According to one Australian newspaper, Theage, the carp is known as ‘the rabbit of the rivers.’
It says, ‘It (the carp) carries a million roe twice a year, and occupies 90 per cent of the fish biomass of eastern Australian’s inland waterways – and the fish survives almost any conditions.
‘Hot water, cold water, water that is up to half as salty as sea water, or brackish water lacking oxygen – nothing much troubles the carp.
“They’re just bloody tough,” says fish scientist John Koehn, of Victoria’s Arthur Rylah Institute.
“You can drag one out the water, throw it out on the road, leave it out there for two or three hours, then put it back in a bucket and it will swim around. I kid you not. They are tough, really tough.”
About the only thing tougher than a carp, says Theage, is a leathery old professional inland fisherman like Bill Lever, who has fought the species nearly all his working life, and come out ahead.
After 41 years on the river Murray, Lever reckons he has got the carp down to manageable numbers in his stretch of the river, achieved by netting seven days a week in the allowed nine months a year. 
He makes his catches when the waters flow through the locks, and the fish begin to move about. And the bad times are when the mist hangs low over the water, the scorching summers with a flaccid river after years of drought, when the fish just will not move off the bottom.
Murray cod and Murray perch (sometimes called yellowbelly or golden perch) are two of Australia’s best eating fish, and it is these that Bill Lever seeks. Fetching him $18 a kilogram, the cod is a delicacy that will end up on the tables of Melbourne’s most exclusive restaurants. The perch, at $13-14 a kilogram, is popular with the ethnic communities like the Vietnamese and Chinese, and is also a staple ingredient of the Jewish delicacy gefilte fish.
Theage says, ‘Mr Lever has always caught plenty of carp, and the law is that you cannot throw them back. They either get left on the bank for the wild pigs – or accompany the cod and perch to Melbourne where they get 50 cents a kilogram for crayfish bait.
‘Mr Lever is one of the few known natural predators of the huge, unpleasant-tasting monsters’.
But not for much longer. It is ironic that just as the Federal Government announces a national management strategy for carp, the last 21 inland fishermen like Bill Lever are effectively being put out of business by the NSW Government’s revocation of their licences next year.
After a 30-year neglect, there is now a plethora of information to help people manage the carp problem. Federal Minister for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Warren Truss, launched three booklets and a CD last week. Missing, though, was any substantial financial commitment that might have kick-started the eradication of the “vertebrate pest”.
Dr Koehn says there are many important small ways to tackle carp, but “ultimately down the track, we’re looking at some of the high-tech options which may make a widespread impact.
“Some of these things are still being developed for vertebrates and are probably a decade away. There are genetic manipulations that can cause sterility, or reduce reproduction, change sexes, there’s an induced fatality gene, which can be implanted and cause the fish to die down the track.”
But Mr Lever thinks that if professional fishermen had been allowed in the Darling and the Lachlan and other NSW rivers all along, then the carp would have been brought under control.
He says they thrive where professional fishermen are banned, supposedly to preserve native fish stocks for future generations.
Now 73, Mr Lever began fishing at Wentworth, NSW, just below the convergence of the Darling and Murray Rivers, in 1959, and the first 10 years were fine.
But in the 1960s, a vigorous new strain of carp escaped from dams and lakes, where it was introduced, into the Murray-Darling system, and soon took over, turning the water muddy by its sucking action, eating vegetation and destroying bugs in the river.
As Dr Koehn, an author of the new management plan, points out, the carp quickly became the scapegoat for problems caused by a wider neglect. “Carp have come into a system already severely damaged, where our native fish stocks had already been severely depleted.
“It provided some degraded habitats in which they (the carp) had a competitive advantage, and so they’ve done very well.”
Native fish, which might have been predators, were not there in sufficient numbers, not because they had been over-fished, but because of river mismanagement.
Is this what will happen in Ireland, where they already cull pike in the same dispassionate way?
