Hagen Stehr 'tuna king' of South Australia's Port Lincoln with idea to breed fish through his Clean Seas company
Hagen Stehr's tank-bred tuna idea was recognised by Time magazine as the second-best invention of 2009 – behind NASA’s Ares 1 rocket.
Image courtesy Stehr Group
German-born Hagen Heinz Stehr went from a tuna fisherman at Port Lincoln on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula to the “tuna king” multi-millionaire businessman as founder of the Stehr Group.
Stehr left home in Germany at 12 to join the merchant navy, then jumped from job to job, including time with the French Foreign Legion, and working on cargo ships. With little money, he absconded at 18 in 1961 from his ship at Port Lincoln where he met his wife Anna and became a long-poling tuna fisherman.
Stehr worked for a decade hauling the giant fish for other operators – in an era when fishermen, especially non-Anglo-Saxon, were regarded as “second class citizens” – before starting his own company, adding to his fleet and fighting for his share of the tuna catch with rival operators such as Sime "Sam" Sarin, Mario Valcic and Joe Puglisi.
The Port Lincoln bluefin tuna industry had its biggest resurgence when those rivals got together in the 1990s – and would keep meeting at what became their “Capuccino Club” – and came up with the idea for value adding to their product: a world-first commercial bluefin tuna farming enterprise.
In giant cages anchored in Boston Bay, captured southern bluefin tuna were held and grown for the premium Japanese market. As other operators joined in, the tuna price skyrocketed from $500 a tonne to many thousands of dollars per bluefin. The Japanese later paid $1.8 million for one fish.
Stehr made the quantum leap beyond wrangling and raising the wild fish by deciding to breed his own bluefin tuna. Defying the skeptics, including scientists, Stehr set up the world-first southern bluefin tuna hatchery at Arno Bay, developing high-tech systems to mirror the natural breeding conditions of the tuna. Research for the project was done with Kinki University, Japan, and $4.5million was raised through government bodies including the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and the South Australian government’s now-state development department.
Stehr floated a company called Clean Seas Tuna (later Clean Seas Seas Seafood) and took his idea to another level by moving into kingfish farming and pioneering breeding of yellowtail kingfish industry and Australian mulloway. Stehr’s tank-bred tuna idea was recognised by Time magazine as the second-best invention of 2009 – behind NASA’s Ares 1 rocket. It also brought Stehr a Friend of the Sea sustainable seafood award and an honourary doctorate from the University of the Sunshine Coast.
Stehr was named Seafood Icon, South Australia, in 2009 and initiated into the National Seafood Hall of Fame in 2013. His other honours included an officer of the Order of Australia and a Centenary Medal for service to the community.
Stehr remained outspoken on marine issues. One of those was the need to train skippers and boat crews to professional standards and end the high loss of life at sea. Again defying the critics, Stehr worked on what would become the Australian Maritime and Fisheries Academy in 1997 at Port Adelaide and expanded into the Northern Territory with plans for the Philippines and Indonesia. It meant fewer names were added to the fishermen’s memorial outside the academy in Port Adelaide.
