Cod Country

I’ve been spoiled by the world class trout fishing and epic landscapes of New Zealand for the better part of my adult life, but I grew up in America and from time to time I miss the grit that comes with a continental landmass and population. Australia ticks all of these boxes and I love it. It’s raw, it’s real and it made me feel at home the second we hit the road. They even have terrible gas station coffee, which of course was the first stop we made in the face of our eight-hour drive to the north.

I can’t speak highly enough about the trout fishing in New Zealand, it really is in my opinion the best in the world. Australia on the other hand is full of fish, a weird and wonderful variety of both introduced and ancient endemic species spread across a landmass so great that it takes a few hours of minimal progress on the highway before the scale of the place really starts to set in.

My fishing partner Patty Neylon and I had one species in mind: the Murray cod — the largest exclusively freshwater fish in Australia and one of the largest in the world, with the biggest specimen ever recorded weighing in at a whopping 113kg.

I’ve booked longer flights to chase smaller fish so the short three-hour jaunt across the Tasman was a no brainer and, in retrospect, I’m surprised that more Kiwi anglers don’t make the most of their proximity to these world class fisheries. It’s also worth reiterating that the allure does not come from the fish alone, but also its home. Australia is a wild place, full of adventure, curious creatures, and a landscape vastly different to what we have in Aotearoa.

The Murray cod is known by differing names from Aboriginal cultures throughout the Murray-Darling basin. The most commonly used today seems to be Goodoo, which is an undeniably striking name.

It could be argued that it is maybe even more appropriate than the popular name of ‘cod’ — as the fish is quite easily not mistaken for its namesake from the North Atlantic. Not to mention Aboriginal cultures have been fishing for these fish with refined techniques for 25,000 years or more.

ROO DODGING

Driving along the Pacific Highway at a comfortable 110kph, I began to understand that these fish are currently represented at a fraction of their natural biomass and range. Which is sadly an all-too-common story for many species across the globe today. Thankfully, there are still some safe havens that harbour healthy stocks of these fish, and that’s exactly where we were headed.

The sun settled into the horizon as we turned off the main highway and it was around this time that nervous mutterings about kangaroos began coming from Patty. I grew up dodging headlight-stricken whitetail deer in southern Ohio so I thought I knew what I was in for, but I later discovered that there are a lot more kangaroos in Australia than there are deer in Ohio, and we were driving a 20-year-old van with one headlight and no roo-bar.

We had a few near misses over the last few hours of the trip but safely made it to our camp at about 3 o’clock in the morning. I pitched my tent as Patty shoved groceries and fishing tackle to one side of the mattress in the back of his van. We poured a celebratory whiskey into a couple of half rinsed coffee cups from Sydney with the hopes of getting a bit of shuteye. But after only a few hours of sleeping soundly our plan was foiled by my first encounter with a rowdy, early-to-rise bunch of cockatoos accompanied by no shortage of their little pink counterparts, the gala.

After a bit of frustrated tossing and turning I quickly realised that my efforts were in vain and it was in my best interest to get up and seize the day. The reality was, as I began to wake, I became fascinated by the birds. They were beautiful, and part of the wild that I was hoping for in coming to Australia. I revelled in the novelty of it all as I brushed my teeth, made breakfast, and got my first glimpse of a cod stream.

FROG WATER

Eastern Australia had been enduring a severe run of drought at the time, which ultimately contributed to the devastating bushfires of 2019 and 2020. The ‘dry run’ was evident during that first day on the river. In fact, ‘river’ almost seemed a generous term. The waterway had almost no flow and exactly suited my definition of ‘frog water.’ But despite the lack of flow it felt fishy, and even though I’d never seen a cod before, it felt like they should be there. With a casual start to the day, we began wandering through the masses of gum trees, which are about as common as dirt in Australia, but for a visitor, a gum forest is a pretty unique experience. The forest grew tight to the boulder strewn stream but there were plenty of places to sneak in and make a cast.

On one such approach, as I emerged from the forest and stepped out onto a large boulder, I spooked a small critter moving just under the surface of the water. It took me a moment of filtering through a lifetime of National Geographic shows and old memories to recall a school report I did in the 4th grade back in Ohio, the subject of which was the peculiar duck-billed platypus. What a bizarre creature and one that my 8-year-old self couldn’t have imagined ever seeing in real life. This must be Australia.

The cod encounter which I had fabricated in my mind was a fish with a big belly, maybe 12 or 15lb, engulfing a top-water fly. In hopes of realising this I started throwing a small Gurgler near to any cover, and I didn’t make half a dozen casts before it happened. The fish was the right size and all, maybe even a little bit bigger (as they often are when they get away.) It ate my fly with an audible whoomph. I stripped hard, perhaps a bit too hastily, and I watched the fish return to the depths as my fly swirled around in the surface wake.

Flabbergasted that the result I was hoping for had at least partially just occurred, I excitedly yelled out to Patty, but he was busy fifty metres downstream looking for his own fish. I gathered myself and my fly line and started making a few more casts into the overhanging bush on the other side of the river, where the fish had appeared to come from. It followed the fly several more times but with less enthusiasm for each cast that I made. I was desperate, but the fish was onto me, my chance was over. As it turned out this was the largest fish that I would move for the entirety of our trip — it’s always better when you don’t get a good look at them.

