Australia White Pages
Elia Khensamphanh
The first National Recreational Fishing Survey innovated new, comprehensive methodology at the time and resulted in establishing best practice for surveys of its kind. This methodology is still the standard used in state-wide surveys where white pages still provide a representative sample.
Regional participation rates were lowest in urban centres such as Sydney (13.1%) and Melbourne (10.2%), but because of their large populations, urban centres contained large numbers of fishers, often dominating the fisher populations at the State or Territory levels.
Indigenous fishers caught more than half their fish in inshore waters. Fifty-three percent of indigenous fishers used lines to fish, 26% hand collected, 12% used nets and 9% used spears [fig. 7]. Indigenous fishers made an estimated 671,000 fishing trips during the survey period.
Use of survey data and importance
The information gathered from this survey is used to measure future trends and development, it is important for supporting the future management of recreational and indigenous fishing in Australia. The full report is available online ( _Lyle_Nationalsurvey.pdf) and to date has been included in over 560 publications and outputs, with the majority being reports (50%) and journal articles (40%) [Fig. 9a]. Since February 2009, there has been over 5,580 downloads of the report and it has received more than 1,800 hits online [Fig. 9b].