The Catch: Australia's love affair with fishing

by Anna Clark

In every coastal town in Australia, there's a bait shop and a boat ramp. Fishing rods are strung up in laundries and garages around the country, waiting for their next outing. Walk over a bridge, look across to a wharf and there will be people casting a line. Many people have a special fishing spot, and families pass on tips from generation to generation and exchange fishy tales of amazing catches and near misses.

Bringing her personal passion for throwing in a line, author and historian Anna Clark celebrates the enduring pleasure of fishing in The Catch. She charts its history, from the first known accounts of Indigenous fishing and early European encounters with Australia's waters, to the latest fishing fads; from the introduction of trout and fly-fishing, to the challenges of balancing the needs of commercial and recreational fishers.

Originally published to accompany an exhibition at the National Library of Australia, now with updated material and all new photographs.

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 29, 2023

About the author

Anna Clark is an Australian historian.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’re into fishing and history books, this is a fascinating short read into history of fishing in this country. To think we had royal commissions into dwindling fish stocks as early as the 1880s and still didn’t do anything about it

[Chelsea Pinkard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 stars - I’m not usually a fan of “short histories of X/Y/Z” because I firmly believe there is no way you can fully capture the history of something in brevity. I’d much rather take an in depth, absurdly detailed 1000+ page tome! And yet this was only 142 pages and was BRILLIANTLY done. Informative, spanning an extremely broad timeline but never feeling rushed or lacking in detail, The Catch was a really insightful read that hooked (hehe) me from the first page.
(I’m also now desperate to go fishing for the first time in like ten years)