Commercial catches of several species of edible shark such as gummy shark Mustelus antarcticus, school shark Galeorhinus galeus and several species of scale fish such as warehou Seriolella brama, spotted trevally Seriolella maculata have been recorded since the origins of the fishery in the mid-1920s but not until the 1960s were data on the fishing effort collected systematically. Since 1970 the Victorian Government's fisheries agency has monitored the sex and the length-frequency composition of the sharks in commercial catches. More recently the agency has also collected details of quantities of sharks handled by fish processors.

Since 1984 such data have been collected by a research unit, the Southern Shark Assessment Group (SSAG), established at the Marine Science Laboratories (MSL) of the Fisheries Division of Victoria.

One of the SSAG's projects, the "Southern Shark Database Project", which was funded from the Fishery Industry Research Trust Account, has been to set up a database designed to enable fisheries agencies to manage the shark stocks off southern Australia.

The database, the Southern Shark Fishery Monitoring Database (SSFMDB) contains four types of data: catch and effort reported by fishers to the fisheries agencies of Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia; weight of shark handled by fish processors and auctioneers; sex and length-frequency composition of commercial catches of shark; and details of licenced vessels.

These data are processed by a suite of Command Program Language jobs, FORTRAN programs and Scientific Information Retrieval Database Management System (SIRDBMS) (version 2.2) running under the PRIMOS operating system on the PRIME 6350 minicomputer.

In this report we provide details of the four types of data and their processing. The SSAG's aim is to routinely provide summaries of data from the SSFMDB to the Bureau of Rural Resources and the Australian Fisheries Service of the Commonwealth Department of Primary Industries and Energy, the Fisheries Division of the Victorian Department of Conservation and Environment, the Sea Fisheries Division of the Tasmanian Department of Primary Industry, the South Australian Department of Fisheries, and the Southern Shark Research Group which reports to the South Eastern Fisheries Research Committee, and the Southern Shark Fishery Management Advisory Committee (SSFMAC).

The SSFMAC comprises representatives from the fisheries agencies of the Commonwealth, Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia and from the shark fishing industry in each of Victoria. Tasmania and South Australia The committee's primary role is to co-ordinate management of the fishery.