Comrade Jewfish
Oscar Schwartz goes fishing with a Victorian Socialist.
Daniel Lopez is no Leninist. He’s not even a Marxist. He has at times identified as a Hegelian, which means he has held firm to a view of history in which nothing repeats itself identically, and that this is hopeful, for if it did, the past might be our only future, and there would be no possibility for true revolution, which is, according to the Hegelian view, at least as far as I understand it, the emergence not only of new institutions and political systems, but an entirely new type of subject—a consciousness of a kind that does not yet exist and could not be anticipated in advance. For some, this makes Comrade Lopez a little dubious. The revolution, to them, is what happened in Petrograd circa 1917 and any deviation is probably covert reformism. He has been accused, over his some two-and-a-half decades in the struggle, of being a “mealy-mouthed reformist twaddler,” a “puerile intellectual,” and a member of the bourgeoisie-adjacent “literati.” Lopez doesn’t care. He knows what future he wants and he is willing to fight for it. First, though, he has to catch a Mulloway.
The name of this fish, which comes from the Ngarrindjeri language of the Lower Murray region, translates as “the greatest one.” This might be because of the Mulloway’s size and beauty. They can grow up to 2 metres long, with rare specimens approaching 80 kilograms, and they glide their handsome trunks through brackish estuaries around southern Australia, illuminating the discoloured waters with brilliant flashes of mauve and bronze. Other names for the Mulloway include butterfish, due to its deliciously rich texture, and the Silver Ghost, due to its elusiveness. But if you head out to the various haunts along the lower Maribyrnong and Yarra where the Mulloway fishermen cast their lines out towards the bridge pylons and abandoned piers that punctuate the mischling waters down there in the industrial guts of the city, you will most commonly hear this fish referred to as a Jewfish, or a Jewie, or simply as the Jew. Some say that this is an abbreviation of “jewelfish,” owing to the large pearly white otoliths found in its skull that some fisherman make into jewelry (though Lopez told me that he thinks the name could be inspired by a sentiment that would offend Jillian Segal.)
Lopez caught a Jew a few years back, but it was only a juvenile, measuring 40cm. The minimum legal size is 60cm, so he threw it back. Ever since, he’s been dreaming of catching another. This is partly because Lopez loves catching and eating fish, but it’s also because the Mulloway is a trophy. They are, I am told, the most exciting creature an urban fisherman could hope have on a line, as close as one can get to a giant tuna or a marlin within the 3000 postcode.
Lopez has been on his Mulloway quest since April, carting his rods, tackle, and bait in his red Subaru Forrester to various spots around the Docklands and the wharfs. As of late, he has been out there almost every day, sometimes fishing from noon until first sunlight. So committed is he to the quest that it has begun to encroach on his various political duties. Lopez was one of the founding members of the Victorian Socialists, and now sits on its executive committee. On Friday, they are launching their campaign for the Victorian state election, the outcome of which—in light of the widespread resentment towards Labor, the feebleness of the Liberals, the disorientation of the Greens, and the populist surge of One Nation—feels more uncertain than ever. The Vic Socialists will run candidates in every single seat in the state, and there is some hope that they might be able to steal a few.
Lopez is also a delegate to the executive of the newly formed national version of the Vic Socialists, the Australian Socialist Party. Two weeks ago, they held their first national convention, and by all accounts, it was a great success. It might just be the first step towards a serious, mass socialist force in Australian politics after decades in sectarian wilderness. There’s much to be done, and the revolution waits for no one. Nor, however, does the Mulloway.
*
A few months ago, Lopez sent me the location of a Mulloway spot he’s been hitting. I won’t share it precisely—Jewie anglers are notoriously cagey about geo-location—but what I can say is that it is somewhere along the Lower Maribyrnong, under a techni-coloured bridge over which passes road trains hauling international ocean freight from the port. I couldn’t get all the way there by car, so I parked on a patch of soggy tanbark just by where the Westgate Veloway pops out, and walked along the sulphur-scented riverbank. It was nighttime, and as I stumbled under a bridge, and heard what sounded like howling from the adjacent underpass, I began to have my doubts, until I saw a lone fisherman, silhouetted by industrial light from the nearby power station, yanking at a loaded rod.
