Fishing and climate change are impacting marine fish stocks but disentangling the relative importance of these factors has proven difficult due to a lack of long-term observational data. We generated novel long-term (50+ years) growth chronologies for four commercially important coastal and shelf NZ fishes (snapper, tarahiki, hoki and ling) using the information naturally recorded in otoliths. We found evidence for temporal synchrony among spatially segregated stocks of snapper and hoki, but not for tarahiki and ling. We successfully related inter-annual growth variation for each species to a range of climate (SST and Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation Index) and fishing measures (spawning stock biomass), highlighting the importance of these external drivers on fisheries productivity.