student poster at the conference. In 1991, the Gilbert P. Whitley Award was split into senior and junior categories, the prize at that time for each category being $350. In 1993, the Student Travel Award was reworked so as to allow for a larger number of students to attend the Annual Conference — up to 15 awards of $100 each were available from the John Glover Travel Fund, named in honour of the late John Glover, a founding member of the Society. [Note that the Society also funds a number of other awards which are not directly associated with the annual conference and so are not mentioned in this article.]

The 1986 conference, under the enthusiastic chairmanship of John Glaister, saw 160 of the Society’s 500 members travel to the far-flung outpost of Darwin, at a time when air travel was relatively expensive and far less available than in recent years. This first Darwin Conference was a spectacular success — I well remember the annual dinner held at the Sailing Club on Fannie Bay, which was the Society’s first ‘fancy dress’ affair, with the theme “Come as your taxon”. This conference also saw the introduction of the Society’s most colourful award, the Donald D Francois award, which was instigated to acknowledge “an outstanding contribution to fish biology” at the annual conference, and came with a dozen bottles of red from Don’s Hunter Valley winery. In following years, John Glaister’s annual letter to Don outlining the nominations and subsequent winner was reproduced in the ASFB newsletter and made absorbing reading (provided you didn’t appear amongst the nominations!).

In 1989, the conference organised to be held on Magnetic Island off Townsville almost didn’t occur due to a strike by airline pilots which effectively grounded all commercial airlines. But the decision was made to go ahead with the meeting, and intrepid ASFB members got themselves to Townsville any way they could. Many flew in RAAF Hercules troop carrier aircraft, which were put into service by the Government to maintain some level of air transport (apparently the seating and cabin service left a lot to be desired!). I remember the irony of having to go to Sydney Airport to pick up a hire car with which to drive the 2,000 km from Sydney to Townsville. Of the 140 members who had registered to attend the Conference, 105 made it to Magnetic Island, which it was said demonstrated “ASFB members’ determination to confer about fish at all costs”!

Venues for the annual conference continued to rotate through all Australian states, and the associated workshops and sub-committee meetings led to increased levels of communication between ASFB members. The 1996 conference in Brisbane was completely subsumed into the 2nd World Fisheries Congress, hosted by ASFB with just a little trepidation that failure to attract sufficient international delegates could put the Society into financial ruin. The Theme of the congress was “Developing and Sustaining World Fisheries — The State of Science and Management”. The Congress proved to be a huge success, with 950 delegates from 66 countries converging on the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. The congress agenda contained no less than 120 oral presentations and 600 posters, and firmly placed ASFB on the international fisheries stage.

By the year 2000, ASFB membership had swelled to 535 from 17 countries. In 2003, in acknowledgement of the Society’s trans-Tasman membership, the annual conference was held at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. More than half of the 150 delegates at the conference travelled across the Tasman from Australia. The Conference and two associated workshops on “Invasive Fish Species” and “Snapper Research” ran for a full week, from Sunday evening to Friday evening, with the Wednesday set aside for field trips and sub-committee meetings. Ten years later, in 2013, the Society held their second conference in New Zealand, at the University of Waikato in Hamilton. This was the 40th annual conference of ASFB, and was held in conjunction with the N.Z. Freshwater Sciences Society and the N.Z. Marine Sciences Society. More than 500 delegates attended the joint conferences, but the representation of ASFB members from Australia was reduced because of the recent ‘downsizing’ of fisheries research agencies in the eastern states.

The annual conference of ASFB has certainly fulfilled the ‘communication’ role intended for the Society, and the associated workshop series has produced some very detailed and authoritative outcomes on themes relevant to fisheries science and management in Australia and internationally. On a personal note, I have thoroughly enjoyed the annual get-together with colleagues who you might only catch up with every few years. Very few of the founding members of the Society attend conferences now, and the numbers from the early years (the halcyon period in the 1970s and 1980s when Australian fisheries research and management agencies were expanding) are also dwindling. But the annual conference remains a focus for the active members of the Society. In July 2014, Darwin was the venue for the 41st Conference (or the 40th anniversary conference, depending on how you look at it!), a joint conference with the Australian Society for Limnology which attracted about 300 delegates and benefited from more than 230 oral presentations. And planning is well underway for the 2015 annual conference, to be held next October at the University of Technology in Sydney — I hope to catch up with many of you there!

This history of ASFB conferences was written by Kevin Rowley, and was originally published in the December 2014 issue of our newsletter. A full list of the society’s conferences since 1974 is available here.