Bermudians and Australian aborigines may live many thousands of miles apart from one another, but they have something in common — progressive attitudes towards fisheries.

That was the word from this year's Corange Science speaker Philippe Rouja.

Dr. Rouja will be giving a talk tonight at the Bermuda College as part of Corange Science Week, called 'Discovery Understanding Progress'.

Corange Science week is an annual Bermuda College event. Students listen to respected Bermudians from different scientific disciplines, take master science classes, and tour the laboratories at the Bermuda College.

Dr. Rouja is a cultural anthropologist specialising in participatory ethnographic research in maritime communities studying resource management, health and nutrition.

He has worked for over 15 years with coastal Northern Australian Aboriginal communities studying resource allocation, traditional ecological knowledge and the nutritional benefits of omega-3 fatty acids.

"I didn't start in nutrition," said Dr. Rouja. "I studied anthropology and a bunch of other things along the way.

"Then I became an ethnographer and catalogued how people were living. I didn't think that we had enough data to come up with practical theories. There are a lot of people looking under the microscope instead of what is outside the microscope."

While at the University of Toronto he became research assistant to professor David Turner.

Dr. Turner took him to Northwest Australia to study aboriginal kinship patterns and song cycles.

"We went to Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria for over six months," said Dr. Rouja.

Dr. Rouja, himself from a long line of seafaring people, quickly became accustomed to the daily routine of fishing and hunting with the aboriginal people.

He was impressed by how incredibly effective and refined the Groote Eylandt hunting fishing techniques were.

He graduated from the University of Toronto in 1991 with a Bachelor's degree with distinction, in anthropology.

While at Durham University in the United Kingdom, he won the Sir Dudley Spurling Post Graduate Scholarship to carry out a doctorate in philosophy in the study of the knowledge of the coastal people of Australia.

Knowing that there wasn't much known about aboriginal fishing techniques, he returned to Australia. This time he stayed with the Bardi people, a group of aborigines living on the Dampier Peninsula.

He was fortunate enough to be adopted by the Wiggan Family elder Douglas Wiggan Sr. and his mother, centenarian Katie Wiggan, the community matriarch.

The Bardi believed that all natural systems are completely and inexorably linked.

Over the next four years he attempted to write an exhaustive ethnography of the fishing culture of the Bardi. The resulting work 'Fishing for Culture: Toward an Aboriginal Theory of Marine Resource Use Among the Bardi People of One Arm Point Western Australia' earned him his PhD in 1998.

While studying the Bardi, he met up with another Canadian scientist, Eric Dewailly from the Universite Laval in Montreal, Canada. His specialty was eco-toxicology.

What Dr. Rouja noticed about the Bardi was that they had their own rules about fishing that helped to maximise caloric intake, and minimise impact on fishing stocks and other species that depended on fishing stocks.

He went on to do a three-year post doctoral research project with Dr. Dewailly, studying how the Bardi's fisheries management affected their fish fat consumption and overall health.

"Most of what we know about omega-3 fatty acids, and minerals like selenium and their protective effects on human health, and the benefits of fish and marine mammals we learned from aboriginal people," he said.

Dr. Rouja said that the aborigines he met were under pressure from outside authorities to abandon their old ways of fishing.

"The Australian authorities were telling them they didn't have to fish at certain times of the year, they could just fish whenever," said Dr. Rouja.

Dr. Rouja's paper gave the Bardi people concrete evidence to back up their traditional ways of fishing.

"They are now back to doing things the old way, for the most part," said Dr. Rouja.

Comparing Bermuda and the aboriginal community, Dr. Rouja said: "Bermuda already has fairly progressive fisheries legislation in terms of leaving breeding stocks alone.

"We have lobster fishing only in non-spawning season. We protect the yellow grunts during their spawning season, and so forth."

He said when he first did his paper, the idea of looking to the aborigines to learn about fisheries was a somewhat threatening idea to some people in the scientific community.

"My ideas weren't so much rejected as ignored," he said.

But today, with more emphasis being placed on the environment, Dr. Rouja's school of thought has more members.

"It has expanded as the environment declines," he said. "Now we are looking to see how other cultures manage to stay within some natural order while still having persisted for a very long time. The ideas we were thinking about in the '80s and '90s are far more palatable today."

As acting director and the custodian of historic wrecks, Dr. Rouja heads the maritime heritage and health section in Government's Department of Conservation Services.

He is affiliated with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and its regional office, the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO).

Dr. Rouja has raised funds and secured grants for several important public health research projects here. He was one of the principal investigators with the mobile ecotoxicology lab Atlantis, that recently started a four-year research programme in the Caribbean.

Through Atlantis two years ago he and Dr. Dewailly completed an assessment of, and advisory on, mercury levels in Bermuda fish. The report targeted pregnant women, looking at which fish in local waters had the most risks and benefits.

That report is now available on the Bermuda Government website.

Dr. Rouja will speak tonight at the Bermuda College in North Hall, room G301, from 6.30 p.m. to 8 p.m. For information telephone 236-9000 ext 4442.

Corange Science Week runs January 31 to February 5.

l Check out Dr. Rouja's report on the benefits and risks of local fish consumption at www.gov.bm