In this book I regard the 1950s and 60s as the old days. I provoke debate on how good they were and whether fishing then was indeed better. But to me as a teenager in the late 1950s and early 60s the good old days were the 1930s and 1940s. Even though I grew up in a pub and was surrounded by Dad’s family who were famous raconteurs, I heard very little about the fishing in their good old days. The few stories I did hear I found enthralling, even though they did not describe prodigious catches.
Fishing stories about the upper reaches of north coast rivers, such as around Casino and Murwillumbah, where my family had lived, were dominated by catches of garfish. These were always measured in dozens of fish. Lower reaches of rivers were where ‘schoolies’ were caught, famously in the Richmond and Clarence rivers. It was accepted that there were schoolies in the Tweed but they were considerably less abundant and smaller than their Richmond and Clarence counterparts. Beach fishing was dominated by bream and the stories of particularly big ones on cold winter nights. Rock fishing could yield all sorts of species, but a description of the capture of a big snapper off the rocks silenced the audience, in reverence.
Enjoy these stories though I did, the pervading message was that fishing on the far north coast of NSW up until the end of the 1940s was not something that was frequently celebrated. The 20s and 30s were marred by the Depression and its aftermath, which damaged the pursuit of leisure activities and created extreme difficulty in getting quality fishing gear, particularly lines. The war was so dominant in lives in the 1940s that discussion of recreational activities in this time was tarnished by the common perception that going fishing then was subverting the war effort, or at best, not contributing. If you were fit and healthy and had time to go fishing, why were you not in the army? It was not the done thing to pontificate on your recreational pursuits. Up to the mid-1950s I simply did not hear many stories about good fishing. Even good fishing stories were rare. Good cricket stories were common and if they included the name Bradman, as most did at that time, they were accepted to be about good cricket. When I began to fish the Kingscliff rocks from 1958 the good stories I heard were disproportionately dominated by the pursuit, but only occasional capture, of snapper. The axiom of nothing pleasing like a rare event was certainly invoked.
Snapper were considered the ultimate species to catch off the rocks. They were not caught in large numbers, and one was enough to boast about. But large schools of big snapper did occasionally, at least, come inshore. I now believe this happened a lot more often than we were aware at the time. Certainly, there were extremely few stories of big snapper catches off the rocks. When schools of snapper were encountered, they did provide some spectacular incidents. These events, and the tales of them, developed a folklore-type status, but they were rarely discussed.
I remember hearing a couple when fishing off Round Rock with Harold Padden, a truly jovial gentleman and a very good friend of my father. Harrold had the most unusual casting action. He would stand with his back to where he wanted his line to go and swing round-arm with as much speed as he could generate. He had to be certain there was nobody to his right while he was casting. He knew his method was imprecise and inefficient, but he persevered.
Harold and I frequently discussed the relative merits of fishing for jewfish or snapper. By that time I had learnt to catch jewies and I had even caught a small number of snapper. On one of the mornings Harold and I were having a chat I had caught a rather big jewie. It was that fish that had provoked our debate. I was rather excited about it. Harold appreciated my fish but it did nothing to make him consider, even for a moment, changing from targeting snapper.
What was it about snapper fishing? As far as I could gather from my discussions with Harold, and several others of the same ilk, there is just that X factor about snapper fishing. It’s so considered and so deliberate. Nothing is hurried. There is no doubt what you are fishing for. You do not get many bites of any sort. When you do get a snapper bite it is obvious what it is. The fact that you do not get a lot of bites is a huge part of the appeal of getting one. So is the fact that you fish for snapper in the daylight: gentlemen’s hours. Harold said to me, ‘You know if I was guaranteed one snapper bite every time I fished for them I would never fish for anything else. And I would be happy to fish all day.’ Harold was certainly patient and committed to the business of having a line in the water and waiting; he would only pull his line in to check his bait about once an hour. If he was using an octopus leg, which he did only occasionally, he may not check it that often; nothing was going to get it off, certainly not without him knowing it.
Harold acknowledged that Snapper Hole, when it was deep, was where he was most likely to catch a snapper. But Round Rock was his favourite spot to fish. There was more to fishing than just catching fish, even the most prized of fish. Round Rock was the place to fish in Kingscliff and snapper was the species to catch. Together, the two could not be bettered.
