In a quiet canal estate on Scarborough’s peninsula, there’s an entrance punctuated by a net-filled styrofoam esky, two mighty shells and some glass buoys. This is the home of 84-year-old Ern Grant, retired Queensland Government marine biologist and self-effacing author of Grant’s Guide To Fishes – subtitled The Fisherman’s Bible – the 11th edition of which has just been released.
“You know, a number of people have told me how famous I am,” he says, settling into a chair with a view of the canal and his boat, “and I’m not. I’m not famous – the books are.”
“The books” are the 100,000-plus copies of his guide to Queensland’s fish that have sold since it first appeared in 1965 as a 280-page, black-and-white, government publication standardising common and scientific names for frequently caught fish, and their minimum size.
“We started with amberjack,” he says. “My senior officer would say, ‘How long?’ And I’d put my fingers on the table. ‘Good,’ he’d say, ‘21 inches.’ Then B for bream: nine inches. We wound up with 160 names, and people just grabbed it.” While fish don’t recognise borders – some of Grant’s fish are also found elsewhere in Australia, in Japan, in Samoa and beyond – the guide is unique. No other waters have an equivalent from which a fisherman might decipher his catch. Its readership came not only from Queensland – “Well, you expect that,” Grant says – but from all over Australia and further afield – from New Zealand, England.
By the time he retired in 1984, Grant was deputy director of Queensland Fisheries, the much-expanded guide was in its fifth edition and some of his superiors wondered if he might continue updating the book. Bureaucratic to-ing and fro-ing saw almost a decade pass before “a politico who loved fishing” finally sorted out an arrangement. “He had a dinghy called The Electorate,” Grant explains, “so that his secretary could always say, with absolute truth, ‘He’s out in The Electorate.’” In 1993, a new and revised guide appeared – not the Guide To Fishes By Grant, but Grant’s Guide To Fishes.
Today’s book runs to 880 pages, featuring 962 of the 2000-odd Australian species known in our waters, including the black-tip reef shark (found from the Great Barrier Reef to WA, they “flood swiftly across… knee-deep water, dorsal fins slicing the surface in Jaws fashion”); Moreton Bay’s famous bugs (which, unlike their Balmain cousins, “never carry a taint of garlic”); the crocodile longtom (which shares “this group’s habit of leaping violently towards lights” – it has killed some lamp-carrying gentlemen as they walk along beaches); and the “sneaky and deceitful mimic blenny”, familiar to fisherfolk from the Barrier Reef down to Moreton Bay. The book’s luscious colour photographs – their highlights often the pretty and more localised Queensland reef species such as angelfish, butterflyfish, coralfish and tuskfish – are mostly Grant’s own. “One of my favourite photographs in the book was taken in 1953,” he says. “I’ve been collecting fish photographs all my life.”
Once, offshore with a crew for Ken Brown’s Coastwatch, Grant reeled in a parrotfish.
“Photograph it,” the cameraman urged. “As I took the camera down against its head, I whispered, ‘you gorgeous thing’ – and the bloke’s microphone picked it up.” His voice sparkles. “Well,” he says, only slightly defensive, “it was a gorgeous fish.”
As he talks, one or two phrases recur – “the devil made me do it”, about some mischief or other, and “I’ve got this funny memory”. That funny memory makes his guide entertaining for even the most landlubberly readers. Grant remembers great anecdotes. He remembers the hump-headed Maori wrasse’s particular fondness for ham-and-chicken rolls at The Cod Hole in northern Queensland. He remembers two tipsy fishermen fighting pike eel in the Brisbane River and destroying their boat in the attempt. He remembers which fish bit Heron Island’s marine station director. All the book’s specimens, he says, “have memories for me”.
He also remembers reading about Ompax spatuloides, a specimen with the head of a lungfish, the body of a mullet, the tail of an eel, and the bill of a platypus. Baked and served in Queensland in 1872, a visiting museum director had it sketched (and then ate it) and sent the drawings to French naturalist François Louis de la Porte, Count of Castelnau, one of the first ichthyologists working on Australia’s fish. He took it to be a new species and named it accordingly. It was almost 60 years before the hoax was revealed. “That tiny diamond fell into my sphere of knowledge from The Bulletin when I was a youngster,” Grant says. It emerges again decades later in his guide’s preface.
Perhaps more than most authors, Grant has a very communicative relationship with his readers. It’s a bit of a contest – they report catching fish that are not in his book, are bigger than they should be, or are somewhere they shouldn’t be; he assesses the accuracy of their information. Once, someone even tried to get a hoax past him, presenting a fibreglass cast of a Munro’s mackerel – with one fin sliced off – as a world-record scad. “Contemporary Ompax!” Grant exclaims.
Out on the canal, boats loll on the tide, their shapes shimmering under the high, clear spring sunshine. Grant started fishing with his father at age five. He doesn’t pause as he nominates some of Australia’s most impressive species – “the saratoga, northern and southern, a remnant of the Jurassic/Triassic, like the lungfish”, and the archerfish, which he associates with Baron Munchausen’s “supposedly tall tale” about a fish that could spit. Grant had one in an aquarium at the University of Queensland that spat in unsuspecting people’s eyes, “before word got around”.
Then there’s his nemesis, his “one that got away”. “It’s a wahoo,” he says, his voice growling the word, “and I know where he is, him and his friends.” He wants to photograph one with fighting stripes.
For their last meeting, on a small seamount just outside Moreton Bay, Grant used a heavy handline, a large lure and a shock-absorbing system that would let him stay at the helm as the fish was caught.
“I was after one of about 30kg,” he says. He had just registered the fish biting when his shock-absorbing system fell apart and his line streaked out.
“I wrenched the motors into neutral and went down to fight the line. Now, I never wear gloves – it’s not an affectation, my reflexes are adequately fast. So I fought it for a good minute… and yes, I will always carry the scars… My doctor said I should have lost two fingers.” Instead of a 30kg fish, this one was 50-60kg – “he was a big boy”. Wahoo: one; Ern Grant: nil.
But come next season, Grant will be back out there, “fighting him rod and reel. And I’ll be cheating and using the electric reel… I’m a very unsporting sporting fisherman.”
Somewhere on his dining-room table, there’s a folder marked “12th edition”. Research is already underway and Grant promises at least “40 new photographs” for the next Grant’s Guide To Fishes: The Fisherman’s Bible – with or without the wahoo’s stripes.
“When The Fisherman’s Bible was mooted as a name, I said, ‘It’s obviously written by one of the lesser apostles.’ But one poor chap wrote in the other day saying he’d like The Gospel According To Ern. Oh dear,” Grant says, looping the conversation back to its beginning. “The book is famous, but don’t ever think that I am.”
Source: Qantas the Australian Way January 2009