by Hal Harvey

There would be little or no argument amongst West Australian boat anglers that the most highly-regarded species in the southern half of the State would be our very own Westralian jewfish, Glaucosoma hebraicum.

The name "jewfish" was officially attached to the species way back in 1846, when Dr John Richardson published a scientific account of the species, recognising its uniqueness with the common name "West Australian jewfish". 

Everybody knew G. hebraicum as jewfish or jewie for the next hundred years or so, and although there was always potential for a spot of name confusion between our jewie and an east coast mulloway's other common name, nobody really seemed to have a problem with it.

There are a couple of stories around about how the dhu name came to exist. The obvious one is that after a few race conflicts that came to a head with WWII, the tag "jew" concerned a few people, particularly sensitive retailers; so somewhere around that time, the spelling of jewfish in fish shops and restaurants often became dhufish or dewfish; though not always. The general angling public still knew what the fish was, and it was nothing more than a bit of a chuckle that some fishmongers would try to make the name look like something else.

The same retailers used to turn snapper into "schnapper", always good for a laugh, and spanish mackerel into "albacore", and so on. People bought what they wanted, the people who caught them knew what they really were, and everybody was happy.

Another equally convincing tale concerns a racket set up by the fish shops of Barrack Street in Perth around the war years. With jewfish being so much in demand and always hard to get, they took to selling whatever would pass for jewfish, and of course still collected top price for it. Inevitably, one found himself accused under the law of doing the wrong thing with the jewfish name, and soon after, the "dhufish" - a fish which didn't really exist, so nobody could be accused of overpricing a lesser fish - came into existence to protect the racket.

Before the days of protein fingerprinting, of course, life was a lot simpler. I remember one of the local pro's showing us a pile of mulloway and saying "Would you look at all those beautiful barramundi!"… to which the obvious reply was, "Aren't they mulloway?".

"Boys", he replied, "Trust me. When the fillets hit the Sydney fish market on Monday, they'll be barramundi".

Unfortunately for our Westralian jewfish, it has always sat at the top of the pile for both flesh quality and price. While I often hear people knock barramundi as being over-rated (even when they've caught it themselves!) and trout are bagged relentlessly, Westralian jewfish are universally hailed as being superb. So it is inevitable that it will continue to be the subject of similar passing-off attempts as the mullomundi and Barrack Street mentioned, and only a few years ago another of the perpetrators of such an attempt found themselves facing court.

Some flesh testing, said the prosecutors, determined that the fishmonger was advertising jewfish, but selling mulloway. The case was dropped on a technicality that had nothing to do with the name, but the problem was highlighted. If a mulloway is a jewfish in NSW, why can't it be a jewfish in a fish shop on the other side of the country?

Sensing a marketing catastrophe, a QANGO named the Seafood Marketing Names Review Committee stepped up its efforts to have Australian seafood marketing names standardised across the country. It wasn't just the jewfish case, of course; the entire system, or lack thereof, was in a mess. In 1995 they published an interim reference, Marketing Names for Fish and Seafood in Australia. In 1999 that was superseded by Australian Seafood Handbook (Domestic Species).

The interesting thing about these publications is that, despite being clearly intended for seafood marketers and not purporting to be anything else, many other publishers in Western Australia have followed their lead and begun using the marketing name of West Australian dhufish, usually abbreviated to dhufish or dhuie, as the common name for Westralian jewfish.

We can at least be grateful the same local publishers haven't followed the same path with cobia (now to be marketed as black kingfish), catfish (silver cobbler), broad-barred mackerel (grey mackerel), barracuda (striped seapike), coronation trout (to be marketed as coral trout, along with every other species of coral trout), rankin cod (white-spotted rockcod), or amberjack (to be called samson fish, along with samson fish). I repeat, for the sake of clarity, the book is professing marketing names, not common names.

While fish shop names were always taken with a pinch of salt, it is obviously distressing for lovers of Westralian jewfish to see the name abominated in such high-profile publications as those of Fisheries WA, Western Angler magazine and the West Australian newspaper. The WA Museum, Australian Anglers Association and the Sunday Times newspaper continue to use the correct spelling.

One of the arguments the local perpetrators use is that WA should call their fish dhufish, to avoid confusion with mulloway elsewhere in Australia, which are commonly incorrectly called jewfish. The Australian Seafood Handbook stuffs that argument by running with dhufish for jewfish, mulloway for mulloway, black jewfish for black jewfish, and teraglin for teraglin; while the name jewfish gets used for marketing all remaining Sciaenidae, which means any of the croakers that isn't a mulloway, black jewfish or teraglin. We bet you will rarely if ever see it used in a fish shop.

When the argument has been raised in WA previously, it has also been pointed out that dhu is Gaelic for black, and jewfish have black backs (sometimes). A bit loose, especially as few people would interpret Westralian jewfish to be black-coloured, and Gaelic language has nothing to do with our fish. In fact, Glaucosoma means white-fleshed, which a jewie is, and hebraicum aligns with the "Hebrew" of the common name.

So on the evidence, dhufish has little basis in common angling usage, and those who have used it in the past have been misled by fishmongers. We will continue to use the correct and most widely-used common name of jewfish, and hope that, eventually, the mythical dhufish will fade into obscurity.

And

Those loveable language experts, www.takeourword.com, know nothing of dhuies, but they do have this to say:

"We first encounter the word in English in 1679: "The Jew fish crowds to be one of the first three of our most worthy Fish," wrote T. Trapham in his Discourse on the State of Health of Jamaica. It was only 18 years later that W. Dampier wrote "The Jew-fish is a very good Fish, and I judge so called by the English, because it hath Scales and Fins, therefore a clean Fish, according to the Levitical Law." So based on Jewish dietary laws, Epinephelus itjara (and others), also known as the grouper, was fit for human consumption.

The name jewfish was applied to several different species of fish, most belonging to the family Serranidae. These include Promicops guasa, Epinephelus nigritus, Megalops atlanticus, Aralichthys dentalus (all from the U.S. Atlantic coast), Stereolepis gigas (from the California coast), Polyprion americanus and Polyprion couchii (from the waters around Madeira), and Sciaena antarcitca and Glaucosoma hebraicum (from Australia). Note that the last one, Glaucosoma hebraicum, contains the Latin adjective for "Hebrew"."

And that's our fish.