FISHO TRIBUTES
By Rod Harrison
For a young man with fishing and hunting in his DNA, the emerging sportfishing movement of the mid1960s became life-changing. Back then however, a low fortnightly pay cheque was already committed. The best I could manage was ogle at the magazine pages Ron Calcutt, Vic McCristal and Jack Erskine in action with their Seascape and ABU reels. Their unique synergy laid the foundations for the Australian Angler.
I came in at issue #4 – though not before the red-pen slashes through the copy seemed just as painful as my hands after strangling a cat caught in a rabbit trap. At the foot of the last foolscap page, Calcutt’s caustic comment – “This reads like a police report.” He was right about that; tapped out on a cop-shop typewriter the narrative was official-ese. But I took the hint and after a gallon of white-out resubmitted the copy.
A mission lay ahead, but my work would be cut-out on any crusade for a marbled icon then with a Cinderella status. The director of Victoria fisheries lamented Australia’s lack of freshwater fish with any sporting worth. Counterparts north of the Murray were similarly disposed, the NSW head sufficiently smitten with salmonoids to trial brook trout and Atlantic salmon in Copeton Dam of all places. The clods in the Queensland quango in charge of fishing abrogated their duty of care by allowing cotton pickin’ mates to appropriate the Condamine and downstream branches once feeding the Darling.
New printing technologies saw the angler morph into a full-colour Fishing World. With Calcutt at the helm, Fishing World led the way; a Federeresq serve after serve of ground-breaking features and gobsmacking photography. If it was newsy, anglers first saw it in Fisho.
By then a writing style to call mine was taking shape. Readers were engaged with a cull of first person pronouns, and avoiding those other narcissist force-feeds; lots of one’s-self pictures, and those wanky depth-of-field distortions to make fish grow.
While ticking a pile of boxes to go from black bass to spot-tails, bonefish and tarpon, dorado, Nile perch, tigerfish, dogtooth and billfish on fly – and big barra when the currency was still old fashioned pounds, the springboard of recognition and credibility gained from a base presence in Fishing World opened doors leading to a full-time living. I wasn’t writing to make money, but so’s I could.
After thirty something years between those covers, I called it a day, and have since gone back to roots – an old farm house on the Lachlan. If the weather is on a high, I’ll wander down and cast a fly at a cod snag – but am just as content to soak a lump of cheese and reflect on a life that’s gone full circle.
By Steve ‘Starlo’ Starling
As a fishing-mad teenager growing up in the 1970s, the original was my bible, and its creator, Ron Calcutt, my childhood hero. That ground-breaking magazine — a publication literally born on Ron’s kitchen table in Sydney’s southern
