STEVE STARLING
The potentially apocryphal saga of Ron Calcutt pasting together the first issue of the “Australian Angler” on his kitchen table in the southern suburbs of Sydney during 1969 is woven deeply into the fabric of our recreational fishing heritage. Those were pivotal times. Just a few years had passed since a fortuitous roadside catch-up between Vic McCristal, Jack Erskine and Ed Pratt sowed the seeds of the Australian National Sportfishing Association (ANSA). The face of fishing in this country was changing — and fast.
Ron’s trend-setting “Angler” — modelled unashamedly on the hip surfing and music mags Calcutt loved so much — would not only ride the sportfishing wave, it would literally help to shape it, and to provide the language it so badly needed to tell its emerging story.
The “Angler” was already several issues old when I discovered it as an impressionable pre-teen fishing nut. I was instantly smitten: both by its content, and by its cool, fresh style — one that contrasted starkly with the buttoned-up, conservative ‘sporting’ and ‘outdoor’ digests of an earlier era. I’d
