The two workshops were hosted by CSIRO Division of Fisheries and enjoyed the professional backup of its excellent Hobart facilities. The workshop on "Larval Biology" which was held on August 20, 1991 was aimed at resolving concerns that fisheries scientists working on the same commercial species in different laboratories were having difficulty in agreeing on adequately staging and identifying larvae. This had implications from temperate to tropical regions and marine to freshwater habitats. It included groups as diverse as penaeid prawns, scallops, demersal finfish such as gemfish or orange roughy and pelagic finfish such as tunas.

Funding for the workshop and administrative resources was provided by the then Fishing Industry Research and Development Council, the workshop coordinated by Dr Don Hancock (formerly Research Director with W .A. Fisheries) and publication of the Proceedings provided by the Bureau of Rural Resources.

This workshop, entitled "Sustainable Fisheries through Sustaining Fish Habitat", continues the Australian Society for Fish Biology's workshop series and its established tradition of bringing together the country's leading experts to freely discuss specific fish and fishery themes of na­tional importance. Past workshops have pre­ceded the Society's Annual Conferences, and began with a meeting on "Australian Threat­ened Fishes" in Melbourne in 1985. Themes since then have covered diverse topics: "Ad­vances in Aquaculture", "The Use of By-catch Resources in Australia", "Scientific Advice for Managers: Getting the Message Across", "Tag­ging - Solution or Problem?", "Introduced and Translocated Fishes and their Ecological Ef­fects", "Legal Sizes and their use in Fisheries Management", "The Measurement of Age and Growth in Fish and Shellfish", "Larval Biol­ogy", and "Recruitment Processes".

Since 1988, the workshops have been gen­erously supported by the Fishing Industry Re­search and Development Council (now the Fisheries Research and Development Corpora­tion, FRDC). This support has ensured the at­tendance of overseas experts at the workshops, and has allowed professional editorial treatment of the published Proceedings. The Bureau of Rural Resources (now, Bureau of Resource Sci­ences, BRS) has also been most generous in contributing substantially to the costs of publi­cation of Proceedings.

These workshops, and their published Proceedings, are now recognised as benchmarks in the development of fish and fisheries science in Australia.