Fish stuck in depot

Karen Hart
Commonwealth Games fish have spent more than a year “rotting” in storage as Surf Coast’s council tries to work out what to do with the international icons, according to a councillor.
Council has left the colourful metal fish, which floated down the Yarra River to help launch last year’s games, gathering dust in a shire depot at Winchelsea since June, 2006.
Torquay councillor Ron Humphrey, who had opposed council accepting the fish, said his colleagues could not decide what to do with the “unsightly” sculptures.
He said they were “rotting” in storage.
“They’re sort of sitting in limbo at the moment,” Cr Humphrey said.
“They’re still in storage because no one seems to be able to decide where to put them, so what seemed like a good idea at the time has come back to bite the council.”
Games organisers had given council a clownfish suffering scratches on its brightlycoloured scales, which had faded since the fish featured in the February opening ceremony.
State Government also allocated a galjoen, which represented the South African games team, to Surf Coast.
Both fish were among 31 unwanted sculptures left over from the games and offloaded on councils around the state.
But Cr Humphrey said council should have erected the work of Surf Coast artists around the shire instead of “sculptures not designed to last very long”.
“Putting them up and maintaining them is a waste of money,” he said.
“If a developer wants to pay for them then that’s great but it would be far better if we supported local artists’ work instead of these uglylooking things.”
Cr Keith Grossman admitted council had been a “bit slow” making a decision on where to put the fish.
But he hoped they would be on display at either Anglesea, Lorne, Torquay or Airey’s Inlet before this year’s tourist season.
“We’re looking for an appropriate place to house them.
“The site needs to be pretty safe and, yes, we have been a bit slow to act on it.
“But we don’t want to put them just anywhere.
“Hopefully they’ll be in the public domain sometime before Christmas.”
Cr Grossman said storage of the fish was at no cost to council.