We carried on upstream and both managed a couple of smaller cod for the day on a mixture of surface and sub-surface flies. It’s always a fulfilling moment laying hands and eyes on a species that you’ve never seen before but have spent time reading and dreaming about.

NEW ENGLAND

Our journey found us on the border of New South Wales and Queensland in a part of the country known as ‘New England.’ New England has a surprisingly high elevation and rugged landscape and is riddled with eucalyptus, red rock gorges and cod water. A nearby town proudly displays a sign at the entrance with a painting of our quarry and the welcoming catch phrase ‘Cod’s Own Country.’ It reminded me of the giant brown trout located on the banks of the Mataura River in Gore, NZ, boasting its glory as the ‘World Capital of Brown Trout Fishing.’ These piscatorial tributes are a promising and energising cue to visiting anglers.

After a couple of days of getting ‘warmed up’ by way of fishing the water within walking distance of our camp, we decided to take a more Kiwi approach to a nearby system. We filled our backpacks with tents, camp stoves, food and fishing gear and hit the red dirt road on our own two feet. While we made our way through the forest I was constantly on the lookout for snakes and other Aussie unsavories. After living in New Zealand, a land with near no human predators or poisonous critters, I feel my survival sense when it comes to wildlife has become numb, which isn’t great when you’re visiting a place that claims a disproportionate amount of the world’s deadliest snakes, spiders, and probably a few other things.

The anticipation was palpable as the rim of the gorge came into view through the thinning forest. We rounded the top of the canyon, and our emotions went from an all-time high to confusion and disappointment.

As the riverbed below came into view, it was seemingly dry, or at least didn’t align with the traditional definitions of a river. We talked seriously about turning back, but the day was late, so we decided we’d carry on, to see if our senses were giving us the full story.

As we journeyed ‘upstream’ the deep stone-sided pools began to link up with small amounts of flowing water and our hopes were slowly being restored. We found a nice place to call home for the evening, set up our tents and rigged our rods to explore a bit further. Once again, after only a few casts we began to move fish. As the sun began to disappear behind the canyon rim, the bite didn’t seem to slow so we kept making casts into the sizeable pool in front of our camp well into the night. We had some of the best fishing of our trip during that first evening in the gorge — fishing surface flies and listening for the gulp.

PATTY’S PRIZE

The next morning, we decided to explore a few more pools before bearing the weight of our packs and continuing our upriver journey. The fishing was slow, and my interest began to wane from the task at hand and shift to the strange and faraway place that I seemed to have found myself in. The place had a nearly tangible energy, and my suspicion is that you might encounter that same sensation in many parts of the ancient Australian continent. It’s an energy I have only otherwise experienced in the canyonlands and red rock deserts of the southwestern United States, an equally ancient part of the world.

I was swiftly brought back to reality as Patty let out an excited hoot. I was perched high on a rocky slope above the pool that he had been tirelessly fishing and my eyes were quickly drawn to a subtle swirl on the surface of the otherwise calm waters. I didn’t see the flash during my daydream, but I could tell by the tone in Patty’s voice that he had a pretty serious situation on his hands. He flung another cast in front of the small rock island before him and it became very clear, very quickly, that Patty was living one of those moments that anglers often dream about but seldom experience.

Patty’s rod was promptly and properly corked, with a deep bend from tip to butt. The battle that ensued was more of a tug of war than a fight, with neither Patty nor the fish giving an ounce more than they had to. Everything was maxed out and at breaking point — the rod, the knots, the hook, the will of the fish, Patty’s nerves, my nerves — all of it. It always seems as though a fight with a big fish lasts longer than reality but this, I believe, was a genuinely long battle. The tenacity of both the fish and angler was admirable. Of course, I always want to be on the fighting end of the rod myself in these scenarios but bearing witness to one of my best buddies laying it to one of the wildest, most impressive fish I’ve ever seen is a damn good consolation prize. Plus, I got to grab his prize by the tail.

We didn’t weigh or measure the fish, but we didn’t need to. We knew it was as big as we could have ever hoped to catch or even witness on this trip. Being in the presence of these largely unobtainable creatures is a real privilege and a big part of what fuels the fire for me. We laid eyes on that fish for probably only a handful of minutes before it powered off back into its lair, possibly never to be seen again. What a wild encounter for all of us, fish included. For a couple of amateur cod anglers, it was an experience satisfactory enough to fuel a lifetime of cod pursuits. As the saying goes, if you know, you know — and I guess we now knew.

We didn’t catch too many fish after that, it seemed as if the gods knew that we had filled our cup and it was now time to just enjoy being alive in the place that we were in. We continued our hike through one of the prettiest gorges I’ve ever borne witness to, swam in the fresh cool water, basked on the warm sun-soaked rocks and laughed a whole lot about that big ol’ fish that Patty had caught. I’ve since returned to Australia to fish for Goodoo and still haven’t seen another fish like that, but I’m going to keep coming back until I do.