“A pinkie!” Lopez exclaimed. “A decent size, too. Hell yeah!”
A pinkie, he explained while pulling the creature out of the water, is a juvenile snapper. They’re relatively dumb fish, and easy to catch.
“But they’re also delicious,” Lopez continued, struggling now with the hook that had lodged itself deep inside the thrashing fish’s throat. He took out his long, thin blade, sheathed in his belt, and stabbed the pinkie right through the temple.
“Sorry little buddy,” he said, as the blade went in. It gave a final death rattle and then Lopez set to work scaling and gutting it on a concrete gas utility vault.
I was impressed and, to be honest, a little taken aback. The only interactions I’d had with Lopez up until this point were convivial chats in the lifts of the Nicholas Building, often concerning his second PhD, on the British philosopher, Gillian Rose. Usually he was in tailored pants, a knitted button-up, and boots with a Cuban heel. He wore signet rings and had his black hair done in an exaggerated mod style, with short bangs and two extremely long sidelocks framing an age-defying face. But now he had snipped the locks off, and was clothed in utilitarian get-up: a classic Barbour hunting jacket, black jeans, and Blundstones. Business time.
To catch a Mulloway, you need a lot of gear, and Lopez had it all and then some: rods, knives, pliers, buckets, eskies, satchels, reels, hooks, sinkers, soft plastic lures, hard plastic lures—a whole taxonomy of paraphernalia that he has been collecting since he started fishing in his mid-20s. He also had what seemed to me an insane buffet of bait: burley (a mixture of bread and tuna oil), sardine, squid, and pilchards, which he was using on a lightweight rod to catch mullet. He already had half a dozen live mullets swimming around in a large esky filled with water that was being pumped with oxygen by a portable aerator. Mulloway are picky eaters and more or less exclusively interested in animate fish, particularly mullet. To keep the bait alive underwater, you adhere them to the hook by their dorsal fin and then cast them into the river with a metal sinker so that they drop to the bottom where they writhe around in agony. The idea is that any nearby Jewie, a predator fish that hides in shadows to ambush in swift attacks, will see the struggling fish and go for it. But it’s not a sure thing.
The Jew is highly intelligent and cautious. If they approach the mullet and sense that something’s not right, they nudge the bait and then disappear. Or they might swallow a livie (fishermen’s slang for live bait) whole only to spit it back out again, scaled and lifeless, without the fisherman suspecting a thing. So cunning is the Jew that some fishermen infer a malevolence from their behaviour, but this might just be the symptom of an angler in the grips of “Mulloway fever,” a kind of obsessional mania that has been known to unravel many a hobbyist. While researching the topic, I came across a book entitled Shadowing the Ghost of the Estuary: My Quest to Catch Mulloway and How They Have Messed with My Head (it was out of print.) On forums, the sentiment was repeated. “Ahh the imfamous [sic] mulloway,” says Rogue_Hunter on Fishing Victoria. “The one fish that can make a grown man cry!”
The struggle fosters great camaraderie in the Mulloway community. In one video I watched on YouTube, a young man kayak-fishing in Western Port Bay successfully reels in a gargantuan specimen while yelping, “I’ve done it. I’ve done it. Holy fuck I’ve done it. Oh my God, it’s a Jew. It’s a Western Port Jew.” In the comments beneath the video, the other fishermen match his enthusiasm: “Proud of you, mate!”; “You deserve every cm of that thing, so happy for ya.” Occasionally, however, the scarcity can lead to competition and paranoia. Lopez told me that he once witnessed a famous Mulloway fisherman get beaten to a pulp by two envious anglers possibly after his trade secrets.
