Behind the Catch: What a Filmmaker Discovered Inside Australia's Seafood Industry

Inside Sydney Fish Market takes viewers beyond the seafood counter — and its filmmaker says the people behind the catch may be the biggest story of all

When filmmaker Dan Walkington began work on the new six-part SBS series Inside Sydney Fish Market, he readily admits he knew almost nothing about the seafood industry.

He had visited Sydney Fish Market. He had bought fish there. Growing up in nearby Glebe, the Market was familiar territory.

But the industry behind the seafood?

“Absolutely nothing,” he told the Seafood Consumers Association this week.

Walkington came to the project from a wildlife filmmaking background, including many years working with National Geographic. What initially attracted him was not necessarily the fish.

It was the people and culture surrounding the Market.

That decision may prove important, because Inside Sydney Fish Market potentially does something the Australian seafood industry has historically struggled to do: It puts human faces behind the seafood Australians eat.

One night at sea changed the picture

One of Walkington's earliest filming experiences was an overnight prawn-trawling trip from Yamba with fourth-generation Clarence River fisher Gary Anderson.

Walkington wasn't really prepared for an overnight fishing trip.

But he decided that if he was going to make a television series about fishing and Sydney Fish Market, he should experience the reality himself.

He went to sea at around 5pm and returned at about 7am the following morning.

What struck him was the enormous physical effort involved in producing what seemed, in the context of a major seafood market, a relatively small catch.

After a night of work, they returned with around 150 kilograms of Prawns and other seafood.

That seafood could disappear rapidly through the morning trade. The labour required to produce it could not.

Walkington said he was “blown away” by the physical work involved.

And behind the catch were families and communities whose livelihoods can be dramatically affected by events outside their control.

The experience left him thinking differently about the seafood sitting on a city plate.

Consumers see the Prawns. They rarely see the night at sea that produced them.

Seafood is a people business

That became a recurring theme during our conversation.

Walkington and his team found multi-generational fishing and seafood families whose lives are deeply entwined with the industry.

At Sydney Fish Market, the cameras follow families including George Costi and his son Isaac as they negotiate the historic transition from the old Market to its new home.

Walkington recalled a touching moment when George watched his son working through the Christmas rush and recognised himself decades earlier.

Elsewhere, the production followed younger generations taking family connections in new commercial directions.

And away from the Market, the cameras found fishing families whose connections to their communities stretch back generations.

Migration is another important part of the story.

Walkington observed that Sydney Fish Market itself reflects Australia's changing migration patterns — from the Greek and Italian families who became synonymous with parts of the seafood industry to newer Vietnamese, Nepalese and other migrant communities.

One young Vietnamese fish retailer filmed for the series starts at 3am to buy seafood at auction, drives to Cabramatta and works in his shop through the day, seven days a week.

His motivation? Building opportunities for his young family.

The national seafood story is therefore also an Australian migration story, a family-business story and a regional-community story.

Earning the industry's trust

Perhaps one of the most revealing parts of our discussion concerned how difficult it initially was for the production team to gain access.

Walkington describes the documentary style as “fly on the wall”.

But first, people had to trust the flies.

For about a month, he simply turned up at the auction at 4am.

People weren't particularly interested in talking. The filmmakers kept turning up.

They sat in the coffee shop. They waited. They allowed curiosity to do its work.

Eventually, Walkington said, people began telling them their life stories.

There is an important lesson in that for the seafood industry.

For understandable historical reasons, parts of seafood have sometimes preferred to keep the doors closed.

Walkington came away with almost the opposite conclusion.

When asked what the industry itself might learn from the series, his answer was essentially: Open the doors and tell your story.

People connect with people.

There is nothing to fear from showing the hardworking families behind seafood.

That message strongly resonates with SCA.

Transparency should not be regarded as a threat to a good seafood business.

Transparency is one of the foundations of consumer trust.

The seafood most Australians never try

There was another transformation in Walkington's own behaviour.

He discovered just how narrow many Australian seafood purchasing habits can be.

Consumers gravitate towards familiar products — salmon, barramundi and prawns among them — while an extraordinary diversity of seafood remains largely unexplored.

Filming the series introduced him to seasonality and to species he had never eaten.

His response became wonderfully simple:

“I've never eaten that fish before. I wonder what it's like.”

So he bought it.

