My Life in the Fishery:
Carol-Ann Mulrooney
Agnes Walsh

Carol-Ann Mulroney was born in Placentia and grew up there. Her husband, Austin, is from St. Joseph's in Placentia Bay. He moved into Placentia as part of the resettlement program in the 1960s. Carol-Ann and her husband have three children and one grandchild. They live in Jerseyside close to an arm of water that runs out into Placentia Bay. Carol-Ann is a soft-spoken woman with the calm of a Buddhist nun. One would never say that beneath all that calmness runs a fiery conviction of how people, and especially people in the fishery, should be treated. In the following pages, Carol-Ann tells her own story, in her own words.

When the Fishery was Good

I left school in grade nine to go to work. A lot of us from my generation left school early because there was a lot of work in the fishery then. I went to work in the fish plant in Jerseyside in 1978. My first child, Janice, was six weeks old at the time. There was lots of fish and lots of work. There were as many as 350 people working at the plant the first years I was there. Boats came in from all over the bay and we did all species of fish in the plant. We did herring, mackerel, lump roe, and salt fish. One year we did all salt in the plant. Another year we did squid. We dried the squid there, too, in ovens we had upstairs. We dried them and packaged them and sent them off to Japan. Then we did capelin, catfish, and we spent a whole summer on nights doing dogfish.