Given the psychological toll and vague danger of the pursuit, it’s advisable to go Mulloway fishing with a mate. Lopez has Matt. A chippy by trade, Matt also has a side hustle of doing street talk interviews around Melbourne and posting them to his 20,000 Instagram followers. A recent edition featured Matt asking a man smoking a crack pipe on the streets of Springvale if he had any Bitcoin. For this, Matt is paid roughly $2000 a week by an online crypto casino whose merch he wears in his reels, and which, according to the casino’s website, operates under a license granted by the Government of the Autonomous Island of Anjouan, Union of Comoros.
Matt, 30, came swaggering down the path to our spot on the ‘Nong just past sundown in grey tracksuits, a puffer jacket, and black and lime green Nikes with shock absorbers. His sharp, roving eyes darted around Lopez’s setup.
“Fuck me, Lopez,” he said. “You intending on living here?”
“G’day Matt,” Lopez replied. “You’re welcome to some live bait. It’s in the esky.”
Matt opened the esky and commended Lopez on his haul. The day before, Lopez had gone to Kororoit Creek to catch live bait. At around midday, he arrived at the ‘Nong spot to try and catch more of the same. Now, at 5.30pm, he was onto Mulloway, and had four rods with livies going at the same time. He wanted to stay until high tide around midnight.
As he set up his gear, Matt told me that he’s been focusing on Mulloway for the past six months. He had one on the line recently, just downstream from where we were fishing.
“Fought it for 25 minutes but the cunt got away.”
Just then, a bell on one of Matt’s lines began to jangle.
“We’re fucking on,” he shouted, sprinting to the rod. After a short fight, he hauled in yet another pinkie. He was about to throw it back, but then he turned to Lopez and asked him if he wanted it.
“I’m almost at the bag limit,” Lopez replied. “But yes, go on. Throw it in the esky. I’ll pickle it.”
Matt grimaced. He told me he doesn’t fish to kill.
“Put it this way,” he said. “If you catch a Jewie that’s a metre long, it could be up to 20 years old. I don’t want to murder something that’s been around so long. Not Lopez, though. He’ll kill and eat anything. He’s fucking brutal. He eats eels.”
Lopez, now wearing a neckerchief to protect from the cold, nodded without contrition. Yes, he eats eel. Furthermore, he said, you can cold smoke it and it comes out tasting like prosciutto.
Matt turned to me. “I love this cunt. He’s so fucking funny.”
“I just like eating fish,” Lopez shrugged. “I’ll try anything. If I catch a Banjo Shark I’ll eat that. If I can figure out a way to make carp taste decent, that’ll be the holy grail. I could set up a little cottage industry.”
A few hours passed. Lopez was a flurry of movement, vigilance, and dexamphetamine, tinkering with his line, tying elaborate knots, re-baiting hooks, listening out for any tinkle from the small bells clamped on his rods. Matt was a more sedentary fisherman, moving in short bursts of energy, and then sitting back in a camping chair to look at his phone.
“Guessing you didn’t watch the game, Lopez?” he asked, sometime just before 11pm.
“What game?”
“Australia-Turkey”
“I was here.”
“Fair enough. Didn’t take you for a sports guy.”
Lopez studied the surface of the water, which offered a perfect mirror image of the purple-hued sky above. It was this exact moment that Lopez was waiting for, just as the tide is beginning to turn and the water goes slack. This is the hour that the Silver Ghost is known to feed. A ripple appeared.
“A water rat,” Lopez said, sighing, finally taking a seat in his camping chair, and helping himself to some of the hard bread and cheese he had brought for sustenance. “You know, sometimes when I’m stressed in my life outside of fishing, say with marking or some other deadline, I’ll have this dream that I’m in a really beautiful spot, far more pristine than this, somewhere beyond the city, the type of place you could find a really good trout, and I can see all these fish in the river, like hundreds of them, and I throw in my line but none of them will bite. I can’t catch anything.”
“Oh yeah?” Matt said, watching the water rat climb out of the dirty river and shake itself dry. “My wet dreams tend to be about women.”
“Yes, well, Matt, that’s why you’re not catching a Mulloway.”