I well remember Harold recounting the day in the 1930s when a relative of his, an uncle I believe, in one afternoon caught ten snapper that averaged 10 pounds from Snapper Hole. The most remarkably part of the story was that he was using a handline. Handlines, made of gut that had to be soaked in water for some time before use, were all that most anglers and commercial fishermen used in those days. They had little choice; there were few nylon lines. My very first fishing line in 1948 was gut. Harold’s relative fished for snapper frequently off the rocks and used a line-tray secured around his neck and waist to keep his line out of the wash. Handline fishing in the wash zone was not easy. From Harold’s description the tray was similar to those available today for fly-fishers to keep their fly-lines relatively free from the surge and rocks.
My great uncle, Cyril Halpin, was recognised as an outstanding angler, taking impressive catches of very large jewfish in particular. But Cyril also caught some snapper, mostly from Cape Byron I believe. Cyril never used a rod. He also told me stories of catching two or three snapper on several afternoons off the front of the rocks at Cudgera. (Cyril never called Hastings Point anything other than Cudgera; that is what it had been when he fished it and even for the first few years I fished it.)
Although not actually rock-fishing, Cyril and my father’s exploits fishing the Julian Rocks off Cape Byron provide some relevant history, and I believe a valuable story. They used to row a small flat-bottom punt from the beach near the old jetty out to the rocks to fish for snapper, with handlines, of course. I am not sure when they first started doing this but it was before the war. I remember the last time they went; it was in 1955. We were still in the pub in Murwillumbah and I remember Dad with his ear glued to the radio to get the latest weather update. I am not sure they actually made it all the way to the Julian Rocks on this occasion.
Dad’s stories about these adventures were among my very favourites. They were indeed adventures. No thought was given to safety, either in the form of gear or advice to anybody that they were even out there. There was probably nobody who could rescue them anyway! In any case they were not going to have engine failure, and their wooden boat would never sink completely, so what was the problem?
As far as Dad was aware, they were the only ones who went to the Julian Rocks to fish, at least for the first few years they did it. They each had two lines, both wound onto large cubes of cork, one with a heavy sinker and the derogatively named ‘dago rig’ of two 2/0 hooks on loops up the line. The other had no sinker and a large hook to which a whole yellowtail would be affixed. They fished with the weighted lines in their hands and the unweighted one secured by wedging the cube of cork under a seat.
Not surprisingly they almost always made good catches of snapper of a wide range of sizes up to about 14 pounds. I loved Dad’s description of how when a big snapper took the whole yellowtail the cube of cork would spring out from under the seat and fly around the boat. Frequently if would bounce out of the boat entirely before they managed to grab the line. They would have to row after it, hook the line with the gaff and then do battle with whatever was on the other end.
One of my favourites of Dad’s stories was of the day a whale surfaced only a yard or two from their boat and splashed so much water into the boat they were worried they would not be able to bail it out before more came over the side. Dad’s account was that he was extremely worried the boat would completely fill with water, but Cyril was apparently panic stricken, to the extent that he could not even bail properly. I am fairly sure this was their second last trip as Cyril did not relish going again. I have a suspicion that their last trip in 1955 was actually aborted halfway out as Cyril had lost his nerve for adventures of this type. He later told me how frightened he had been by the whale. Cyril was considerably older than Dad.
But mostly their adventures were limited to making very good catches of snapper. They were adamant in their refusal to call them all snapper. In fact, Dad tried for years to keep me to the strict structuring of the size classes of snapper. Very small fish up to the minimum size that they kept were cockney bream, or ‘cockneys’; from about a foot long to 2 or 3 pounds they were ‘red bream’; from there to about 5 pounds they were ‘squire’; from 5 to about 8 pounds they were snapper; and from 9 or 10 pounds up they were ‘nobbies’, even if they did not have a pronounced nob. These terminologies persisted in Kingscliff, particularly in the pub, until at least the late 1960s, with one prominent modification. Fish of between 5 and 7 pounds became known as ‘Prosser’s’. Harry Prosser developed a reputation for claiming all the snapper he caught over about 5 pounds were nobbies.
Schools of large snapper were encountered occasionally off the local headlands well into the 1960s at least: they may well still be, even if the time between them has likely lengthened. I only observed the phenomenon on two occasions, but I know of three other definite occurrences off the rocks and one close to shore (chapter 17).
My first encounter with a school of snapper was in about 1961. It was in the middle of a day in May and I was fishing for bream in The Alley with my 9-pound line with crabs as bait. I was seriously out-gunned four times in twenty minutes by fish that took off with more speed and determination than I could handle on my light gear in the vicinity of rocks. Out the back of The Alley they went and the inevitable ‘cut-off ’ on rocks followed. I was confident they were snapper, even though snapper were not commonly caught in The Alley. More correctly, not many were landed from The Alley. I think I ever only landed about four. I am now sure many of the unknown big fish we hooked there on light lines that got away were snapper. At the time we blamed jewfish for most of our losses. A fish does not have to make a long run in The Alley before it can pull the line around ‘old baldie’ or another of the numerous available rocks. Snapper famously pick up the bait and accelerate very quickly. Their first charge after being hooked is extremely determined. And the ones that were caught off the Kingscliff rocks were always relatively large: 7 pounds and up. These attributes made them difficult to land on light lines in The Alley.