Sometimes it cost a fraction of the familiar seafood consumers automatically choose.

Walkington now hopes the television audience might do something similar.

When asked what he would like viewers to do differently after watching Inside Sydney Fish Market, he had a practical suggestion:

Go to a proper fishmonger and try something you haven't tried before.

That could be one of the most useful messages to come from the entire series.

Australia has an extraordinary diversity of seafood.

Eating more broadly can introduce consumers to new flavours, support different fisheries and fishing communities, and reduce our habitual dependence on a relatively small collection of familiar names.

But consumers need confidence.

They need seafood retailers who can tell them what the fish is, where it came from and how to cook it.

From the Chatham Islands to Sydney

The series also demonstrates just how extraordinary seafood supply chains can be.

Walkington travelled to the remote Chatham Islands, hundreds of kilometres east of New Zealand, where logistics can determine whether an otherwise available fishery is commercially viable.

The production followed a trial shipment bringing Chatham Island Blue Cod directly to Sydney.

The fish was available.

The quota existed.

The challenge was getting the product to market economically.

It is a reminder that the seafood price consumers see at the counter reflects much more than catching a fish.

Distance, aircraft, fuel, cold chains, handling, labour, market demand and perishability all sit somewhere behind that final price.

A disconnect between ocean and plate

Perhaps the most important question we put to Walkington was whether, after making the series, he believed there was a disconnect between Australian consumers and the people producing their seafood.

His answer was clear: “I think there's definitely a disconnect.”

Before making the series, even as what he describes as a reasonably engaged consumer, he simply hadn't thought very much about the industry behind his seafood.

Like many people, some of the fishing stories most likely to reach him were negative ones.

What he encountered through Sydney Fish Market was something much more complicated — including numerous small family operators and fishing businesses around Australia.

Walkington hopes the series can help reconnect those worlds and tell what he describes as the “ocean to plate journey”.

That is precisely the connection Australia needs to strengthen.

Some fascinating stories didn't make the cut

Six television episodes sounds substantial.

It wasn't enough.

Walkington says there were many seafood stories he would have liked to pursue further, including Australian abalone.

Another particularly fascinating story left on the cutting-room floor involved Sydney Fish Market working with scientists at ANSTO on technology capable of helping verify seafood identity and provenance.

For Walkington, with his science and wildlife background, that was particularly exciting.

For SCA, it touches directly on one of our central interests: using science, verification and traceability to make seafood substitution and fraud increasingly difficult.

Perhaps that deserves an episode of its own one day.

What about the next six episodes?

We couldn't resist asking Walkington where he would point his cameras if someone gave him another six episodes.

After understandably suggesting he might first like his life back, one area quickly emerged: aquaculture.

It is an intriguing choice.

Aquaculture has become enormously important to modern seafood supply, yet consumers can still have very different emotional reactions to the words “farmed fish” compared with the farmed meat, poultry and other foods they routinely purchase.

Walkington was careful not to claim expertise in an area the current series had not covered.

But his answer returned to the same principle that emerged throughout our conversation:

tell the story.

Closed doors don't work.

And beyond aquaculture, he would again follow the seafood back to where it comes from — around Australia and beyond — because those ocean-to-plate stories were among the experiences that stayed with him most strongly.

The Hook and Sinker

After more than five decades working in seafood, I found something particularly encouraging about talking with someone who entered our industry knowing virtually nothing about it.

Dan Walkington didn't emerge from the experience talking principally about tonnes, quotas or regulations.

He talked about people.

The fourth- and fifth-generation fishing families.

The migrant fish retailer starting work at 3am.

The auction buyers.

The seafood merchants.

The communities depending on fishing.

The extraordinary work required to put what can look like a very ordinary piece of seafood onto somebody's plate.

And he came away wanting to eat more adventurously.

Perhaps there is a lesson in that for all of us.

The Australian seafood industry has remarkable stories.

But stories cannot build trust if nobody tells them.

For consumers, perhaps the first step is equally simple: Ask what the fish is. Ask where it came from. Talk to your fishmonger. And occasionally buy something you've never tried before.

Because behind every piece of seafood is a journey.

And very often, behind that journey is a person whose story deserves to be heard.

Inside Sydney Fish Market, narrated by Rick Stein, premieres on SBS and SBS On Demand on Thursday 8 October at 8.25pm.

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