38
BARBARA E. WARD
given land, a new dwelling, a new pig-sty, free transport for himself, his family, livestock and all belongings, and an agreed sum of $50 per person per month to tide his family over the first six months until he could begin to get an income from his new land. It is important to stress that the negotiations, which were conducted by the District Office, were entirely correct, the enquiry meticulous and the terms most generous. Only the fishermen were left out of account.
The omission was, at the time, not unnatural. The stereotyped view of the Boat People as essentially mobile (“like gypsies” was a common English phrase) made it difficult even to imagine that some of them might be attached in any permanent sense to any particular place. It was assumed, too, that fishing could be carried on as well in one part of the water as another (or, if not, that it would be impossibly difficult with such a transitory population to determine who normally fished where) and that therefore only the land people of Kau Sai could be considered.
There were in fact two separate issues, affecting respectively two separable categories of fishermen. On the one hand were those who claimed that because firing practice interfered with their fishing operations and therefore reduced their income they were entitled to monetary compensation; on the other hand there were the others who did not want compensation but simply desired to be allowed to go on using Kau Sai as their permanent anchorage. The former group, mainly small long-liners and others engaged in day-time fishing, put in their claim to the District Office during the course of the negotiations with the land villagers. It was referred to the Fisheries Section of the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and investigated by its officers together with those of the Fish Marketing Organisation. Finally, a list of claimants was drawn up, and a once-for-all payment agreed and handed over. The organisation of this claim and its significance are discussed more fully below.
The second group of fishermen were mostly, but not all, night-time operators, purse-seiners, who normally spent the days at anchor in Kau Sai bay. At first, they seem to have shared (though for different reasons) the District Officer's assumption that the