It was most unusual, but on this day I had not brought my tailor rod. I was therefore seriously handicapped if I wanted to even the ledger with these snapper. I knew I would have a better chance of landing one on the only gear I had at the time if I hooked it in Snapper Hole, and after all, that was where snapper were supposed to hang out. With the limitation on my casting imposed by my light gear, I was not able to get anywhere near the distance normally considered adequate to catch a snapper. On this day a short cast was no significant impediment. Two minutes after hitting the water in Snapper Hole I was on the end of a very serious battle for a significant amount of my 9-pound line. I stayed with the fight for a few minutes but finally lost to the cunjie reef on my left. I made the decision to run home and get my bigger gear. I did literally run home and all the way back. I was very fit in the good old days. I often ran to the rocks and back just for fun; of course, I had a good look around while I was there.
About forty minutes later I had a bait on the end of a 15-pound line in Snapper Hole in a position that was respectable for snapper fishing. It was there no more than a minute or two before it headed out to sea at good speed. I landed that one and one more before all went quiet. Both were snapper of between 7 and 8 pounds. How long had they been there and how many could I have caught if I had only brought a heavier line in the first place? It was one of those days when the only limit would likely have been my ability.
My second encounter was at Hastings Point about ten years later. I had gone for a drive and had not taken gear. As I pulled up at the front of the headland, I saw Georgy Williams walking up the hill; he also had no gear in his hands. We began to chat as we looked across the rocks and out to sea where a few terns were feeding, somewhat casually. There were four anglers on the rocks but it was obvious to both of us that they had little idea of how to fish this area successfully. But as we watched, one of them hooked what was obviously a sizeable fish. The fight lasted only a few seconds before the fish won, or more correctly, the angler lost, through incompetence. George and I decided to walk the 40 yards or so to where they were fishing. Before we got there one of the others hooked up, for the same result. We quickened our approach and were told that this had been happening all morning and they had each lost four or five big fish. They had assumed they were big jewies. Georgy and I looked at each other and quickly made our retreat.
There were no speed cameras between Hastings Point and Kingscliff at that time, but George, who lived at Hastings Point, still beat me back with his gear by at least twenty minutes. By the time I returned, the other anglers had gone and George had a snapper of about 12 pounds on the rock; he said it had been a first-cast instant bite. But it was the last. I was too late.
Three encounters of schools of large snapper that I am certain were real but for which I was not present occurred in the mid-1960s. The first was when a Sunday morning competition of the Kingscliff Fishing Club was won by two members who had each caught a number of large snapper off the Causeway at Fingal. Club records would have the detail, but I think one had at least four and the other five. I saw the fish and from memory they were good snapper, but not huge; I think 5 to 8 pounds.
The second was reported by my father. He was fishing The Alley for bream when Hughie Philp and his son Ian arrived from down the beach in their Land Rover. The beach was seriously eroded back to the dunes at the time for two relevant consequences: the rocks were deep and four-wheel-drive access from any direction was limited to low tide. Hughie and Ian had come to fish for snapper in Snapper Hole. They were both very good fishermen, including being extremely good casters. I was most fortunate to have had Hughie teach me to cast. The result is evident in the cover photo.
Dad reported that Hughie had not even got back to the rock he was going to perch on after his first cast when he was obviously connected to a snapper. Ian followed only a minute or two later. At one stage Hughie commented to Dad, ‘There are so many bloody snapper out there a man hasn’t got time to take a leak.’ The frenetic pace continued for the hour or more before the Philps had to leave in order to make it back down the beach in their vehicle.
The third well-recorded but not personally observed encounter was the first time Alex Smith, at that time a recent arrival in Kingscliff from South Africa, fished for snapper in Snapper Hole. He fished the area purely on a recommendation. He was one of the few fishermen we saw on the rocks using an overhead reel. He had no prior knowledge or experience of the area but that afternoon he caught twelve snapper, which from memory were between 8 and 13 pounds. Alex immediately thought fishing in Australia was too easy. In spite of many efforts, he never managed to repeat this feat. In fact, he hardly ever caught a snapper off the rocks again. Incidentally, he had converted to a side-cast reel within the year. Alex did catch many snapper from his boat, but that is another story.