Douglas Stewart, 1966

his is a truly inexplicable book. The reason I can't account for it is that it is a classic, and yet it is available in paperback. Clearly, something has gone wrong in the grand scheme of things, because classic books on fishing are by definition out of print. Anyway, when Rick Keam sent me a copy of it, he opened up a new world of Australian fishing writing before me. They do not get much better than this, and Stewart writes with the sort of lyricism that few authors aspire to:

George, with a friend, was the first man to fish some lake near Taupo that had previously been reserved for the Maoris - not, so far as I know, that the Maoris ever took any interest in trout. They preferred their ancestral food of eels; which, presumably because they have some age-old, racial fear of volcanoes, are not to be found in the Taupo area. Maybe the Maoris ate the freshwater crayfish, or maybe they just kept the lake because it was theirs. Anyhow George Batchelor and his friend were the first of white men to fish that lonely disc of blue water in the hills. It was an aquarium. They each broke six or sixteen rods. The trout were all of ten or twenty or two hundred pounds in weight. They caught five thousand of them. Or something like that. It was a dream; it was a nightmare; it was so magnificent that it is not to be spoken of.
But on a gentler, more feasible level, there was the expedition of Caleb and Finlay Maslin. They camped at the mouth of the Tauranga-Taupo river and fished it with frogs - we were all barbarians in those days. The problem they had to solve was that the best fish lay well out into the lake at the river-mouth where no fishermen could reach them; and the solution was to seat the frog on a small piece of pumice and float him out with the current. When he was far enough out, you flipped him off the pumice, and promptly caught a fat fish. Many, many fat fish. They buried them in the sand to protect them from the marauding half-wild pigs of the Maoris; they smoked them with sawdust; and they brought them back to Eltham packed in fruit cases, layer upon layer of smoked rainbow trout from Taupo. I cannot think why I did not instantly bolt for the lake.